This is My Annual "I Hate Halloween" Video...
Every year churches fold some part of Halloween into their activity calendars, and every year I make this video to explain why we don't practice it. I remember dressing up and trick-or-treating as a boy, but when you look at where this holiday came from, a Bible-believing church has no business dressing it up and calling it ministry.
Halloween traces back to the Celtic and Druid festival of Samhain, which marked the turn from the harvest season into winter, the season of death. They believed that around October 31 the veil between the living and the dead opened, and that ancestors, and worse things like demons, could walk the earth. Customs like setting food out for visitors and dressing up as creatures to hide from evil spirits grew out of those beliefs.
Rather than truly converting those people, Rome blended Samhain with its own All Saints' Day on November 1 and gave it a Christian label. The same practices stayed, only with Christian vocabulary on top. That kind of syncretism, mixing two opposite things into something new, is the same pattern behind ecumenicism and behind the mystery religion we cover in the Third Adam series.
Paul warned the Corinthians that the things the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and that you cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of devils (1 Corinthians 10:20-21). The church is supposed to be a holy people preaching God's Word and carrying out the Great Commission, not an off brand of the world. Enjoy your pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving, but let's not try to Christianize a pagan festival.
Watch the full video on YouTube: This is My Annual "I Hate Halloween" Video.... For more Bible preaching and commentary, subscribe to the channel at youtube.com/@spencersmith312.
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