When it comes to determining the truth of a God statement or a Satan statement, Satan wins every time.  This phenomenon began in the Garden of Eden and, with extremely rare exception, still dominates in the “Who’s telling the Truth?” war.  This includes the subject of this series–the New Year’s Day Celebration with its international television coverage, parties, eating, drinking, kissing, etc.  But what are the foundational truths surrounding this popular festival performed by both the churched and the unchurched.  Is it of God or not?  Let us find out.

The New Year’s Celebration is one of mankind’s oldest and most universal pagan customs.  It has remained virtually unchanged for over 4000 years.  The custom traces its genesis back to ancient Babylon some 2000 years before the birth of Christ.  The holiday was tied to the worship of the sun, which many ancient societies practiced.  God states His hatred for all such practices in Deuteronomy 12:30-32 where He warns the Israelites (and us) not to follow the ways of the heathen and not to do for Him what they did for their gods for they were (are) an abomination unto Him.  His people must do exactly what He tells them to do and nothing else.

One of the practices of sun worshipers was the sacrifice and consumption of children.  The cute little “New Year’s Baby” that is so popular at that time of the year actually pictures the rebirth of the Greek god Dionysus as the spirit of fertility.  Good old “Father Time,” the white-haired gentleman with the scythe, represents the ancient Greek god Cronos.  This “silent reaper” anciently “reaped” little children for the purpose of sacrifice and cannibalism.

These New Year’s festivities originated in Babylon and eventually made their way to Rome where Julius Ceasar established January 1 as New Year’s Day in 46 B.C.   In 375 A.D. Roman emperor Constantine established “Christianity” as the only religion allowed to function throughout the empire.  Having been embraced by the Catholic Church, his dictates became enforced laws within the church.  Roman society was polytheistic.  When a society was defeated, the Romans examined their religion and incorporated the parts of it they liked into their religious observances.  Over time the church embraced many of those religious beliefs and customs, some of which can be found in the introduction to this website.  The Romans called the January 1 holiday Saturnalia in honor of the god Saturn.  The holiday was extremely popular within the empire.  It was a time of reveling, drinking bouts and sex orgies, which produced children for the following year’s end celebration which ended with the slaughter of those children and their consumption in many cases.

Pope Gregory officially decreed January 1 as the beginning of the year for the entire Western world in 1582.  All Roman Catholic nations were forced to accept the holiday.  Sweden, Germany, Denmark and England, all deeply steeped in Druid customs, immediately began observing the festival.  It was from the sexual aspect of the holiday that the use of mistletoe was introduced.  The belief was that the parasite held over the head of a female prompted sexual desire in her.  I remember seeing a clump of the stuff tacked to the top of door frames on January first.

God, and God alone, has the authority to set the date of the beginning of the year.  No man, including the pope, has the right to change it, or anything else God has decreed.  God’s calendar begins in the spring, not in the dead of winter, as Exodus 12:1,2 and 13:4 tell us.  He named the first month Abib, not January.  The month is also called Nissan, meaning “green ears.”  This month occurs during the months of March and April on the Roman calendar in use today.

Second Kings 17:18,20 and 23, as well as Hosea 2:11 reveal what punishment awaits any nation that forsakes God’s Law and turns to the customs of pagan societies.  High on the list of such condemned practices is the observance of heathen holidays on which heathen gods are worshiped.  Observance of such abominations breaks the Lord’s first commandment which condemns the acknowledgment of the existence of any other God: “I am the (one and only) Lord your God.  You will have no other gods before (beside) Me.”  That is plain enough for a child to understand.

Regardless of why one practices heathen customs and embraces heathen beliefs, God holds the individual accountable for doing so.  He commands that we not so much as enquire about them.  Inquiry, like leaven, tends to infect the life of the individual, for the ways of Satan are always more fun and more self-directing than His ways.  Just as Adam and Eve jumped at the chance to determine FOR THEMSELVES what was good and evil, their religious descendants have determined that what God calls good is in fact evil, and what God calls evil is in fact good.  Adam and Eve did not renounce God and His version of good and evil.  They simply came up with an improved version.  How could that possibly cause a problem?   Nothing of consequence had changed.  To them, He was still God and everything else He had told them continued to be right in their minds.  For example, they could eat of every tree, reproduce, name all creatures, practice dominion over the earth and everything on, under and above it, as well as in the water.  And they would never die, but instead would live in the paradise called Eden forever.

They would make one harmless change in one of His rulings.  And even if He did not approve of the change, what could He do about it?  They were guaranteed eternal life in paradise regardless of what they did, or so the serpent had told them.  No harm–no foul, right?.  What could possibly go wrong?  History gives us the answer.  Because they listened to Satan, everything they touched went bad.  One of their sons actually killed his brother.  They were kicked out of paradise and forced to work for their food.  They learned too late the cost of their “minor alteration” of God’s Law.  Notice that they did not stop viewing Him as their God and Creator, did not stop meeting with Him and communicating with Him.  They merely stopped believing and obeying Him.  Sound familiar?

Over the past 6000 years Adam and Eve’s descendants have followed lock-step in their first parents’ religious footsteps, with a minutely few exceptions.  As Jesus said, He did not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance (Lk. 5:32).  He called those sinners “the world.”  Note that He referenced “the righteous (people),” which means that there were some righteous people on earth when He arrived.  The Lord has always had a “remnant”–a few righteous, holy people to whom He has promised salvation upon His return.  He did not need to save them (Lk. 5:32).  Today there remains a tiny remnant of true believers who believe and obey His Words.  Concerning the other 99.99% of humanity, doesn’t it stand to reason that the outcome for them (the world) will be the same as it was for Adam and Eve?  If God is to be believed, the answer is “Yes.”  L.J.