The Triple Importance of October 31

Sunday, October 31 was a trilogy of historic, political and spiritual confluence.

The last day of October, known as Reformation Sunday, recalled the day in 1517 when Catholic priest Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses on his church door in Wittenberg, Germany. The event is generally recognized as setting off the Protestant Reformation. Luther’s byword became “justification by faith,” as Romans 5:1 declares it: “Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Luther was distressed by a nearby intrusive papal salesman, Johann Tetzel, hawking fund-raising indulgences to finance the beautification of Rome. The indulgences were purchased by the poor, and, according to Roman Catholic belief, would spring one from purgatory. Luther chose October 31, the evening before All Saints Day, as his day of protest. It was a time called All Hallowed Even or Hallowed Evening when the faithful prepared themselves to honor the departed in grace and martyrs of the church.

Hallowed Evening unfortunately had incorporated pagan occult practices to facilitate warding off returning spirits of the dead. The amalgam of sincere spirituality gradually merged with sheer nonsense to birth the modern Halloween (Hallowe’en) interaction with death and the dead. As Isaiah described the spiritually debauched condition of northern Israel’s “covenant with death” (Isaiah 28:18), shallow people erect tombstones, skeletons and ascribe reality to witches and ghosts in an annual exercise of public demonic occultism.

The Protestant Reformation eventually increased the desire for political freedom as well as spiritual deliverance and inspired some of the New World emigrations and the crafting of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. The amazing U.S. Constitution, called “the most wonderful work ever struck off by the brain and purpose of man” by British statesman William Gladstone, calls for an electorate vote on the entire House of Representatives every two years, and this year is that election. Throughout the weekend, political candidates accelerated their push to either retain or gain national or state office. All legislation must originate in the House, and so the political tide of the country was being contested throughout the days observing Halloween and the Reformation.

But Sunday is the first day of the calendar week. It is the day Christians either tacitly or directly observe the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead—that life-giving rebirth of the spiritually dead sinner to newness of eternal life. Even without significant attention to history, spooks or politics, every first day of every week of every year focuses on history’s most stunning truth: “He is risen, as He said” (Matthew 28:6).

When all the historical dates and absurd occultism and fevered political campaigns have ceased, the first-day cycle will remind us that “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old thing have passed away; behold all things have become new” (II Corinthians 5:17).

Dave Virkler