What is Lent and should believers observe it today?
Lent is a 40-day period that Catholics along with a few Protestant denominations, including Anglicans and Lutherans, go without items of their choosing, e.g. foods or habits. Lent was originally established in the 4th century as a time of self-evaluation, self-denial, and repentance. It begins on Ash Wednesday and ends on Easter Sunday.
According to some scholars, the celebration of Lent was pre-dated by a more sinister observance. Alexander Hislop in his book, The Two Babylons, states, “Let any one only read the atrocities that were commemorated during the ‘sacred fast’ or Pagan Lent, as described by Arnobius and Clemens Alexandrinus, and surely he must blush for the Christianity of those who, with the full knowledge of all these abominations, ‘went down to Egypt for help’ to stir up the languid devotion of the degenerate church, and who could find no more excellent way to ‘revive’ it, than by borrowing from so polluted a source; the absurdities and abominations connected with which the early Christian writers had held up to scorn. That Christians should ever think of introducing the Pagan abstinence of Lent was a sign of evil; it showed how low they had sunk, and it was also a cause of evil; it inevitably led to deeper degradation. Originally, even in Rome, Lent, with the preceding revelries of the carnival, was entirely unknown, and even when fasting before the Christian Pasch was held to be necessary, it was by slow steps that, in this respect, it came to conform with the ritual of Paganism,” pp. 171-172.
The Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible continues: “Easter, Christmas, Lady Day, Lent, and other Babylonian festivals were all borrowed from this religion and were all observed centuries before Christ. None of them have any relationship to Christ or Christianity.”
There can be no doubt that Lent, along with Easter, are not only missing from Scripture, but also have roots in pagan worship going back to antiquity. In the tenth chapter of Jeremiah, Yahweh commands that we learn not the way of the heathen. As shown above, Lent, along with many of the Church’s “sacred” days, was adopted from heathen worship.
For this reason, as believers we are to abstain from practicing these days and worship Yahweh as He established, including the seventh-day Sabbath and biblical Feast days as found in both Old and New testaments.
