The Fight to Save Passover

Tonight is Passover, the most sacred night of the year for true Christians.

More than two decades after Jesus Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, the Apostle Paul gave the Church at Corinth detailed instructions on how to observe the New Testament Passover (1 Corinthians 5 and 11). Yet despite these plain instructions, the vast majority of professing Christians today do not observe this biblical memorial. In fact, less than 5 percent of the roughly 2 billion Christians worldwide keep the Passover on Nisan 14 as Jesus and the apostles did. Most have substituted it with a Sunday service—a tradition that arose centuries later and shifted the focus away from the annual night of Christ’s death.

What happened to the Passover that Christ and the apostles kept? The answer reveals a sobering story of compromise, persecution and a determined fight for God’s truth that has continued for 2,000 years.

The night before His brutal beating and torturous crucifixion, Jesus told His disciples, “With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer” (Luke 22:15). Even as He faced unimaginable suffering, His mind was fixed on the profound purpose of Passover. He knew that His death would pay the penalty for sin and open the way to everlasting life in God’s Family for all who repent and believe.

John 3:16 captures the incredible love behind this sacrifice: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

God the Father and Jesus Christ love humanity far more than we can comprehend. That love motivated the greatest act in history, so we must take this sacrifice seriously and live our lives accordingly.

In 1 Corinthians 5:7-8, Paul told Gentile converts: “Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened. For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us: Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” Here, Paul links Passover directly to Jesus Christ’s sacrifice and connects it to the Feast of Unleavened Bread, which pictures coming out of sin.

These instructions are not for some outdated Jewish ritual. They are for true Christians in the New Testament Church. This means true Christians are required to keep both the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread that immediately follows it.

The Old Testament Passover outlined in Exodus 12—when each family selected an unblemished lamb, sacrificed it, and applied its blood to the doorposts for protection—perfectly foreshadowed Christ, “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8). The two testaments are not opposing religions. They complement each other perfectly.

All Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for true Christians (2 Timothy 3:16-17). Christ’s sacrifice doesn’t abolish the Old Testament: It connects it to the New Testament!

Of the three major events in Christ’s life—His birth, death and resurrection—the Bible commands us to memorialize only one: His death. Yet traditional Christianity ignores the biblical Passover while inventing holidays to celebrate His birth (Christmas) and resurrection (Easter).

The New Testament Church was still keeping the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread decades after Christ’s crucifixion (see Acts 20:6). What happened between then and now?

The late Herbert W. Armstrong explained in Mystery of the Ages that in the first and second centuries, the true Church of God and its doctrines were counterfeited. Read the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament, and you see that, while early resistance and persecution of the Church came from Jewish authorities, the truth of God was soon subverted by “another gospel,” “another Jesus” and “false Christs.”

False Christianity expanded tremendously, but the true teachings of the Church, including Passover, faded from view as compromise set in.

After the Apostle John died around a.d. 100, he passed leadership to Polycarp, a true Christian in Smyrna. One of the most important events in Polycarp’s ministry was his battle to preserve the Passover.

The churches in the West began observing Sunday as a memorial of Christ’s resurrection and abandoned the Passover. According to Irenaeus, Bishop Sixtus of Rome (a.d. 115–125) was the first recorded individual to prevent the proper observance of the Passover and to celebrate it on Sunday. Sixtus lived during a time of rising anti-Semitism in the Roman Empire, culminating in a decree by Emperor Hadrian in a.d. 135 banning circumcision, Torah reading, and Sabbath observance. To distance the church from the Jews, Sixtus convinced Christians to stop observing Passover on Nisan 14 and to observe it instead on Sunday. The bishops of Rome have followed Sixtus’s example ever since.

Yet God’s true Church in the East continued observing Passover on Nisan 14 of the Hebrew calendar, using the new symbols of bread and wine instituted by Christ. When Polycarp was about 85 years old, he traveled to Rome to urge Bishop Anicetus (a.d. 157–168) to keep the Passover according to the tradition handed down by the apostles. Anicetus refused, but Polycarp stood firm on God’s Word rather than human tradition.

Polycarp was later martyred, burned to death, for holding to the truth of the Bible and refusing false gospels, false Christs and false days.

About 40 years later, Polycarp’s successor, Polycrates, made a similar appeal to Bishop Victor of Rome (a.d. 189–199). He too was rejected. Polycrates wrote boldly, echoing the apostles in Acts 5: “We ought to obey God rather than men” (verse 29). He affirmed that he and his predecessors had always kept the Passover scrupulously on the 14th, exactly as outlined in Scripture. Polycrates was nearly excommunicated for his courageous stand, but Irenaeus urged the bishop of Rome to show tolerance since the apostles also kept Nisan 14.

The Encyclopedia Britannica (11th edition) confirms there is “no indication of the observance of the Easter festival in the New Testament or in the writings of the apostolic fathers.” The first Christians continued to observe Passover—though with new meaning centered on Jesus Christ as the Passover Lamb. (Read Matthew 26, Mark 14, Luke 22, John 13-17.)

By a.d. 325, the Council of Nicaea under Emperor Constantine made the break official. It decreed that Easter would be kept on Sunday worldwide, deliberately distinguishing it from the biblical Passover, and it characterized keeping Passover on Nisan 14 as “Judaizing.” For those who worshiped Jesus Christ and kept the biblical Passover, persecution followed. As Mr. Armstrong noted, the persecuted eventually became the persecutors once the Roman Empire embraced paganized “Christianity.”

Revelation 2:8-11 describe this Smyrna era of the Church as a time of tribulation and poverty—and also of spiritual riches. Christ warned of persecution and imprisonment, yet He promised that those who overcome would not be hurt by the second death. God’s true Church has always been a small, scattered flock, often persecuted for obeying God rather than men.

The fight for the Passover is not ancient history. It is part of the ongoing battle between the truth of God in the Holy Bible and the traditions of men mixed with the truth, as Christ Himself warned. Mainstream Christianity today does not observe the Passover as Christ and the apostles did. Instead, it follows customs that developed centuries later.

Yet the Bible is consistent from Old Testament to New: God’s holy days are not “Jewish” festivals; they are God’s festivals, given for all people. They picture His master plan of salvation, with the Passover symbolizing the death of “the Lamb of God,” our Savior.

To understand these truths more deeply, request Pagan Holidays—or God’s Holy Days—Which? and The True History of God’s True Church. These books explain the Passover in detail and document the historical struggle to preserve it.

This world is in spiritual darkness. Like Polycarp, Polycrates, the original apostles and Jesus Christ, we must have the courage to fight for God’s truth. Examine yourself. Repent of sin. Keep the Passover as Christ commanded—in remembrance of His body and blood. The Passover points directly to the greatest expression of love in the universe.

Christ our Passover was sacrificed for us. Will you respond to that love by obeying Him? He that has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.