Why we don’t celebrate Christmas

Directly from the section in Ephesians where apostle Paul exhorts us to Walk in Light even as He is Light and in the Light we read:

8 For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light 9 (for the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness, righteousness, and truth), 10 finding out what is acceptable to the Lord. 11 And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them. 12 For it is shameful even to speak of those things which are done by them in secret. 13 But all things that are exposed are made manifest by the light, for whatever makes manifest is light.14 Therefore He says:

​​“Awake, you who sleep,

​​Arise from the dead,

​​And Christ will give you light.”

Compare to these words of our Lord during the feast of Lights in Jerusalem in John 7:37-38 which truly was the time of winter, Jesus cried out and said, Come to Me, not a baby anymore, now the Light spoken into the world, receive this invitation as though Christ Y’shua was speaking to right now:

37 On the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink. 38 He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.”

---

For years our large family, like most others in our country, has enjoyed the pleasure of celebrating the year-end holiday we call Christmas, which actually stands for Christ – MASS.

Ostensibly this particular day and its beautiful celebrations represent something very good, the birth of Y’shua in Bethlehem 2000 years ago.

One could not hear a professionally performed rendition of Handel’s Messiah and not be touched at the heart level by the sheer magnitude and glory of God coming down to dwell with the sons of men when the chorus sings the Halleluiah chorus. Sung with the sounds of a perfectly presented crescendo, a human being with any emotional sensitivity would naturally feel a presence of something way beyond the music and one could say within his heart, this has to be good and this has to be God.

I’m not going to attempt again to parse the soul, spirit, and the mind today, all I seek to do here is lay the groundwork of what I believe to be a word from Our Father for our times, 2013 and beyond.

So I have felt what you have felt when Christmas celebrations bring Christ’s birth into full view in a song or in a concert performance, as in the case of hearing a perfect rendition of Handel’s Messiah, which adequately present an amazing baby in a manger as Emmanuel – “God with us”.

Hearing those perfectly played notes of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra set in the perfectly unbelievable acoustics of Fisher Hall in NYC, add to this positivity the connection made with the sacred words of scripture blended harmoniously together to make us feel that our overly commercialized and very materialistic Christmas season somewhat redeemable.

---

When the Lord called me to be His servant September 2002 I had no real sensitivity to the nature and the historical meaning of a December 25th celebration that marks the culture of our land.

In spite of my ignorance on or about 7 years ago I started to question the merit of celebrating Christmas on December 25th simply because I found out that our Lord Y’shua was not born on December 25th.

Having been raised in a church which celebrated Christmas with a modicum of holiday decorations even though some of the people in the church would not have a Christmas tree in their home for reasons of conscience. When the knowledge of their dissent came to my attention I would ask my parents why people don't believe in having a Christmas tree in their home, they just said they were being hyper-spiritual and needed to relax a little. 


Some sermons were even preached on the topic of the Christmas tree and used the doctrine of Christian Liberty to bring unity to the local fellowship.

---

My parents chose to ignore the tradition of the Puritans 200 years earlier in our nation’s history that made it illegal to celebrate Christmas; the Puritans prohibited Christians from Christmas celebrations because of the pagan practices of rape, murder, and thousands upon thousands of human sacrifices associated with the December 25th celebration in ancient Rome and the European nations. Many of our forefathers had to hide their Christmas celebrations from the church so they would not be excommunicated from the church fellowship.

All you have to do in the information age we live in today is to make the simple attempt to type, "origin of the christmas tree", into your google search bar and read.

After you spend a few days plowing through the muck and mire of the terrible origins of the Christmas tree and the evil works done in the ancient celebration of Christmas you might also take the time to study the Roman tradition of mistreating and even killing observant Jews in their cities during and after the time of Constantine during the Christ-Mass celebration as well as on the New Year celebration of the god - Janus.

The Roman Catholic Christians justified their evil behavior because after all the Jews killed Jesus and therefore they had to be eliminated. Jesus was born to replace the Jewish religion with a new unifying religion created by the Roman empire and bought and paid for Roman and Greek theologians. Therefore the Jews and their religion of the past must die; the Jews must die and their memory must be forever removed from history as a people group. 

The birth of Jesus to Romanized Christian meant the end of Judaism forever, and to the observant Jew still waiting for the Messiah, what a terrible predicament, for many of our ancestors this meant they would be forced to convert to Christianity in order to survive.  

