13 Ways Hanukkah Is Different from Christmas

Hanukkah (a Hebrew word meaning “the Feast of Dedication” and also known as the Festival of Lights) is a minor holiday in Judaism and is only mentioned once in the Scriptures (John 10:22). It is the memorial of the cleansing of the temple in Jerusalem after the pagan Greeks had defiled it with idols. There is no scriptural command to celebrate it. There is no indication that Yeshua or the early disciples celebrated it, although John in his Gospel mentions that Yeshua happened be at the temple during this holiday. Nevertheless, Hanukkah as great positive spiritual ramifications.

Although Hanukkah and Christmas occur in the same month, they are totally different from each other. Hanukkah is not a replacement for Christmas for those who have discovered the pagan origins and unbiblical nature of Christmas. Here are several ways how these two holidays differ.

  • Hanukkah is about staying pure from and resisting unbiblical pagan practices and defilement. The Catholic Church invented Christmas as a blend of biblical and pagan themes as an evangelistic tool to woo the pagans into Christianity. This is not how the Bible teaches that evangelism should be done! The gospel is to be preached and the pagans are to repent of their sin. The saints aren’t to become like the pagan sinners to win them to Messiah. Hanukkah, on the other hand, was intended to keep YHVH’s people separated from paganism, so they could remain true to biblical truth.
  • Hanukkah celebrated the cleansing of the temple from the defilement of pagan practices. Christmas involves bringing pagan defilement into the church. It is the corrupting of the church. Hanukkah was about purifying the temple of Elohim. The Bible teaches that the saint are now YHVH’s spiritual temple and we are to keep our temple pure and undefiled from the corruption of the world (1 Cor 2:16–17).
  • Hanukkah is mentioned in the Bible (John 10:22); Christmas is not. It is true that the birth of Yeshua is well documented in the Gospels, but there is no command to celebrate his birthday. Instead, YHVH gave his saints the weekly Sabbath and seven biblical festivals to celebrate (see Lev 23). Christmas is not one of these commanded biblical holidays. To observe Christmas and to not observe the Sabbath and biblical feasts, which YHVH commands is people to do is, by biblical definition, sin, for sin is the violation of the laws or commandments of Elohim (1 John 3:4). 
  • Hanukkah was birthed out of spiritual revival (rejection of unbiblical pagan practices). Christmas was born out of spiritual apostasy (becoming like the pagans to “win them to Christ”).
  • Originally Hanukkah didn’t involve giving gifts. This is a recent tradition to compete with the popularity of Christmas.
  • Originally Hanukkah didn’t involve putting up Christmas-like lights. This too is a recent tradition to compete the popularity of Christmas and has nothing to do with theme of Hanukkah. At Hanukkah, one lights the hanukkiah or eight-branched candelabra only in honor of the temple’s menorah. The Christmas tradition of putting up lights goes back to the ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia where the pagans lit candles in honor of their demonic sun god. This has nothing to do with Yeshua, and everything to do with paganism.
  • Hanukkah doesn’t have the blatant ancient pagan sex worship symbols that Christmas has (the Christmas tree, the red ball-shaped Christmas tree ornaments, wreath, mistletoe, holly, Christmas lights, giving gifts et al), which come from the pagan demon-worship rituals of the Druids, the Scandinavians, and Germans, the Romans, the Greeks, the Babylonians, the Canaanites and the Egyptians.
  • Hanukkah never involved putting up a tree or a bush and decorating it with lights as Christmas does. The Christmas tree tradition is purely pagan in origination and has nothing to do with the Bible, except for the fact that the Bible identifies this practice as rooted in ancient pagan customs that YHVH’s people are NOT to do (Jer 10:1–5).
  • Hanukkah is about the survival of a small remnant of Jewish people desiring to remain true to their biblical faith against overwhelming odds. Christmas came about through compromising biblical truth in an attempt to come up with a way to placate the heathen masses who couldn’t let go of their idolatrous and unbiblical traditions. Hanukkah commemorates how the Jews were trying to keep the flame of truth alive against all odds, while Christmas is about diluting and profaning the truth of Yeshua’s birth with pagan customs, and then moving the time of his birth from the fall to the time of the winter solstice when the heathens were honoring their demonic sun deity.
  • At Hanukkah, children and adults play the dreidel game, which was how the Jews surreptitiously studied the Torah (the Law of Moses) when the heathens ruling over their land forbad it. The Torah teaches us about the YHVH’s seven biblical feasts. Christmas (and the other non-biblical Christian holidays) is religion’s attempt to draw people away from the Word of Elohim and replace it with man-made, pagan-based traditions that make the Word of Elohim of none-effect. This is something that Yeshua condemned (Mark 7:8–9; Matt 15:6).
  • Hanukkah is a minor Jewish holiday, while Christmas is the major Christian holiday of the year. The holidays that the Bible considers to be major, which YHVH commands his people to celebrate are the weekly Sabbath, Passover, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, Pentecost, the Day of Trumpets, the Day of Atonement, the Feast of Tabernacles and the Eighth Day.
  • Christians have two major (non-biblical) holidays they celebrate each year: Christmas and Easter. Those who follow the Bible celebrate seven major holidays or festivals as listed in Leviticus 23, and Hanukkah isn’t one of them. Clearly the Bible has more to offer in terms of exciting holidays and spiritually significant and meaningful celebrations than does mainstream Christianity with its non-biblical, man-made and pagan-based holiday traditions. Besides, the seven biblical holidays depict the seven steps one must take to obtain the free gift of immortality. Wow! No pagan-based Christian holidays can beat this!
  • In a certain sense, Hanukkah trumps Christmas, since without Hanukkah there would be no Christmas. How is this? Hanukkah celebrates the victory and preservation of the Jewish people in the land of Israel over their pagan Greek rulers who were trying to exterminate not only them, but their biblical based religion along with YHVH’s Torah. If it had not been for this remnant band of Jewish diehards (some of whom died for their faith in the struggle), not only would the Jewish faith in the land of Israel have been stamped out, but likely the Jewish people would have ceased to exist either through genocide or forced assimilation with the pagans around them. Had this happened, how would the Messiah have been born in the land of Israel about 140 years later, which Christmas celebrates? There would have been no Jewish culture for the Messiah to be born into, and it’s possible that his ancestors would have been killed in a Jewish holocaust as well.
 

