The American Churchman: Should Christians Celebrate Christmas?

Christmas, the Trinity, and the Knowledge of God

Welcome to the American Churchmen podcast. Once again, I'm your host, John Harris and my co-host, Matthew Pearson. Hey Matthew, how you doing?

I'm doing good, John.

Hope you're doing well as well.

Yeah, well, enjoying the Christmas season and all the busyness it entails, but also just, it's a special time of year. I can't put my finger on it. I think having a child for the first time and seeing it through her eyes is also pretty cool.

Yeah, it's always fun.

I'm definitely relaxing because I just finished my last class yesterday. So now all my fall classes are cleared. So now I'm free.

Winter semester starts when?

I'm not gonna be doing any winter semester classes this time around. I'm gonna be, we're gonna be job hunting the whole time. So that's what we're gonna be doing. We're gonna be locking in.

Great for Matthew. He's on the job hunt. He's got a girlfriend. He needs your prayers. So we have a big show today. We're gonna talk about Christmas actually. And the debate that's been around for a long time on whether or not Christmas should be celebrated by Christians.

But before we get to that, the American Church and Podcast is brought to you by TruthScript. And our mission is to encourage men in the church to fulfill their biblical, godly responsibilities and to do so in gentleness and also courage.

And so in that spirit, we bring you the material we're gonna talk about today on the attributes of God, as well as this discussion of Christmas. And if you want to make it possible for us to continue doing this and expand the operation, you can go to truthscript .com, scroll down to the bottom and a little donate area there.

If you want to subscribe to the American Churchmen Podcast by audio, or if you wanna just see our library of videos that we've done, you can go to theamericanchurchmen .com. So we have people already correcting the grammar of the podcast because I guess I use apostrophe in the wrong place.

I said, should Christians celebrate Christmas? And I put an apostrophe there. I will correct that. My apologies. And if man, if Joseph, if that makes you unsubscribe, I don't know what to tell you. Oh man.

Just goes to show the idolatry of Christmas that people have and why we should not celebrate it. So some would argue maybe.

It's a good argument. I'll tell you, some of us are pretty busy. I mean, we do things on the fly a little. So I will be sure to make sure that apostrophes are in the right place moving forward. Oh goodness.

Oh, we can't throw this one into it. Should we celebrate Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, to make sure we don't fall into kinism? Oh my goodness.

I mean, I don't see how a kinist can't in good faith celebrate those because you would see those as like, you know, holding things and, you know, they're distinct places. So I don't know what charge that would get against though.

What if you're a Jewish or a black kinist?

Exactly.

Come on.

And wouldn't you be obligated to celebrate? I don't know. I mean, Kwanzaa is not even a real holiday, but Hanukkah is real. Have you ever... I've never celebrated Hanukkah.

No, I'm a Christian. I'm not a Jew. So I have no purpose to celebrate Hanukkah.

Well, I mean, sometimes you might have Jewish friends, right? I don't know what they do. I really don't, because I've never been invited. I guess I don't have enough Jewish friends. I don't know. No one's ever invited me to a dreidel.

That's what they do, right? They go spin dreidels around, right? That's my...

You know, now I think about it. My kindergarten teacher, when I was a... She was Jewish, actually. And during the holiday season, I spun a dreidel around and all that stuff.

So you're Jewish?

Yeah, I am Jewish. So the Gropers are right. Matthew Pearson is Jewish or something.

I don't know.

I can...

I'll post my 23andMe and you guys can judge.

Oh, goodness. I was thinking today of Elizabeth Warren and how she was, what, was it 116th or something?

Yeah, something like that.

Trump called her Pocahontas, and it was like a big joke. It's funny, because there are guys out there who are... That's how they are about your DNA. It's like, oh my goodness, you found one drop of blood of this.

You must be that or whatever. But let me just make an overture towards all of God's people, all of his children who are in him, as well as those who have yet to become his children, but they should be.

Christmas is a wonderful universal holiday and all are welcome to celebrate Christmas. Not in my home, necessarily. We only have so much capacity. But find a church near you that preaches the Bible and go sing some Christmas carols.

I don't care who you are. That's my welcoming, magnanimous overture.

Well, there we go.

Divine Omniscience and the Incarnation of Christ

With that, let's talk about some attributes of the Lord before we get into the discussion on Christmas. Today, we're gonna be talking a little bit about omniscience or the knowledge of God and how he knows everything, and we don't, and we're limited.

