What Is the Feast of Dedication?
Bible Study Guide
(Verses 22-24) The scene is winter in the temple courts. Jesus is recorded teaching among the crowds during the Feast of Dedication. This feast is also known as the Festival of Lights. It’s more popular name is Hanukkah.
This is not one of the seven feasts appointed by God and given to the Israelites in the Old Testament. This feast was created as a dedication feast in remembrance of the Maccabean Revolt.
After the last of God’s words came through the last Old Testament prophet, Malachi, and the 400 year Intertestamental Period had begun, the events of the Maccabean Revolt occurred.
During this time, the words of God spoken to Daniel over a hundred years prior about the Greek Empire and Alexander the Great were playing out in the Middle East. The death of Alexander the Great gave rise to four kingdoms under his four generals. Eventually, one of those kingdoms, Seleucid’s, took control of Israel under the pagan king Antiochus Epiphanes.
Antiochus took control of Israel and ended all Jewish worship and sacrifice in the temple in Jerusalem. There he began to worship idols and made pagan sacrifices. Antiochus was a wicked king who was a foreshadowing of the antichrist who is to come during the tribulation. The antichrist will do in the newly built temple in Jerusalem that same thing, but with greater evil than Antiochus did.
Eventually, Judas Maccabeus led a revolt with other Jews through guerrilla warfare. They overpowered the Seleucid’s and took back the temple. The Jews then led a rededication ceremony of the temple and all the Jewish worshiping traditions.
This revolt and recapturing of the temple has lead to the annual celebration of the Feast of Dedication. A time meant to celebrate and remember the rededication of the temple.
Teaching at the Feast of Dedication
(Verses 25-29) Jesus reminds the unbelievers that they are not among His sheep who can hear His voice (the voice full of truth and grace).
To those who hear the voice of their Shepherd, Jesus offers three phrases of powerful encouragement.
- I give them eternal life.
- They shall never perish.
- No one will snatch them out of my hand.
What amazing words of encouragement that Christians can embrace on their daily walk with Christ.
Jesus introduces the doctrine of “once saved, always saved.” In this passage and throughout the gospel, it’s made clear that once a person is saved and justified by God, that person will never fall out of the embrace of God.
There is much debate about this topic. Unfortunately, the debate’s focus is on the wrong area. Instead of looking at whether a person is saved eternally or not, it should focus on whether the person in question of their salvation was ever saved in the first place.
At this point, it becomes mute because the one and only one that can justify our salvation is God.
“And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.” (Romans 8:30)
If Christ says that no one will snatch the true believers out of His hand, than it means exactly that. Once you’re justified as a true believer, you will be never taken from the hand of God.
Imagine for a moment if the hapless bumbling’s of mankind and our flirtation with sin could override the power of God’s salvation to bring sinner’s to Him. It just isn’t so. Once saved, always saved.
“But that is not the way you learned Christ!— assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.” (Ephesians 4:20-24)
To say that one can fall from the power of salvation is to say that the power of salvation is not strong enough to save them. These are those that are easily led by religion and the repeating of rituals and sacrifices and required acts of work they believe they need to be saved.
Those who believe they have fallen away from salvation were never saved in the first place.
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