Why Christians Should Know the Hanukkah Story

I am a child of the 60's and 70's. I didn’t even know Hanukkah existed until I was nearly grown and heard it referenced on some sit-com.  I thought it was Jewish Christmas. It is not.

I have also come to understand the importance of the Jewish feast days.  If any among you don’t think the Jewish feast days are important, I would respectfully say you are wrong.

Jesus died on Passover, the first established Jewish holy day.  We know Him as our Passover Lamb.

He rose from the dead on First Fruits and is called the first fruits of the dead in I Cor. 15:20. Paul didn’t call him this by accident.

Christ ascended to the Father and sent the Holy Spirit at the Feast of Pentecost.

I believe He will likely rapture the Church on The Feast of Trumpets. Please don’t get all hung up on that ‘no one knows the day or hour’ thing. It’s still unknown even if I say He will come on the Feast of Trumpets.

I believe the Tribulation  and the Day of the Lord are represented in the Day of Atonement.

And finally, the book of Ezekiel says the whole world will celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles yearly after all is said and done.

All the aforementioned feasts were part of the covenant established by God with Israel but, there are a couple celebrated by the Jews that weren’t commanded in the covenant, like Purim.

We know from the book of Esther that Purim was established to commemorate the saving of the Jewish people while they were in exile.

“Yet who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” Mordacai said to Esther. I love this line!  Esther is a really good read if you are interested in the details around Purim.

What I really want to look at now though, is Hanukkah.

Let me just get this out of the way up front, Jesus celebrated Hanukkah.  And yes, you can find that in the Bible in John 10:22. He was in Jerusalem for the Festival of Dedication in the winter. Hanukkah is the Hebrew word for dedication or consecration.

So, let's do a very condensed history of Israel that led to the events that culminated in the Festival of Lights, as Josephus called Hanukkah.

God calls Abraham.

Abraham’s grandson, Jacob, has twelve sons that become the twelve tribes of Israel.

Israel becomes a nation, and then a monarchy.  All was fine and good under Saul, David, and Solomon.

King Rehoboam, Solomon’s son, and Jeroboam, Solomon’s official, fall out and divide Israel into the Northern and Southern Kingdoms.

The Northern Kingdom, known thereafter as Israel or Samaria, embraces false gods.

God sends judgment and they fall to the Assyrians.

The Southern Kingdom also embraces false gods and God gives them over to the Babylonians.

The difference between the conquerors is, The Assyrians not only displaced the Israelites, as the northerners were known, they scattered them like seeds throughout their empire. Many never returned.  That is why you hear people referring to ‘The Lost Tribes of Israel’.

But, the Babylonians allowed some of the Jews, as the southerners were called, to remain in their land and practice their faith. Judaism was not wiped off the face of the earth.

Actually, Daniel was a captive in Babylon and still practiced his religion right there in the very palace of the king.

God would not allow the tribe of Judah to be annihilated because His promise was that He would send The Messiah through Judah.  

God’s word cannot be broken.

Cyrus the Great of Persia, after conquering Babylon, allowed the Jews to return to their homeland and rebuild their temple, something prophesied in detail by Isaiah, by the way.

Those students of ancient history will know that that empire, the Medo-Persian, was overthrown by Alexander the Great and now we are almost up to date with the situation in Judea at the time Hanukkah was instituted.

Alexander died and his kingdom was eventually divided between four of his generals.  Ptolemy ruled his kingdom out of Egypt and Seleucid ruled his out of what is now Iraq/Syria.

The other two have no bearing on our story.

Lots of stuff happened but, in a nutshell, the Jews which had been under the rule of the Ptolemaic empire ended up under the rule of the Seleucid empire and the rules were very different.

As a matter of fact, a sect of Hellenistic Jews known as The Tobiads are the ones who asked the Seleucid king to intervene and take Jerusalem. Which he did.

The Seleucid empire embraced their Greek-ness, whereas the Ptolemaic empire was kind of live and let live as long as you paid your taxes.  Taxes were the problem at the root of all this.

Initially after the takeover, The Seleucid king left the Jews alone, But, you know how it is with God’s people.  They can’t go long before someone tries to wipe them from the face of the earth.  Three and a half years into things, the Seleucid king decided he needed everything to be Hellenistic and everyone worshiping the Greek Gods. 

Hellenism the official name of the Greek culture.

This king was Antiochus Epiphanes and his name literally means God manifested.

