Easter

Most Christians consider Easter to be a sacred and joyous celebration of Christ’s resurrection. But what about the claim that Easter and its accompanying traditions originated from a pagan spring celebration?

You can always tell that Christmas is coming, even before it’s close. Radio stations start playing Christmas carols before we’ve even eaten all the Halloween candy, and commercials beckon us to start our shopping before we’ve even bought our Thanksgiving turkeys. Our nativity scenes are set up for weeks, and our advent calendars keep us counting down to the day baby Jesus entered our world. Christmas isn’t celebrated on just one day-- it gets a whole, long season.

Easter on the other hand? Usually, Christians dress up for one fancy Sunday service and forget about it all days later.

“Why do we spend an entire season of the year thinking about and celebrating Christmas, but just a weekend thinking about and celebrating the impact of the resurrection,” Trevin Wax asks.

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A new poll found that more than two-thirds of likely American voters believe that the moral lessons behind Easter and Passover are essential to "ensuring a strong America for future generations."

Evangelist Franklin Graham has announced that he will be returning to Ukraine to deliver a special message this Easter Sunday.

Easter is quickly approaching and many of us are turning our thoughts toward the Resurrection of Christ.

Easter is a time to rejoice in such a central tenet of the Christian faith. Easter is also a good time to ponder the truth of Christianity more deeply, and specifically look at the evidence for Christ's Resurrection.

It is so important as a Christian to be assured of the truth of the Resurrection because as the Apostle Paul states, “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith” (I Corinthians 15:13-14).

To that end, here are four pieces of evidence to show that Christ truly did rise from the dead and we have much to rejoice about this Easter.

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On Easter and Good Friday, the Los Angeles Times published two anti-Christian articles. What do the two articles have in common? Both were published on two of the most significant holy days in the Christian year. And both are based on selective arguments that conflate personal opinion with objective truth.

Over the weekend, Senator and pastor Raphael Warnock stirred up theological controversy when he asserted in a now-deleted tweet that the meaning of Easter involves more than Jesus' resurrection and that by helping others, "we are able to save ourselves."

In a day when defending not just Christian truth but the concept of truth itself is controversial and dangerous, it will be tempting for Christians to retreat from the “culture wars” and thus from secular culture. This despite the fact that we are commissioned to “go and make disciples” (Matthew 28:19) as Jesus’ “witnesses” (the Greek word can also be translated “martyrs”) where we live and around the world (Acts 1:8).

Christians worldwide are preparing to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. The resurrection is the central event in the Holy Scriptures, the pivotal moment of the story of Christ, and the foundational belief of a Christian worldview. Even more, if it happened, it is the pivotal event in all of human history. Some skeptics, however, find the story hard to believe. A few have even gone so far as to assert that the story of Jesus’ resurrection was simply borrowed from pagan myths.

On this day of Holy Week, Jesus wanted silence. The gospels record no activities on this Wednesday. As best we can tell, he spent the day with his disciples at the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus in Bethany, a village two miles east of Jerusalem. Solitude with his Father was Jesus’ consistent pattern, from early in the morning (Mark 1:35) to evening (Matthew 14:23) and through the night (Luke 6:12).