Happy New Year

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Are you kidding? It isn’t New Year. Well, maybe not, but September always feels like it to me. With a new school year, new church programs, etc, the lackadaisical summer has turned into a disciplined schedule. Nevertheless, September-October is the month Israel celebrates their civil New Year, called Rosh Hashanah. Israel’s New Year begins Wednesday, September 24, 2014, but for them, it’s the year 5775.

Rosh Hashanah or The Feast of Trumpets is one of the seven feasts the Lord instituted in Leviticus 23. The first feast, The Sabbath, is weekly. Three spring feasts are next, ushering in the religious New Year:  Passover/Unleavened Bread, The Feast of Firstfruits, The Feast of Weeks or Pentecost. Jesus Christ, in His first coming, spiritually fulfilled these three. The remaining three are fall feasts, ushering in the civil New Year:  The Feast of Trumpets, The Day of Atonement, and The Feast of Tabernacles are yet to be fulfilled. The gap of time between the spring feasts and the fall feasts represent this present church age. 

Into each feast, God built deep spiritual meaning and unless you know Jesus Christ as Messiah, you miss the fullness. This is where Israel is today. Some suggest this feast commemorates the day of creation and some feel it represents the binding and deliverance of Isaac.

Israel’s Feast explanations do have the feel of spirituality, but they remain empty and flawed without Christ.

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So let’s examine the deeper meaning of the Feast of Trumpets. It begins on the first day of the seventh month, the month of Tishri (Leviticus 23:24). On all other months when two witnesses spot the new moon, the celebratory silver trumpets are blown. However, the new moon of Tishri is different. The shofar (ram’s horn) is blown as a symbol of calling the hearers to the ten-day, soul-searching process of repentance, culminating with Israel’s national day of repentance, the Day of Atonement – Yom Kippur.

Because Rosh Hashanah begins with the blowing of trumpets, most pre-millennial commentators see it spiritually representing the rapture of the church or the “catching away” to meet Jesus in the air.

“Behold, I tell you a mystery:  We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed – in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.”(I Corinthians 15: 51-52)

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“For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord.” (I Thessalonians 4:16-17)

“After these things I looked, and behold, a door standing open in heaven. And the first voice which I heard was like a trumpet speaking with me, saying, ‘Come up here, and I will show you things which must take place after this’.” (Revelation 4:1)

Are there are scoffers? Of course, just as God said there would be (II Peter 3:3-4), but only because He is “longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.” (II Peter 3:9)

While we wait then, let’s conduct ourselves in holiness “…and godliness, looking for and hastening the coming of the day of God…” (II Peter 3:11-12). If we do, people will “see our good works and glorify…[our]…Father in heaven.” (Matthew 5:16).