This is one of his attributes that cannot be communicated to man. We can't follow Christ in being omniscient, but he, maybe you can explain this as you get into it, but Christ, or God, the Godhead is omniscient, but some have challenged that by saying, well, Christ in human form didn't know certain things, right, because he said he didn't know the time he was coming back.

So maybe we'll address that as we get into it.

Yeah, no, that's a good one. And I actually have not thought about that one just yet today, so my brain may be a bit grumpy.

Luckily, I went to seminary, so.

Well, there you go.

Yeah, seminary is what teaches you. Seminary is what teaches you everything. If you don't go to seminary, you'll never be able to truly understand the Bible,.

Apparently.

Anyways, so yes, the divine omniscience. So today for divine omniscience, I decided to take a little break from Bob Inc. I had to use him on an essay, so I kind of got tired of him. So we're just gonna, we're gonna have some fun with Richard Muller.

So my primary sources that I pulled from is his Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms and his Post-Reformation Reform Dogmatic, specifically the volume on the divine essence and attributes.

So whatever you hear from me, it's not really original. I basically just, it's not really plagiarism because I'm credited to him. So yeah, this will mostly be pulled from that. But divine omniscience.

To begin with, I'm just going to read one verse, which I, for some reason, did not cite. So let me put that in Google real quick. Psalm 139. We will be reading from Psalm 139 verses one through six, just to kind of get us started before we talk about divine omniscience.

The text reads, "'Oh Lord, you have searched me and known me. "'You know when I sit down and when I rise up. "'You discern my thoughts from afar. "'You search out my path and my lying down "'and are acquainted with all my ways.

"'Even before a word is on my tongue, "'behold, oh Lord, you know it altogether. "'You hem me in behind and before "'and lay your hand upon me. "'Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. "'It is high, I cannot attain it.'".

So that kind of gives us a little insight into God's knowledge right there about how before David even speaks a word, God knows what it is. So if we're gonna define omniscience, this is a very succinct way that Richard Muller defines it, according to some of the medieval and reform scholastics and Lutheran scholastics, we can't leave them out.

But omniscience essentially is the attribute of God by which God knows all things, all events, and all circumstances of things and events perfectly and immediately in his timeless eternity. So just to repeat that one more time, because that was a lot, it's the attribute of God by which God knows all things, all events, and all circumstances of things and events perfectly and immediately in his timeless eternity.

So basically God knows all things and he knows all things in an immediate sense. It's not like God knows all things, but his knowledge of those things is sort of unfolding, like he has access to all knowledge and he learns it over time.

No, he just knows all things in an immediate and perfect sense. So God's knowledge of all things, there are certain traits that this knowledge that he has possesses. So God's knowledge of all things is absolutely true in all it perceives because it is all-encompassing, complete, and without defect.

God's knowledge is absolutely clear because it lacks no detail, either concerning things possible or things actual, things to be or things to come. All possible things and worlds are entirely and perfectly clear to God.

God's knowledge is absolutely simultaneous because God, who is eternal, is free from temporal succession, not only in being, but also in knowing. And therefore he knows all things at once, which includes the order and temporal succession of all things.

So when I say like temporal succession, there's a difference between like a logical succession and a temporal succession. So for example, logical succession, we would say that regeneration precedes faith when in reality, it's not like first you're regenerated and then you have faith, but those things are more like simultaneous.

They almost seem to happen at the same time, like when you have faith, you're regenerated. But in like the logical ordering of things, because regeneration gives you the supernatural virtues, one of which being the supernatural gift of faith, it thus precedes in a logical sense.

And so when I say a temporal succession, I mean that God doesn't sit there and go, huh, this happened, therefore this happened. Oh, that's how I know that. No, God is free from knowledge that he gains by a temporal succession because it's simultaneous knowledge.

And that leads into the other attribute or not attribute, the other like traits of God's knowledge is that it is immediate because it knows things by immediate apprehensions rather than by discourse or demonstration.

So like I just said, God doesn't have to look at how things play out and then he knows, God simply immediately knows. Something important to note about speaking about divine knowledge essentially is that when we speak about divine knowledge, scripture speaks of its vastness, its extent to all things and its freedom from all deceptions essentially.

And so there's like a lot of different places you can go to in scripture to learn about divine knowledge. So this is a little bit different than divine simplicity and that divine simplicity, there's not gonna be like, you sort of, you get to divine simplicity by good and necessary consequences of how God reveals himself and who he is.

