Abrahamic FaithCorrected 24.10.2006
As a believer ever since my calling from Islam into Yahushua as my Messiah and saviour this was my second most important question, should I celebrate Christmas or not? The first being which church should I go to? I became a believer on September 17th 1998 and Christmas was not all that far away and the need for me to find a good fellowship was paramount to my spiritual growth. I prayed for the Lord Jesus (Yahushua HaMashiach) to reveal the truth to me about what I should do. Fortunately for me that not only did the Lord reveal the answer to this question but many others also. First of all He led me by His personal hand to a messianic Bible believing church, a person who I had never met before contacted me to meet him for lunch which I accepted and he showed me to the church I should go to, this became my spiritual home with other believers some thirty seven miles away from my home town set in Golders green London, right smack bang in the middle of the Jewish heartland. This was my first experience of seeing so many Jews together in one area wearing Yarmulkes, black hats and the like. Is it not amazing that this was the answer to the very first question I had after my salvation? My second question carried a payload with it, I am not sure why at the time I felt I must ask this question but intrinsically I recognised that something was not quite right about Christmas but as a baby believer in Yahushua I could not quite place exactly what was wrong with Christmas. As a Muslim I had friends who would give me Christmas cards and likewise I would give them cards but to be honest I never knew what was the meaning of this as my friends simply followed a tradition, I saw Christmas nothing more then getting drunk, having fun and watching movies which is what my friends did and you can see this quite prevalent in the Western culture.
The answer that the Lord gave was even more shocking, I was told that Christmas was not for me. Christmas was the pagan wrapping on a Biblical feast that the 4th century church replaced with the Roman Christmas, this was the church's effort to bring about replacement theology and to shun the Jews. They interpreted everything that God had ordained for Israel in the Bible with the Church, they shunned Israel (the Jews) as apostate who rejected their Messiah Yahushua and therefore the church believed Israel was no longer part of God's plan. This leads to another interesting situation, these people actually believed that the church became Israel or took on all of Israel's blessings and all the curses were left for the Jews.
Sadly we can read the writings of the early church fathers in existence today and we will find strong or moderate tones of anti-Semitism. When I looked at the question of Christmas, an interesting parallel appeared to me, in Islam the Hajj (pilgrimage) at Mecca was done before Muhammad ever proclaimed prophethood, he later adopted this practice into Islam as a valid practice that clearly had nothing to do with monotheism because Mecca housed 360 idols and was a pagan shrine but Muhammad had to get his powerful Quraish tribe into his new found faith. This was Muhammad's political attempt to get the pagans to buy into Islam and he succeeded in that. The same thing had happened here with Christmas, because really this was the feast of the winter solstice which the Pagan Romans celebrated and it had nothing to do with Jesus Christ's birth, instead this practice was simply wrapped onto Biblical Christianity to appease the Roman hierarchy and get their buy in which like Islam was successful. This is what then led to the 1600 years of anti-Semitism, Jewish persecution and hatred in our churches.
A friend phoned me the other day asking what I was doing at Christmas this year, I causally responded that I do not celebrate Christmas to which he retorted but that is Christ's birthday, how can you not celebrate? This led to some flurry of questions from him to establish whether I was a believer or not, he asked me, do you believe in the virgin birth, I said yes, he said do you believe in Jesus being God who became flesh to which I said yes, he said then why do you not celebrate Christmas?
I could not believe what I was hearing, an evangelical Christian had questioned my very salvation on the basis of Christmas, simply because I said Christmas is not Biblical! It does not get any more ridiculous then this.
I went through an explanation to my friend that I left the pagan religion of Islam after I found the truth of the Lord Jesus Christ Yahushua the Messiah of Israel, then how can I possibly adopt another pagan festival namely Christmas. I asked him would I not be a hypocrite if I told the Muslims that you worship false practices of a false god but then I also do the same thing myself? I further explained that there is no mention in the Bible of Christmas and that this was a question that the Lord had dealt with upon my conversion. He argued that we cannot know what day Christmas is and the church has merely established the date of 25th of December to celebrate Christmas. I explained to him that we have reasonable scriptural evidence to indicate that Yahushua Jesus the Messiah was born on the feast of Tabernacles (Succot) that is during September/October timeframe and never in December. I asked him if Christmas was celebrated from the early church on the 25th of December then how come the Eastern Orthodox Church do not celebrate it on the same day as the Western church but in January instead? I asked him why was it that the early church for the first 400 years refused to celebrate Christmas until the Romans legalised Christianity? I asked him why do people put up Christmas trees in their houses and light them up, what significance has this to do with Christ? Christians believe these are symbols for Christ but this is far from it, in fact in Jeremiah 10:3-4 we are told this:
For the customs of the peoples are futile; for one cuts a tree from the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the ax. They decorate it with silver and gold; they fasten it with nails and hammers so that it will not topple.
