Dale Partridge - Christians and Hanukkah？

00:00:00.000 Can Christians support Hanukkah? No, and here's why. Many claim Christians can support this 1.00

00:00:05.140 holiday because Jesus celebrated it in John 10, 22 through 23. But is that true? No. Historically,

00:00:12.140 Hanukkah was the Feast of Dedication, an eight-day commemoration of the temple being reclaimed and

00:00:16.820 rededicated under Judas Maccabeus in 164 BC. It celebrated the purification of a physical building.

00:00:23.720 Jesus did not celebrate Hanukkah. John simply says that he was present in the temple during the

00:00:28.820 feast. Scripture is explicit when Jesus does observe feasts that were commanded by the law

00:00:33.880 because Jesus came to fulfill the law. Hanukkah was not one of those feasts. More importantly,

00:00:39.460 Jesus viewed himself as the temple. He said, destroy this temple, and in three days I will

00:00:44.920 raise it up. Now, the Jews believed that he was speaking of the Jerusalem temple,

00:00:49.020 but as John 2.21 says, he was speaking about the temple of his body. However, he did prophesy the

00:00:55.000 destruction of the temple in Matthew 24, which then occurred in AD 70 as a judgment on Israel

00:01:01.140 for rejecting their Messiah. So why does this matter? Because Jesus is the true temple. To

00:01:07.140 celebrate the dedication of a temple that Christ replaced and judged is theologically incoherent. 0.95

00:01:12.960 Even more directly, the Jews who celebrate Hanukkah reject Christ. And John says, 0.82

00:01:17.880 no one who denies the son has the father. So Hanukkah celebrates a temple without Christ. 0.63

00:01:24.280 Christianity confesses Christ as the true temple. 0.98

00:01:27.620 The two are not compatible. 0.96

Dale Partridge - December 16, 2025