And things like that.

It's not as explicitly, there's not a verse that says, God is simple necessarily. And the same way there's not a verse that says, God is a Trinity, you put it together by good and necessary consequences.

Omniscience is a bit different. You can kind of go to very clear verses which talk about that. Like Job 28, 24, 1 Samuel 2, 3, 1 Samuel 16, 7, 1 Kings 8, 39, Psalm 94, 9, Psalm 94, 11, Psalm 139 verses one through six, which is what I just read.

Matthew 7, 23, Acts 15, 18. There's a lot of places. I'll just say one more. 1 John 3, 20. So if you're ever rewatching this, you wanna do a little study on omniscience, go to those verses. But all that to say, just to end, one of our attributes that we covered a few weeks back was that God is a spirit.

And not only that, but God is infinite. God is an infinite spirit. So God, the attribute of divine omniscience is actually directly tied with his nature as an infinite spirit. Because God is infinite, because he's an infinite spirit, his understanding must also be infinite.

And if his understanding is infinite, it must be able to contain all things. In order to contain all things, he must know all things via immediate perception. So that's part of something I love doing about these divine attributes is just seeing how all of them connect with one another and how all of them, because all that is in God is God, they all are coterminous with the divine essence.

But it's really neat to see how some, based off our human perception, connect and are so obvious. When you grant one attribute to God, this other attribute must necessarily follow. And we see that with God being an infinite spirit.

So that is divine omniscience in a nutshell. Thank you, Richard Muller, for helping me out with that.

Yeah, thanks, Richard. So back to the question of Christ. And I mean, the way I reconcile that is Christ grew in wisdom and stature. And that was not in his capacity as the second person of the Trinity, but in his capacity as someone who is the Jesus, the God-man, the incarnate Son of God who lived, who gave up temporarily, put on hold in his earthly identity, those certain traits that he still kept, that are still part of the second person of the Trinity, but they, and this is the mystery of the, of course, the hypostatic union, but these are attributes that he could honestly tell his disciples, I am, I do not know the day or the hour, but he wasn't making a statement about his role in the Godhead.

His capacity is as the second person of the Trinity. So the rest has to be given up to mystery. And that's the whole mystery of the hypostatic union. And of course, the Trinity is also mysterious in some ways too.

So it is, it does not necessarily have to be, you know, how do you figure Christ being an infant? I mean, wouldn't he have been limited? How does he grow in wisdom?

That's what I was just thinking about. Because when you read through the gospel of Luke, there's numerous instances where it speaks of Christ growing in wisdom and knowledge. And one of the Cappadocians, one of the Gregory Cappadocians, I can't remember if it's Nazienzus or Nyssa, someone in chat may know, but one of them basically says that Christ assumed all things in order to redeem all things.

So Christ had to take on a human mind in order to redeem our minds, because our minds are also fallen into sin. We have sinful inclinations. We have concupiscence. We have all these things that impact our mind.

There are bodily things that we do, which are sinful, but those proceed from the mind, which informs what our body does. And so in order to redeem all things, Christ, through his incarnation, has to assume all things and live a perfect life.

And part of that is growing in wisdom and knowledge of things. And so part of that is also could have like a temporary, like, I don't want to fall into some sort of heresy by accidentally saying the wrong thing, but you do need to affirm that Christ did grow in wisdom and stature, and he assumes all things to redeem all things.

And thus there's a sense in which, for our sake, he learned. For our sake, there were things he didn't know, which he then received knowledge of.

And so, yeah,.

That's kind of how I would take that passage as well.

Yeah.

Yeah, there's a number of issues like that. You know, how could Christ be tested in all points, and yet God's not tempted? And how could, right, there are these things that take place in the incarnation of Christ that are different than the way that the second person of the Trinity operated for eternity past.

Certainly, yes.

So, all right. So all that to say, now that everyone's been deeply drinking from some good theology here, let's move this into the incarnation itself and the celebration of Christmas. And I'm assuming, Matthew, you celebrated this holiday, even though you haven't done Kwanzaa or Hanukkah.

I'm assuming you celebrated Christmas.

No, believe it or not, I have never celebrated Kwanzaa. I've never partook in Hanukkah, even when I went through like a little stupid messianic Jewish phase in middle school, but never got to

You've got a lot of phases. I always find out about these on the podcast.

