Hope, Healing & Freedom Podcast: Episode 180
TRANSCRIPT
Happy Hanukkah my friends! I can imagine that my saying that might make some of my Christian friends a bit uncomfortable. We would easily greet each other by saying Merry Christmas, but how many of us will include the Jewish holiday that corresponds with Christmas? Come along with me in this week’s podcast as we look at the value Christians can discover in the Jewish feasts and festivals along with celebrating the normal Christian holidays. Why do this? Hopefully, by the end of this podcast, I will have answered that question.
I’m Lee Whitman from Restoring the Foundations and I welcome you into this Hope Healing and Freedom Podcast. I am blessed to have sat under the teaching of Pastor Don Finto, who helped us realize that the people called Christians are being grafted into our Jewish brothers and sisters and not the other way around. Many Jewish believers have been taught that they need to quit being “so Jewish” in the way they worship and become more Christian. I am going to be quoting from Don Finto’s wonderful book “Your People Shall Be My People” published by Chosen Books (ISBN 978-0-8007-9789-0). I highly recommend this very important book to you.
“When we read the Apostle Paul’s words in Ephesians 2:15 talking about Jew and Gentile becoming “as one new man”, we assume that this one new man will look like the regular Christian church with Jewish believers becoming more like us. The truth is that much of the New Testament was written for a Gentile audience and was rooted in the Tanakh which are the Jewish scriptures. The New Testament can only be fully understood through the lens of Jewish history and the Prophets.” (pg. 158)
Let me quote again from Papa Don’s book “Your People Shall be my People”.
“The Gentiles should never forget what it says in the book of Romans:
- Jesus “as to his human nature, was a descendant of David”. (He was Jewish)(1:3)
- The Gospel was “first for the Jew, and then for the Gentile”. (1:16)
- The Jewish people had “been entrusted with the very words of God”. (3:2)
- “Theirs (the Jewish People) is the adoption as sons; theirs the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship and the promises.” (9:4)
- God has not rejected “his people”. (11:1)
- They have not stumbled “so as to fall beyond recovery”. (11:11)
- Gentiles should make Jewish non-believers “envious (for their own messiah)” (11:11)
- Gentiles have now been grafted into a “cultivated olive tree.” (11:24)
- The Gentiles should not be “arrogant” or “conceited” (11:20, 25) in their relationships with their Jewish brothers and sisters.
- At some future time in history when the “full number of the Gentiles has come in” (11:25), “all Israel will be saved.” (11:26)
- Non-Jews are “no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people” (2:19, “heirs together with Israel”) (3:6).
Since we are heirs together with Israel, then it is important for us to make ourselves aware of the Jewish Feasts and Festivals. There are really only two Christian holidays; Christmas and Easter. Thanksgiving used to be a Christian holiday, but it has been co-opted to become more about turkey dinner and football than it is about giving thanks to God for this amazing country.
What is Hanukkah? I am taking some of the information for this podcast from an article called Hanukkah Festival of Lights. Hanukkah is the Hebrew word for “dedication”. Also known as the Festival of Lights, Hanukkah is an eight-day Jewish holiday celebrating the rededication of the temple in the second century BC.
“Hanukkah is tied to a time when Israel was struggling for existence. In 167 BC, Israel was under the rule of Antiochus Epiphanes (Greek meaning God Manifest), who was known for his cruelty and delusions of deity. His enemies mockingly referred to him as Antiochus Epimanes (madman).
Among many atrocities he committed to Hellenize Israel, Antiochus desecrated the Temple in Jerusalem, dedicating it to Greek gods and even sacrificing a pig on the altar. The apocryphal books of Maccabees describe Israel’s plight under Antiochus’ mad rule, as well as the successful revolt led by the Maccabees, a Jewish family of priests. After winning their freedom, the Jewish people rededicated the Temple to God.
According to Jewish tradition, when the Temple was rededicated, there was only enough pure olive oil to light the Temple menorah for one day. As the story goes, the oil miraculously lasted eight days, long enough to purify more oil.
Today, in remembrance of God’s provision, Jewish people light the eight candles on the nine-candle menorah (the ninth candle, the shammash, is used to light all the others). A New candle is lit on each night of Hanukkah, one candle to remember each day of the miraculous provision of oil from God. Since the legend of the miraculously burning oil is a central focus of Hanukkah, it is traditional to eat foods fried in oil during this festival.
What is Hanukkah’s significance to believers today? Hanukkah is a testament to God’s faithfulness to the Jewish people, preserving them through war and persecution – and His faithfulness in fulfilling His promise to produce a Messiah from the line of David. If the Jewish people had succumbed to Hellenizing pressures and lose their religious and ethnic distinctives, the Messianic prophecies could not have been fulfilled. The same God who sustained the Jews to retake the temple, is the same God who sustained us to retake our lives that were given over to the evil one through sin. Just as the Jews had to fight to regain the temple, we, the believers in Jesus, must fight to retake our lives from the power of sin.
For believers in Jesus, Hanukkah reminds us of two important points. First, it is a sobering reminder of the force of antisemitism (hatred of the Jewish people) in the world. AS believers, we should emulate God’s love and concern for His chosen people by standing against anti-Semitism. Secondly, Hanukkah reminds us of God’s faithfulness – past, present, and future – to His church. Similar to Jewish history, church history has been marked by periods of intense persecution, yet God has continued to bless the spread of faith in Jesus throughout the earth, preserving the church since its birth.”
What I love about the celebration of the Jewish feasts and festivals, is they are celebrated over several days. For most of us, Christmas is only a one-day, or maybe a two-day celebration if you count Christmas Eve. We don’t have anything equal to the week-long celebrations the Jews have. And during their celebrations, everything has special meaning. The songs they sing, the foods they eat, the manner in which they celebrate all relate to their understanding of God. In the celebration of Hanukkah, it is traditional to eat foods fried in oil, signifying the miracle of the oil that lasted for eight days. They eat a special potato pancake called a latke and eat my favorite a jelly-filled donut called a sufganiyot. During the meal they remember the miracle of God causing the oil to burn for eight days. In other words, they celebrate God’s miraculous provision.
Another thing I love about the celebration of Hanukkah is they are remembering that it was one family who fought and took back the temple. A Jewish resistance movement led by a priest Mattathais and his son Judas Maccabeus (call the hammer, great name huh?) successfully revolted and recaptured the temple. What I love about this is that it sometimes only takes one person to lead others to do what needs to be done. This priest (not like any priest that I have known) led this revolt and eventually recaptured the Temple.
Leadership is so important for good to conquer. You have no idea the impact you can have on those around you. There is a lady who saw a need for temporary housing for women in difficult situations. Something that would help them get back on their feet so they could provide for themselves. She tried to get involved by volunteering with government-run organizations, only to realize that their goals and God’s goals were very different. So what did this brave woman do? She started her own ministry to help these vulnerable women. She recruited a few friends to help her, and she set out to meet with churches and businesses to raise money to launch this ministry. Last winter, her organization called Compassionate Hands (compassionatehandstn.org) helped 150 women get through the winter and many of them are now self-sufficient. You never know what your presence will mean in the lives of others.
The last thing I want to point out about the celebration of Hanukkah is that God does not change. The things that were important to Him in the past are still important to Him today. God wants us to remember His deeds of old. How many of us celebrate the day we got saved every year? That might be a more important date than your physical birthday, but in our culture, we don’t make it a priority to remember the deeds of God in the past. What if we took a few days and eat a few Jelly donuts while remembering how God reached down into darkness and pulled us out.
This Christmas season with all the business and family celebrations, take some time to remember the greatest gift that was ever given, the birth of Jesus Christ. I pray that the Joy of the Lord is yours and that you are so filled with that Joy that you can’t help but give it away to those around you.
As we end 2025, would you consider making a financial gift to the ministry of Restoring the Foundations? You can go to our website at restoringthefoundations.org and click on the Donate tab at the top of the page. Your gifts will make it possible for us to continue to take this ministry of healing and freedom around the world.