25 Reasons I Don’t Celebrate Christmas

1—Christmas is not the day on which Yeshua the Messiah (Jesus Christ) was born. He was likely born in the autumn during the biblical Feast of Tabernacles. In ancient times, December 25 was considered the birthday of the demon-sun god by many heathen religions. This was definitely not the birthday of Yeshua!

2—There’s no biblical command to celebrate Christmas.

3—Christmas has become a pagan substitution for YHVH’s true biblical holidays or festivals, which are listed in Leviticus 23. These are the same biblical festivals that Yeshua and his apostles celebrated. They never celebrated the Messiah’s birth.

4—Christmas is the Christianization of various ancient pagan sun god, sex-worship rituals having to do with the winter solstice. “Cleaning up” a pagan custom is contrary to the biblical truth of turning away from the practices of the heathen and having nothing to do with them after one chooses to follow Elohim and his Word as found in the Bible.

5—Christmas is laced with heathen and Satanic rituals and traditions. These are things the saints should have nothing to do with!

6—The Bible forbids placing any trees or tree-like objects near an altar (or in a church building), since this is a heathen practice (Deut 16:21).  Most Christians violate this command when they place Christmas trees in their church sanctuaries near their altars every year at Christmas.

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Christmas—The Rest of the Story (just the facts, nothing more)

How and When Christmas Came Into the Church

Did you ever wonder how the non-biblical holiday called “Christmas” came into the mainstream Christians church? What follows is the backstory to Christmas—the rest of the story.

Christmas was not among the earliest festivals of the Church. Irenaeus and Tertullian omit it from their lists of feasts; Origen glancing perhaps at the discreditable imperial Natalitia, asserts (in Lev. Hom. viii in Migne, P.G., XII, 495) that in the Scriptures sinners alone, not saints, celebrate their birthday; Amodbius (VII, 32 in P.L., V, 1264) can still ridicule the “birthdays” of the gods. (The Catholic Encyclopedia, “Christmas”)

Saturnalia was an ancient Roman festival in honour of the god Saturn, held on 17 December of the Julian calendar and later expanded with festivities through to 23 December. The holiday was celebrated with a sacrifice at the Temple of Saturn, in the Roman Forum, and a public banquet, followed by private gift-giving, continual partying, and a carnival atmosphere that overturned Roman social norms: gambling was permitted, and masters provided table service for their slaves. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturnalia)

Saturnalia may have influenced some of the customs associated with later celebrations in western Europe occurring in midwinter, particularly traditions associated with Christmas, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, and Epiphany. (ibid.)