Yeah, yeah, no. One of my favorites was my King James only phase. That was fun. But no, I never celebrated Hanukkah, but yes, I do partake in Christmas. One of my favorite holidays, I think it's just the season, because look, I live in Florida, and Florida's hot.

And there's only a very brief stint of time where it actually gets a little chilly. And because of that, it feels like a special occasion, because even after winter months, it doesn't like stay that chilly for long.

And so I always just, I feel cold in the air and I'm in the swamps and it feels cold. And I'm like, wow, Christmas must be coming up. Jesus is born. So yes, Christmas is great.

Yeah, it reminds me of Kenny Chesney's, all I want for Christmas is a real good tan.

So true.

Probably before you were born, before you were born.

I need a tan, I'm looking pasty.

I mean, today it was like 55 degrees, which is crazy. It snowed the day before. So it's like, the weather's a little erratic, but usually Christmas, it's like in the 30s, at least. It's probably falling into 20s at night.

It's supposed to be in the 30s coming up soon, like the week of the 20th.

Oh.

Yeah.

In Florida?

In Florida, yes. So that's going to be pretty wild. It hasn't, in like the central Florida to Tampa area, it hasn't snowed since 1977. So we'll see what happens. I don't think we're expecting snow, but that would be pretty wild if it did happen.

Interesting, 77, that was the same year we had this huge blizzard in New York. So anyway, all right. Well, whenever you talk about this, it's like when you talk about the Lord's day, there's always that person in your comments, who's like, Constantine set that up and you're worshiping a demonic day.

I don't know if you've seen those comments.

I see.

Oh, I have.

I usually chuckle and I don't even engage, but Christmas is kind of like that. You're going to have, I don't know how big of a group it is, but there are Christians who do not celebrate it. And I bet some of them, some of them have reversed course on that.

They used to be in that. Oftentimes it seems to, I don't know if you've noticed this, it goes along with like, usually they're reformed. Usually they're very influenced by the Puritans. There's probably some family integration at work and just a Sabbatarian.

So like, there's a bunch of things that usually go together when someone says that they're not going to celebrate Christmas. But I think, primarily it's in our circles, at least, that's something, because we're not Jehovah's witness.

They don't celebrate that either, or birthdays or any holiday. But I think in our circles, it's primarily like a Puritan type influence. And my understanding of that history is that it was more of the things associated with the Christmas celebration that Puritans objected to in New England, that they thought that this was an opportunity for debauchery and in England, there had been a corruption of the celebration.

And so they just decided to eradicate the whole thing. We're not going to do it. I haven't dug deeply into that. Maybe you've dug deeper than I have. But as far as I know, that was the main motivation behind, we're not going to celebrate this because it becomes a drunken brawl.

I'm glad we're past that. I don't want to cancel Christmas. I want to celebrate Christmas. But there are Christians who still won't participate. And sometimes that level of non-participation could be something like, they will set aside the day, but they will not do a Christmas tree.

I don't know if you've ever met families like that, but I've known some. They'll say it's part of Saturnalia or something, and they will bring in a manger scene instead or do something else. And this strikes me as, it's like you watch the fringe kind of joke of a atheist video online that tells you that everything in our Christian religion came from a pagan source.

And then you just believe it. And then you try to cut it out. I think that's where, I mean, I know that that makes me probably sound condescending, but I really do think that's probably what's at play more than anything else.

Because the Christmas tree developed in Germany in the 1600s. One legend attributes it to Martin Luther himself, that he brought it in to his house, a tree, and he had admired it as he was walking and saw stars through it, and thought this was a good reminder.

That's why you put a star at the top of the, the star that led the wise men or the shepherds and the wise men, I'm sorry, to see Christ. And so it then was Queen Victoria, who I believe had German ancestry, who brought it into the English speaking world.

And that was in the 19th century. So it's fairly new, I suppose you could say. It's not, it doesn't go back to 1000 or 2000 years, but you have to stretch to try to say it's part of Saturnalia or some pagan festival.

Cause trees have been used in lots of pagan festivals. Like it's not uniquely, but the Christmas tree, the one that we know that we decorate and stuff, that is unique to Christmas, right? This wasn't an ashtraw pole, which is what I've heard some Christians say.

It's ridiculous. So that's my rant at first. I have a Christmas tree, cost me way too much, but I do have one in my, it's a real live one. We decorate it, we feel no guilt about it. And I hope my children continue to practice.

