Easter Sun Rise Service

From the death of Yeshua until 135 C.E., the Nasorean Church in Jerusalem, presided over by the relatives of Yeshua, was kept free of any change to the calendar of services. However, after the Bar Kochba revolution, the Nasorean Church was all but destroyed, some say by the collaboration of the Pharisees and the Paulines. Subsequent to the fall of the dynasty of David as rulers of the whole church, the Patriarch of Antioch began to celebrate Pesach as a Christian day, called the Lord's Passover, and it was called Resurrection Day or Pascha. 

The feast of Pascha or Easter became the most important feast in the Christian year and the Vigil service was the most important service of that feast. The people had fasted throughout the forty days prior to Pascha and now the catechumens were brought forth for baptism. At this time, the process of joining the Christian churches took some time. A person must first profess his belief in Christ; then he had to study the traditions and scriptures for a period of time and undergo weekly exorcisms; and then and only then was the person permitted to be baptized into Christ. The event of baptism occurred late at night and often the catechumen came out of the water just as the sun was rising and he or she felt that she had arisen from the dead just as had Christ on that first Resurrection day. 

In 1732, the Moravians, a very early protestant group, had a group of single men go into the local cemetery and there with hymns and preaching they welcomed the new day as a proclamation that Christ had indeed risen and was not in the grave. This tradition quickly spread throughout the protestant churches of the colonies and the idea of an Easter Sun Rise Service became firmly established in protestantism. However, it should be noted that the service is not present in the great historical liturgical traditions of Roman Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Lutheranism, and Anglicanism. This is a distinctly protestant tradition. 

In Ezekiel 8:16-17, the Prophet describes what he saw in a vision that he was told was happening in Jerusalem. He says:

     Then he (the Holy Spirit) brought me into the inner court of the Lord's house, and there are the door

     of the Lord's Temple, between the vestibule and the altar, were about twenty five men with their backs

     to the Lord's Temple and their faces toward the East; they were bowing down to the Sun. Do you see,

     Son of Man? he asked me. Is it such a trivial matter for the house of Judah to do the abominable

     they have done here -- for they have filled the land with violence, and again and again they have

     provoked me -- that now they must also put the branch to my nose?

The modern evangelicals have made this blasphemy, this abomination, a thing of great moment. And yet G-d forbids sunrise services as abomination. This is one more sign that the Devil has entered into the modern non-liturgical churches. Do not be led astray. Easter Sun Rise Services are abomination and should be avoided at all costs.