So the seed of the northern tribes would be further spread to the uttermost parts of the world. All to the glory of God.  

Ponder that thought for a moment.

Nothing could be more anti-bible and out of step with God’s love and message than this evil way of thinking. When did Jesus command us to use politics or the sword to spread His Message? He gave us words and a mission statement and the company of the Precious Holy Spirit and that's it.

I simply ask the question to you and to myself, “how will we ever win a Jew to Y’shua, their King, if we continue to celebrate a holiday that brought so much mayhem, death, and pain to so many of their ancestors”?

The council of Nicaea was formed to defend the doctrine of the Trinity supposedly but the council also agreed to remove all the Jewish celebrations from the Roman calendar.

After this august gathering of all the world renown christian theologians, world leaders and neo-politians, a law was levied on all the Romans citizens that prohibited the celebration of the three Jewish feasts of Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot and other days Jewish days of remembrance like Purim in December.

Think about that for moment.

The implication of this new law was that the feasts designed to point us to see the glory of Our Christ, shown in the luster of His glorious role as the Savior & Messiah of the Jews. So all the historical accounts of God's mighty arm saving His People from world leaders and bondage would be conveniently expunged from their and our yearly remembrance

So a new world order would now take over the calendar of the world, the bad memories of the parting of the Red Sea for Pharoah's army and the removal of Antiochus IV Epiphanes from the most sacred holy place in the Temple would simply be removed with a pen and some parchment from the conscious remembrance of subsequent generations of the nations and replaced with annual celebrations that point to the birth of another king, the ultimate anti-christ king - Beelzebub.
 

Since the days of Babel the people of this world have chased after their own king to push back the holy presence of God Almighty and replace with something that fits our wants and desires - self government.

---

What this means for God’s people today is that Our Lord's worship is wrongly connected with holidays that really don’t point to Him and His-Story but rather point to false messiahs and false worship of the current worldly empire of AntiChrist.

Five years ago I took a trip to Israel, during the time of the New Year. It was winter in Israel so in the area surrounding the birthplace of Our Lord today is mostly market places for the tourists with but just a few fragments of the agricultural aspects of the origins of Bethlehem as it would have been 2000 years ago. What I realized is that in December in Bethlehem the nights were cold so we did not see sheep grazing in the fields at night.

The hot summer days grant the cool night air to provide comfort for the consumption of luscious green grass with added pleasure of the night's dew meets the requirements of shepherds and parched sheep makes grazing at night a much better proposition. A September night would far more suit the shepherds that would hear the chorus of heaven's angels singing their glorious announcement message.

All the evidence of scripture, modern science, computer modeling, and archaeology point to September 11th as the actual day of Christ’s birth, so why do we continue to falsely claim that Jesus (His German name) was born on December 25th?

What is going on here, why does our current band of scholars and modern day pastors continue to pull the wool over their own eyes and hide the truth from God’s people?

This question will bother you if you let it agitate in your heart for awhile. If you let this weird inconsistency eat at the foundation of your heart and faith in Your God and your longing for His glory; and this holy grieving will quite naturally, if you are born from above, lead you to repentance.  But If you still love the material world more than Our Lord's new world that is coming in, if you like Lot's wife look back at the stuff in Sodom, these thoughts on the facts of  our history will not move you.

Many of you will continue to hold onto the idolatry that happens over and over again during this holiday. And you will allow your children to play along with the story of Santa Claus and his flying reindeer. Why, I ask you... Why? 

Is it to serve the sentimentality of tradition that makes you happy? But remember this beloved treasure of sentimentality could come at the come of our souls.
 

The cost is the frown of the Father and the reduction of the Glory of Jesus in all that He is and will be in the Land. For one day we will save His People from their sins. Yes indeed, even the sin of submitting to worldly lies and false traditions. Do you remember Josiah's reformations. 

Josiah did not mince words and most certainly he didn't put worshiping Yahweh, the Baals, Ashtoreth, and Molech from the same mouth in the class of Christian Liberty.
 

Could it be that these celebrations we are so reluctant to leave in the dust that make up our history as a nation and are part of the past are one of the many onerous sins He will remove from the Body in order for His return to be accomplished in the earth?

Don’t move on so quickly, or open another browser window on your computer my overly sensitive Christian friend, let’s the facts of our bad history and let the Lord reveal to your heart what He thinks about these holidays.

