It began last year

when we made an attempt to understand Hanukkah.   It was quite foreign to us and after an entire Christian walk  thinking that the Jew and the Christian were segmented by a gulf that existed between the Old and New Testament we started seeing things differently.

  Jesus himself mentions Hanukkah* in the New Testament in

 John 10:22 And it was at Jerusalem the feast of the dedication*, and it was winter.

You see the Jewish temple was regained in 165 B.C. and then the Jews re-dedicated it to God.    The reason we are seeing Hanukkah differently is because as Christians we believe that our body is the temple,

 1 Corinthians 6:19 Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?  

Hanukkah is a feast that celebrates the re-dedication of the temple. As Christians, knowing our body is the temple, we see the celebration of Hanukkah as a re-dedication of our temple.  We see this feast fulfilled by the coming of Christ as He is also known as the Light, and Hanukkah was called the festival of Lights by Flavius Josephus.  We see a need to re-dedicate ourselves because we live in the times we do, where the world is moving forward at a pace that contradicts God and His Holy Word. We see the symbolism of the re-dedication of the temple by the Jews as a foreshadowing of things to come when our temple, our bodies, have been dedicated to our Lord and Saviour.

We are not Jewish. We are Christians. We will not adhere the the traditions totally, but try to keep it simple and taking each night to focus on another area we can re-dedicate our lives to our Saviour. We are not doing this claiming that all things Jewish relate to us, no, we are celebrating Hanukkah, as the bridge between the Jew and the Christian is Christ, and we are connected because of Him.

*the feast of dedication is also known as Hanukkah