So we, my apartment, we have a little Christmas tree out there. My roommates, I live with a good friend of mine, his wife and their one-year-old daughter. And so my, like a week and a half ago, my girlfriend and his wife decorated a little, a cute little Christmas tree out there, rearranged the room a little bit.

So it's nice, but yeah, I guess something important before we really get into it is I'd say that there's two types of people that don't celebrate Christmas. And I think that one of them is, despite my disagreement is like, I can respect their reasoning more than others.

So the first type is like what you said, where they think it's pagan. They think it came from pagan practices or whatever. And I think that's just historically very inaccurate. And if you wanna get good resources on that, the Apologetics YouTube channel, Inspiring Philosophy, he has a pretty old series on debunking like myths about holidays and things like that, where he looks into the claims about like pagan origins and demonstrates why those are false.

So that's like the first group that you have. The second group that you have will largely be reformed people, because believe it or not, I say this as a Presbyterian who does like Christmas, I do deviate from the historic norm here in that Presbyterians, Scottish, English, whatever ones you wanna talk about, did not celebrate Christmas.

When you look at the Westminster directory, they discouraged the celebration of these feast days actually. And now that's not to say that the reformed never celebrated Christmas. When you look at like the more like Dutch reformed and the continental reformed as a whole, they are okay with evangelical feast days, which would include Christmas and Easter, but at least among like the Presbyterian tradition, especially in Scotland, they would not celebrate those holidays.

And part of that was this theological understanding of the regulative principle of worship that whatever God does not command is not to be practiced. And because God has only instituted one holy day under the new covenant, that being the Lord's day, that is the only day to be celebrated.

So I think it's important when we, we probably won't even be tackling those points a lot. And this is, it'll probably be more inclined towards the former than the latter grill.

We have like nine points to go over. I think that actually is one of them.

Oh, really?

Yeah, it's

Exposing that I haven't even read the article. Yeah, I'm a terrible podcast host, but no, no, no. But yeah, no. So like, that is a respectable position, which I do respect despite my disagreement, but I think it's important that we're able to differentiate that one group is a little crazier than the other.

That's what I would say, but I guess some of the more, yeah.

I went into a, I wouldn't recommend this, but I went into a pagan witchcraft shop years ago to share the gospel, of course. Oh, good, good. Yeah, no, it wasn't, I wasn't doing it. I wasn't up to any funny business.

Wait, John, you're woke, right? Woke, right? Don't share the gospel.

That's right, right. Yeah, we just believe in using the sword to spread Christianity and the force of the government. And that's it. We don't, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's what a Christian is, right? So anyway, we should, we should get off this.

Oh, Christmas. So we went in and my friend wanted to witness. He said, they need the Christ more than anyone else. I said, sure, let's, probably not a wise thing to do. I'm not recommending it, but we did at this time, this was over a decade ago, we went in.

And I remember the folks behind the counter, there's a guy behind the counter, he got so nervous. And then he called, he couldn't even talk to us. He was stuttering so bad. And it was after we told him we were Christians.

I mean, he just lost it. He couldn't even communicate. So he goes in the back, finds this witch to come out. And I say that not in a condescending way. She actually would have told you she's a witch and she came out.

And she, you know what her whole argument was? The whole thing, the entire disagreement between us in her mind came down to this. Her religion was older than ours. Satan was misunderstood. It was like everything in our religion was sourced in some kind of pagan tradition because Christianity is only 2000 years old in her mind.

And the Yule log, Yule was the, and Saturnalia were the Christmas holidays, but we just stole from them. We ripped off everything from paganism. And so we're not authentic. That was the whole entire argument, which I thought was interesting.

Like she didn't have any compelling reason for us to believe in paganism, other than like, you guys ripped us off. That's what, and at the time, I didn't really know a lot about those things. I just thought it was a dumb argument in general.

That doesn't really get to the, it's just a misunderstanding. Like our religion didn't start 2000 years ago. It's, we believe that it started on day one. It was what God instituted from the beginning.

So anyway, I just wanted to tell that story because I think it's floating around out there. A lot of people are persuaded by that. They think, you know, Yule was a celebration in I think Germany that, you know, predated Christmas, I guess, or at least the Christianization of Germany.

And there's a lot of these harvest type of festivals and in the pagan world and stuff. But, you know, what did we, what did we gain from Yule? What did we gain from, I guess, you know, we have a Yule log maybe on like, nothing really that significant.