Now anyone who has studied any prophesy knows that the events unfolding here were prophesied by Daniel, or were at least a very close foreshadow of the fulfillment to come later.  

If you are seeing the parallels between these events and the whole book of Revelation, three and a half years, peace thing, ended by a guy called God in the flesh, who desecrates the temple; if you think it sounds eerily like what we expect to happen in the end days. 

BINGO! you got it.

Sorry, back to our story.

So Antiochus declares public prayer, the reading of the Torah, the temple sacrifices, circumcision, basically everything associated with Judaism, punishable by death.

He proceeds to desecrate the temple by erecting a statue of Zeus within and sacrifices a pig, a very unclean animal by Old Testament standards, on the altar of God. This is the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel.

He doesn’t stop there.  He sets up places all over Israel for sacrifices to the Greek gods and demands that the populace participate in those sacrifices.

One day, an official delegation shows up in this little village of no importance, sets up their altar and declares the village must make sacrifices to the gods of the state.

This Jewish guy starts walking toward the altar to make the sacrifice and, Bam! A priest named Mattathias kills him.  But Mattathias doesn’t stop there. No way. He kills the officials, too.

So, Mattathias and his five sons run for the hills but not before he cries out, “Let everyone who has zeal for the Law and who stands by the covenant follow me!”

This single act by this one man sparked a revolt that, against all odds, led Israel to defeat the mighty army of the Seleucid empire and take their country and their worship back.

I have to add something here I didn’t know ‘til recently. Mattathias was a descendant of Phinehas. Everyone who has spent any time talking Bible with me knows I love this guy.

Phinehas took dramatic measures against sin in the camp of the Israelites in the wilderness and God honored him with a covenant of a lasting priesthood.  It’s a great story found in Numbers 25:1-13.  Mattathias came from good stock.

You may be wondering why the sons of Mattathias, the grandson of the Hasmonean where the kingly line got its name, are called the Maccabees.  It turns out that Mattathias' oldest son had a nick-name, Judas Maccabeus, which means Judas the Hammer. The whole rebellion came to be known by that nick-name.

Mattathias died during the war and Judas took the helm, carrying on the fight.

When the war was won, the brothers cleaned out and rededicated the Temple. That’s how we got Hanukkah, the re dedication of the Temple.

There are many side stories, like the miracle of the oil, around the holiday just like we have side stories around Christmas but, the celebration itself is based on the historical fact that the Jews defeated a mighty army and rededicated their temple for the worship of the one, true God.  

I believe you can see what a great story this is and how God was truly in it through and through; which is reason enough. But, why should Christians, as Christians, know about Hanukkah?

At the top of the list, we wouldn’t have a Christmas without a Hanukkah. The Maccabean revolt kept Judaism from being eradicated.  Had no one stood up for the right, there would have been no Judaism left and therefore no Jesus.

It also gives us something to talk about with our Jewish friends, a little icebreaker so to speak. You may not realize but many, I daresay most, Jewish people don’t realize just how Jewish the gospels are. 

They don’t realize Jesus celebrated the Passover, went to Hebrew school and Temple, and that almost every word out of His mouth was from the Torah or the Prophets. They don’t realize that there is a connection between Judaism and Christianity any more than my grandmother did.

We as Christians, learn all about the main Jewish feast days in Sunday school and how they foreshadow Jesus. 

But, Hanukkah is lost on us even though there is no set of events I can think of that foreshadows the time in which we live like the circumstances surrounding Hanukkah.

Let’s look closer at these circumstances remembering that Daniel prophesied these events hundreds of years before, in detail. Remember, also, that Jesus refers to the Prophet Daniel and the abomination of desolation, when speaking of the last days.

There had been a great falling away. There were very few true people of God left. They had gone the way of the world and had embraced the Hellenistic ways of the Greeks.  Remember, It was Hellenistic Jews that let the Antiochus Epiphanes into the city.  The first person to die in the rebellion was a Jew who was stepping right up to offer the pagan sacrifice.

We see the same spirit around us today. There cannot be an Antichrist unless the people of God first start turning away from the truth.  The people of God, actually the Spirit of God within His people, withhold evil.

I think I have rattled on long enough but I encourage you to look deeper into Hanukkah.  Become aware of the parallels of that age and this, because they are many.

I say, let us teach our children about the Hammer Brothers, how they withstood the spirit of the antichrist, and how God used them to lead His people to victory. 

These are lessons they need to know in light of the times we are living, don't you think?