These customs the Lord says are futile and useless. Many might argue that the Christians do not worship a false god in the shape of an upright tree which I agree is true but the point is that it is not the fact that they worship a false god as such but that the practice itself is useless and unworthy, it has no symbolism to Jesus Christ but people try and force their own symbols. The real symbol for Jesus Yahushua the Messiah would be the the feast of Tabernacles, there is another feast Chanukah which is referred to as the festival of lights, e.g. He (Yahushua) gives us the light of life even Yahushua was in the Temple in Shlomo's (Solomon's) porch proclaiming that he gives eternal life (John 10:22-23). The feast of Chanukah was celebrated by the Maccabees because they missed the feast of Tabernacles, this is mentioned in the book of Maccabees and also in the Jewish sources, they were essentially celebrating Tabernacles, there is no injunction for us to celebrate Chanukah because in the old days they only had the 7 candle menorah and not the later traditional 9 candle Chanukiah, the Lord is clear for us that we are to look at the feasts he has given us mentioned in the Torah. There is no mention in any of the early sources of the miracle of oil, many believe this was invented later.
2 Maccabees 1: 7-9
When Demetrius was king, in the year 169, we Jews wrote to you as follows, 'In the desperate affliction that has come on us in these years since Jason and his associates betrayed the Holy Land and the kingdom,
they burned the Temple gateway and shed innocent blood. Then we prayed to the Lord and were heard; we offered a sacrifice with wheat flour, kindled the lamps and set out the loaves. And we now recommend you to keep the feast of Tabernacles of the month of Chislev. In the year one hundred and eighty-eight'.
In the above account in the book of Maccabees we can see that it mentions "The feast of Tabernacles".
In the Megillat Ta'anit was a scroll written in the first century BC. It talks about the people when they could or could not fast or mourn. It emphatically states that the people were busy for 8 days; it says they entered the Hasmonean Temple with seven iron rods coated with wood to burn - this is possibly a reference to the menorah. Only 7, not 8 or 9 found on the present day Chanukiah. We must be very careful not to mingle tradition with what God has given us. However there is a allusion to the feast of Hanukah in the book of Daniel and a direct reference to it with Yahushua celebrating it in John 10:22.
Josephus a Jewish Roman historian, under Antiquities of the Jews, page 260, book 12, chapter 7, section 7, says -
"Now Judas celebrated the festival of the restoration of the sacrifices of the temple for eight days; and omitted no sorts of pleasures thereon: but he feasted upon them very rich and splendid sacrifices; and he honoured God, and delighted them, by hymns and psalms. Nay, they were so very glad at the revival of their customs, when after a long time of intermission, they unexpectedly had regained the freedom of their worship, that they made it law for their posterity, that they should keep a festival, on account of the restoration of their temple worship, for eight days. And from that time to this we celebrate this festival, and call it Lights. I suppose the reason was, because this liberty beyond our hopes appeared to us; and that thence was the name given to that festival."
We can read that even Josephus was not certain why this name was given for this festival and does not mention any miracle of the oil. Whether the miracle of oil is true or not is not really what we are debating here, clearly the feast was representative of the feast of Tabernacles.
The Lord wants us to celebrate His feasts not pagan feasts and the ones He has given are as follows that all the churches should have been keeping but failed to keep:
1. Passover (Yahushua became the Passover lamb and delivering us from bondage and sin, passing us from death to new life)
2. Feast of unleavened bread (Signifies the necessity of living a clean life without sin, Yahushua being the heavenly bread of life not only removes our sin but gives us heavenly manna)
3. Firstfruits (The Jews would bring the sheaf of the firstfruits of their harvest, Yahushua became the Firstfruits (Hebrew Shavuot) upon his resurrection presenting himself to the father and the first person to rise from the dead)
4. Pentecost (Israel received the Torah and the church was started with the allegorical marriage with the God of Israel on this day but we received the Holy Spirit in abundance to guide our lives with the Torah written on our hearts)
5. Trumpets (Rosh Hashanah, the Jews celebrate the new year but we should celebrate the coming of our Lord with the blowing of the last trumpet)
6. Day of Atonement (The Jews fasted and gave animal sacrifices to atone for their sins once a year but for us this signifies our sins dealt with once and for all time by Yahushua the Messiah and not on an annual basis as was the case in Temple times)
7. Tabernacles (The Jews build booths, as a reminder of God's provision in the wilderness, reflection of provision for us through Yahushua when we are in the wilderness of life)
As we can see all these feasts pointed forward to Yahushua the Messiah when the Jews were in the wilderness and also the feasts point backwards for us to remember what our Lord Jesus Christ did and also remembering that He is going to come again soon. T
Lev 23:4 These are the feasts of the Lord, holy convocations which you shall proclaim at their appointed times.
These are not Jewish feasts or feasts for Israel only but these are our feasts also because we have joined ourselves to the God of Israel by choice. We should be observing the feasts that the Lord appointed to reflect on both the past and future of the atoning work of the Lord on the cross for and on our behalf, we can offer nothing of ourselves towards our salvation but He has done it for us. Our God is unchangeable. Halleluiah praise Yahushua our Messiah.
Simon Altaf is a prophecy scholar and a messianic Rabbi and an author who has debated many people on different aspects of the Bible, he is the author of five books one co-authored with Walid Shoebat another prophecy scholar and his personal friend. He has consistently warned the Church of its lax attitude towards Israel and the Jewish people and the dangers posed to the West by Islamists. We must be careful not to reject YHWH's holy commandments and His people Israel as non-essential. This is our call to re-examine our attitudes towards our brothers the Jews and repentance of any error in our life for our current and past mistakes before the great King of Israel returns to judge us all.
If you would like him to speak in your church or Radio/TV please write to him shimoun63@yahoo.com to make a booking.
Abrahamic Faith