The main things that we celebrate and used to celebrate Christmas, and I'm not talking about just the season. I'm talking about the day, Christmas, are unique to Christianity. Christmas is a Christian holiday.

Even the date of the 25th, which he was trying to tell me is some, I don't know if it's Horace or some God, you know. That was something from the early church period that people like John Chrysostom and Augustine, Jerome, they all said that was the day, December 25th.

This isn't something that we stole from a pagan source. This was something from the beginning, from very early period that Christians said, this is the day that Christ was born. So anyway, I want to say that.

Why the Church May Teach Christmas

All right, well, let's get to the article and we'll talk about it some. So if you go to truescript .com, you can check it out and follow along with us. Nine reasons to celebrate Christmas. All right, reason one, it's the church's responsibility.

The church has been given, oh, I should say who this is written by. Joseph Spurgeon wrote this. So this is the Spurgeon official view, Spurgeon's view on this.

I think I can say that.

Charles Spurgeon.

Well, it's Joseph.

Not that one though, not that one.

He is related. So even though he's, this is a funny thing because he's Presbyterian and he's related to Joseph, Charles Spurgeon.

Good, he perfected that which was lacking. That's great.

Well, my name is not Knox, you know, but I am a direct descendant of John Knox, even though I'm a, I'm baptistic. So it's

You need to return.

I, well, I told him he should thank me, but he said he, I should thank him. So whatever. So the church has been given the responsibility to teach that all that Christ commands, the church must teach the whole counsel of God.

Seeing how this is impossible to do all at one time, the church also has the authority to decide what parts of scripture and where those parts may be taught. Reform Christians practice this weekly as elders decide what will be preached.

There is no biblical reason why the church should be forbidden to teach a certain truth at the same time of year. And so this is falls under the authority and prudence of the church according to this first point.

So it's not really a positive, I would say argument, but it's more of like a defensive, like you can't say that this is wrong. There's nothing in scripture that would tell you it's wrong, I guess, unless you hold to a regular principle, right?

Well, even then it would get to, it would fall under like, what is the ministerial authority of the church? So the church does, because sometimes as Protestants, we can be a little bit weary about talking about church authority because you want to make sure that scripture alone is the only formally a material infallible, like, you know,.

Authority.

And so, but what you have to understand is that, no, God is still giving the church a ministerial authority for the purpose of proclaiming the faith. That's why we have the Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Athanasian Creed, the Chalcedonian definition.

That's why we have confessions of faith because the church is building on the rule of faith, which they have received in the apostolic deposit, which summarizes what scripture teaches. And so I think that just kind of off the dome here, I don't think that it would necessarily fall outside of the bounds of the church's ministerial authority to say, let's use this time to celebrate.

Now that would come into another discussion. It's like, oh, are you in sin if you don't celebrate it? That's where things get a little more dicey where we'd probably say, no, it wouldn't be sinful to abstain from that unless you're coming from a more Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox perspective or any of the other churches of like the first millennium.

But yeah, no, so I totally would think that it's within the church's ministerial bounds to be able to say, let's focus in on this today or during this period of time.

The second point is basically the same thing. It says you have the freedom to gather because look, churches will have Wednesday night meetings. They'll do things outside the Lord's day. So why not also gather during Christmas or Christmas Eve is what my church does.

I would say that's the same argument. It's just that, you know, there's nothing prohibiting you from doing this. Times of Thanksgiving and fasting. So this is kind of similar too, but it just wants to make the point that the Westminster Confession of Faith says that days of fasting or Thanksgiving are permitted.

One of the proof texts was the celebration of Purim, a feast created by Mordecai after the Jews were delivered from their enemies in the Book of Esther. This was not part of the feast and festivals given in the law through Moses.

There's no description of Mordecai being told directly by God to establish this feast. That's actually a good argument. I never thought of that. So, I mean, this says that you can go outside the days that God specifically has ordained to worship God on another day if you choose to do so.

Yeah.

And he talks about, let's see. We have an example of a non-law yearly celebration that finds its origin not in scripture, but it was celebrated in the time of Christ, John 10, 22 through 23. At that time, the feast of dedication took place at Jerusalem.

It was winter and Jesus was walking in the temple at the portico of Solomon. And so this was, I think this is Hanukkah is what they're describing here, I guess. Hanukkah was created in response to events that happened during the intertestamental period.