The popularity of Saturnalia continued into the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, and as the Roman Empire came under Christian rule, many of its customs were recast into or at least influenced the seasonal celebrations surrounding Christmas and the New Year. (ibid.)

According to The Catholic Encyclopedia, Christmas is not included in Irenaeus’s nor Tertullian’s list of Christian feasts, the earliest known lists of Christian feasts. The earliest evidence of celebration is from Alexandria, in about 200, when Clement of says that certain Egyptian theologians “over curiously” assign not just the year but also the actual day of Christ’s birth as 25 Pachon (May 20) in the twenty-eighth year of Augustus. By the time of the Council of Nicea in 325, the Alexandrian church had fixed a dies Nativitatis et Epiphaniae. The December feast reached Egypt in the fith century. In Jerusalem, the fourth century pilgrim Egeria from Bordeaux witnessed the Feast of the Presentation, forty days after January 6, which must have been the date of the Nativity there. At Antioch, probably in 386, St. John Chrysostom urged the community to unite in celebrating Christ’s birth on December 25, a part of the community having already kept it on that day for at least ten years. 

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On Celebrating Birthdays (including that of the baby Jesus)

This week much the world (me excluded) will be celebrating Christmas, the supposed birthday of Jesus (Yeshua) the Messiah. Let’s talk about the pros and cons of celebrating birthdays from a biblical perspective and briefly touch on the Christmas issue as well.

Genesis 40:20, Pharaoh’s birthday. The is the first of three references to birthdays in the Bible. The second one is to Job’s children who were killed on, presumably, one of their birthdays (Job 1:4, 18–19).The third reference to King Herod, who had John the Baptist beheaded on his birthday (Matt 14:6–12). Because of the fact that birthdays are associated with calamity in the Bible, some people refuse to celebrate birthdays, even though there is no direct or indirect prohibition against honoring a loved one once a year on the day of their birth.  

Though I respect a person’s right to disagree with me on this issue, it is my opinion that celebrating birthdays is neither inherently evil nor a pagan thing to do. It is merely honoring and respecting a loved one on the day marking their debut into this world. What’s evil about that? “Oh, it’s a pride thing,” someone might respond. If so, then answer me this: How is honoring and showing love by telling someone that you’re glad they were born and that they’re special to you “a pride thing”?  And if it’s pride, then pride on whose part? The Bible teaches that there is a wrong and sinful kind of pride and right kind of pride, but that’s another discussion.

Now what about celebrating Yeshua’s birthday on Christmas? Is that wrong or evil? No, not inherently, unless we mix satanic and pagan traditions into the mix, and do it on the same day that the ancient pagans honored their demon sun-god. Of itself, there’s nothing evil about recognizing the coming of the Messiah in human form to this earth. To be sure, this is something to be celebrated in one way or another. The problem is that in so doing, most people have not only mixed in pagan traditions with their celebrations, and have secularized out of it the real purpose of the day, and have chosen to celebrate the Messiah’s birth on the totally wrong day. Perhaps, worst of all, they have rejected or made of non-effect the clear word of Elohim that commands all the saints to celebrate the seven biblical feasts. Instead, men have substituted Christmas and Easter (et al) for Passover, Unleavened Bread, Pentecost, Trumpets, Atonement, Tabernacles and the Eighth Day. This is not only wrong, but it is, by biblical definition, sinful, for it violates the laws of YHVH Elohim (1 John 3:4).

Yeshua addressed religious leaders’ sinful, rebellious and prideful proclivity to substitute their man made doctrines and traditions for the Word of Elohim.

