"Hanukkah - Part 1"
How does the celebration of Hanukkah, a festival NOT found in the Old Testament, provide greater insight into biblical themes such as the Messiah? How is Hanukkah handled in the New Testament?
Go to "Hanukkah - Part 2".
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The End Result of Compromise
What you see happening in the history of the church reflects what happened in this period that Daniel prophesies, the Intertestamental Period.
In the Greek world, homosexuality and bisexuality were culturally endemic. They were accepted as sexually normative behavior. Sexual use of children was somewhat socially acceptable. But certainly perverted sex – homosexuality and lesbianism (from the Island Lesbos) – these things were culturally normative.
In Greek entertainment there was this mixture of Pagan religious philosophy and entertainment. The problem was not the sports, the problem was in the Greek view of the Olympics: It was lewd. I do not mean “naked” in the biological sense that the athletes competed in the nude, but “naked” in the sense of sexual exhibitionism. Originating in the Greek world, something the Romans later adopted – the Romans called them “gladiators” – violence was used as popular entertainment.
These were the cultural elements of the Greek world that Antiochus wanted everybody to accept. He wanted to Hellenize all culture. When the Hebrews went along with it, they brought trouble upon themselves. “Well, we’ll go along with this, we’ll go along with that, we’ll go along with the other thing”, until surreptitiously laws were passed that outlawed their beliefs and they could no longer practice them. Ultimately, circumcision was outlawed and “Kasrut” (dietary law) was outlawed, then the reading of Torah was outlawed.
The Haftorah developed at this period because the reading of Torah was outlawed. So they began reading the Prophets (Haftorah), and they tried to find something from the Prophets which in theme corresponded to what the Lection would have been in the Torah for that week. That’s how you got the Haftorah.
Things were progressively banned. And the problem was God’s people went along with it step by step until it couldn’t be stopped, including the banning of the Levitical theocracy. The priests of the Levitical theocracy had been the Zadokites, the good priests according to Ezekiel; sons of Zadok. But then the Zadokim became the Sadducees; they became bad guys. But they began right. The Hasmonean Period began with the Maccabees and then it got corrupted after that. The Jews were compromising, then things got outlawed and could not be stopped.
The main problem was not the Pagans. The main problems were the Jews who collaborated and the Jews who stood by and kept their mouths shut.
There was, of course, in Britain a Prime Minister who said, “In order for wicked men to triumph, good men must merely remain silent.” Well, he was right. If we go back to the 1930’s, the equivalent of nuclear d isarmament, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) , were the Chamberlainists. Churchill and a small group of mainly Torrey Members of Parliament (MP’s) warned, “Look, you can’t let Hitler violate the Versailles Treaty like this; we’re going to have to fight him sooner or later, better sooner than later.” And they were seen as war-mongers. And then over 10 million people signed petitions against war with Hitler, and Sudaten was given up for appeasement. But somebody like that cannot be stopped with appeasement. Just like when you had the CND, it was the same thing. “For wicked men to triumph, good men must merely remain silent.” But if they remain silent, how “good” can they be?
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Scripture taken from the New American Standard Bible Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation.