The first horse race meetings with onsite gambling take place today at Lingfield and Musselburgh.
Kate Hills, spokeswoman for Lingfield owners Arena Racing, said: “One of the reasons we are having racing on Good Friday is it’s a day of leisure and people are looking for something to do.”
It is also an opportunity to make some money.
In the modern era, off-course betting shops first opened on Good Friday in 2008. Championship football matches will be held today, some shops will open. These are modern-day, secularist developments. As recently as 1986 the Daily Telegraph was not published on Good Friday.
In a sense it is rather appropriate to have gambling on the day we remember Christ’s crucifixion. The Roman soldiers cast lots for the coat of Jesus, fulfilling an Old Testament prophecy in Psalm 22.
It will be thoroughbreds racing today, but Christ entered Jerusalem as a king but riding on a donkey, again fulfilling an Old Testament prophecy:
Zechariah 9:9: Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.
As A N Wilson points out, even people of no faith used to recognise Good Friday as a day of solemnity.
A lot has changed in just a few years, a degree of respect for what is holy has been lost and our society has become more coarse and more crass along the way.
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I remember Good Friday in the 1950s as always being a puzzling day. It was a holiday, but you weren’t sure that you were really supposed to be enjoying yourself.
Holiday as in ‘Holy Day’, Rox. It isn’t a feast day, it is a day of solemn remembrance. Hence baking buns with a cross on them. But don’t worry, you can let your hair down on Easter Day as we celebrate Christ’s glorious resurrection.
Searching the scriptures you find the Passover took part in March
Satan said he would seek to change times and laws
No one considers why we acknowledge a month designated as tenth [ Deca ] as the twelth for example
” for he has blinded thiers eyes and deceived the whole world ”
on a side note has anyone noticed how MSM has been mocking the blood moon phenomena ?
Anyone took a look and not seen a red moon on the last two nights ?
Does this mean that the blood moon is only observable in the middle east ?
I note NASA has been blathering on how earth is in conjunction with mars at the moment
No one considers why we acknowledge a month designated as tenth [ Deca ] as the twelth for example
Wasn’t that due to the Romans adding two more months to the calender ?
The date of Passover, like other Jewish and Muslim dates, is fixed according to a lunar calendar. So this does vary on the solar calendar from year to year. Astronomy is just like that. The full moon in your diary one year is never on the same date as the year before, or the next year.
When you say that “we” acknowledge the calendar, don’t forget that Julius Caesar make a lot of changes to it, producing the Julian calendar, which Pope Gregory corrected to produce the Gregorian calendar we now use. However, you don’t have to go as far back as the Romans to find the year starting in March, and then September, October, November and December follow as the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th months. In England, the first day of the year was 25th March (“Annunciation style”) until 1752, and after that it was officially 1st January (“Circumcision style”).