He answered and said unto them, Well hath Isaiah prophesied of you hypocrites, as it is written, This people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. Howbeit in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. For laying aside the [Torah] commandment of Elohim, ye hold the tradition of men, as the washing of pots and cups: and many other such like things ye do.… Making the word of Elohim of none effect through your tradition, which ye have delivered: and many such like things do ye. (Mark 7:6–8, 13)

 

Christmas—The Rest of the Story

How and When Christmas Came Into the Church

Did you ever wonder how the non-biblical holiday called “Christmas” came into the mainstream Christians church? What follows is the backstory to Christmas: the rest of the story.

Christmas was not among the earliest festivals of the Church. Irenaeus and Tertullian omit it from their lists of feasts;  Origen glancing perhaps at the discreditable imperial Natalitia, asserts (in Lev. Hom. viii in Migne, P.G., XII, 495) that in the Scriptures sinners alone, not saints, celebrate their birthday;  Amodbius (VII, 32 in P.L., V, 1264) can still ridicule the “birthdays” of the gods. (The Catholic Encyclopedia, “Christmas”)

Saturnalia was an ancient Roman festival in honour of the god Saturn, held on 17 December of the Julian calendar and later expanded with festivities through to 23 December. The holiday was celebrated with a sacrifice at the Temple of Saturn, in the Roman Forum, and a public banquet, followed by private gift-giving, continual partying, and a carnival atmosphere that overturned Roman social norms: gambling was permitted, and masters provided table service for their slaves. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturnalia)

Saturnalia may have influenced some of the customs associated with later celebrations in western Europe occurring in midwinter, particularly traditions associated with Christmas, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, and Epiphany. (ibid.)

The popularity of Saturnalia continued into the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, and as the Roman Empire came under Christian rule, many of its customs were recast into or at least influenced the seasonal celebrations surrounding Christmas and the New Year. (ibid.)

According to The Catholic Encyclopedia, Christmas is not included in Irenaeus’s nor Continue reading


 

13 Ways Hanukkah Is Different from Christmas

Hanukkah (a Hebrew word meaning “the Feast of Dedication” and also known as the Festival of Lights) is a minor holiday in Judaism and is only mentioned once in the Scriptures (John 10:22). It is the memorial of the cleansing of the temple in Jerusalem after the pagan Greeks had defiled it with idols. There is no scriptural command to celebrate it. There is no indication that Yeshua or the early disciples celebrated it, although John in his Gospel mentions that Yeshua happened be at the temple during this holiday. Nevertheless, Hanukkah as great positive spiritual ramifications.

Hanukkah 33399027

Although Hanukkah and Christmas occur in the same month, they are totally different from each other. Hanukkah is not a replacement for Christmas for those who have discovered the pagan origins and unbiblical nature of Christmas. Here are several ways how these two holidays differ: Continue reading


 

Chanukah or Christmas, Neither or Both?

Happy Chanukah/Hanukkah! Tonight begins the first night of the Festival of Lights. Want to know more? Please read on…

John 10:22, The Feast of Dedication [or consecration]. This is a reference to the annual Chanukah (also spelled Hanukkah, and also known as the Festival of Lights) celebration lasting for eight days beginning in the 25th day of Jewish month Chislev (in the middle of our December). This minor Jewish feast was instituted by Judas Maccabaeus (164 BC) in memory of the cleansing of the Jerusalem temple from its desecration by Antiochus Epiphanes, the pagan Greco-Syrian king.

The word Chanukah derives from the Hebrew word KH-N-K meaning “to dedicate.”

While Chanukah isn’t a biblically commanded observance, it is interesting to note that Yeshua happened to be at the temple in Jerusalem at this time as John mentions in his Gospel (John 10:22). Are there any spiritual significances to this? Perhaps.

Chanukah falls in the same time frame as the modern Christian festival of Christmas, which has its roots in the pagan Roman festival of Saturnalia, which culminated on December 25. Saturnalia was a pre-Christian festival held from December 17 to 25 in honor of the sun god characterized by drunken revelries, sexual debauchery, hedonistic indulgences of all sort, and human sacrifices. Saturnalia was a festival of lights in an effort to defeat the forces of darkness at the darkest time of the year and to woo the sun as earth’s life-giver back again thus insuring that the earth wouldn’t become an uninhabitable dark and frozen wasteland.

In the fourth century, Christian leaders “redeemed” Saturnalia by attaching the birth of Jesus Continue reading