The Real Story of Chanukah
With “the holiday season” now upon us, I thought it would be appropriate to share a few thoughts with you about Chanukah, the Jewish Feast of Dedication.
Personally, I’m not a big fan of typical Chanukah observances for one simple reason—we tend to let them steal God’s thunder, so to speak. How do we do this? By affording Chanukah equal (or greater) attention with Adonai’s Feasts and appointed times, and by using it as a replacement for Christmas.
So many of us—after deciding that Christianity in all forms is “pagan” and “evil”—run screaming from the church’s religious clutches, only to impose our residual sense of religiosity upon “the right and true way” to live for God. Chanukah, then, becomes another casualty of our religious metamorphosis, as we swap out one over-hyped Christian holiday for a Jewish one. But just because Chanukah is mentioned as a passing detail in Yochanan (John) 10:22, that doesn’t give us permission to appropriate Chanukah for our own “Messianic” needs or agendas. The fact of the matter is, unlike the Feasts and appointed times designated by Adonai Himself, Chanukah is a man-made, Jewish holiday—and we only make it more so when we heap upon it the traditions and theologies of our own making.
I recently witnessed a Jewish believer in Yeshua trying to concisely describe Messianic Judaism to a roomful of Christians. Now, I completely understand and can relate to the challenges a speaker faces when he needs to close the frame of reference gap and establish rapport with his audience. So I empathize with this man and the monumental task he set out to accomplish.