Why not change to the Jewish feasts and the Jewish calendar as as our holiday calendar, why not make this requisite for the Body of Christ? These precious and very powerful rehearsals speak of His entire ministry in the earth, they speak more to our modern times than Christmas will ever speak to our neighbors. The feasts promote fellowship with our neighbors, they reach out to the poor, and they point to every aspect of His work in the earth. The feasts are beautiful rehearsals of future events that point to the Divine signs of our salvation.

Passover – Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. The great exodus from bondage in Egypt. Passing from death to life. (replaces Easter)

Shavuot – Feast of weeks, the in-gathering of the first barley harvest filled with leaven and unleavened bread, initiated by the out-poured Holy Spirit exactly 50 days after the celebration of Passover and the day of First-fruits. (replaces summer break celebrations of Memorial day and the 4th of July)

Sukkot – Represents the large fruit harvest, a double harvest, also the people of Israel were commanded to go out in the wilderness to gather in booths (teepees) to meet the Lord in His glorious return, the One who would sit on David’s Throne now is with us forever.  The Mount of Transfiguration was a prefiguring of this future event in the real place of the event. (is more like an addition of a new week of feasting) 

The sukkot feast points us to our Immanuel - God with Us - who forever will be with us verses a baby born to die in human flesh every year and His sacred blood is shed every year even though His Flesh body was buried in a tomb and was renewed forever a glorious Body that will be ours one day when He appears again in the clouds.

Compare, my dear Christian friends, the Sukkot celebration to our silly greco roman Christmas and Easter celebrations we hold on so tightly to today.

Compare these falsely identified holidays that point to Our Lord's earthly ministry to the actual celebration of Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot in September (Jewish calendar points this time as the birth of Creation and the Head of each year) the birth of the King of Glory. Which celebration is best suited to build up your most holy faith and get you more excited for heaven? 

A Christmas built around commercialism and material gain of more stuff that lasts a day or two or the week long celebration of Sukkot in September which is all about fellowship with God's people and is built around the long anticipated return of the Son of David, our Lord and Messiah, Y'shua?
 

What power, what glory, and what a rehearsal!

A great link that explains these things at greater detail.
 
Included in this feast is a full week of celebrating that which will come to earth in future. With so much singing, dancing, eating, and glorious mirth who in their right mind would turn down this kind of holiday celebration? 

A place where the celebrants offer real thanksgiving for the real in-gathered harvest that was preserved for the People of God. A harvest of souls that come out of the nations, those who were willing to come out of the whore of Babylon.

---

Do you think me a radical today my dear Christian friend? Are these words too hot to handle?

Would you do Your Lord a favor and ask Him to investigate your heart on the matter, in lieu of worry in these hard and uncertian days of end time prophesy fulfillment, why don't we replace these challenges with a challenge to ourselves to engage God and His Glory and ask Him to show us what He feels about these things?

Would you be willing to remove from your home any representation of the evil celebration of a re-killing of Our Lord Y’shua by the Romans?

The celebration of false deities?

Would you be willing to be called a scrooge on this fake day of Christ’s birth?

Will you be a man, woman, or child that is not afraid to be singled out as a radical believer in the Words of scripture and not the words of culture?

Oh that Our King would bring in a harvest of souls truly saved from this current debauchery.  Come Lord Y’’shua, even so come -- Y’shua.

A final word of consideration, how many conversions have you seen or witnessed during a Easter celebration (worship of the rebirth of the evil Nimrod out of an egg)?

How many kids got saved at a trunk or treat celebration in your church parking lot? 

How many dear people of God truly are saved at a Christmas cantata held in your building?

I ask you my fellow believer in the blood atonement of Y’shua, of what value is this holiday celebration? We might see more fruit in our modern day evangelism if we used Passover celebrations or Sukkot celebrations to reach our neighbors than the very limited power of the existing celebrations of Easter and Christmas.

Do we hold so tightly to these traditions for the Lord’s glory? Or could reaching our neighbors with the Gospel Message be accomplished in a better way? Or are we chained to this lie for sake of sentimentality and to accommodate the merchants that rule the world? 

We would rather use this time of year to celebrate each other, our health, God’s sustenance, and the joy of being together as a family and a week of NO SCHOOL.

May the Lord bless these words to your heart and your meditation today,

Jonathan David Keener