Trumpets Pastor Jerry Gillis – May 21, 2017

Feast on Jesus (Part 5) – Trumpets Pastor Jerry Gillis – May 21, 2017 So when I'm studying for a message I usually do so in absolute dead silence. Occasionally, I will play a little bit of instrumental music of whatever you know, I decide to listen to, occasionally, when I'm preparing. Some of you, you know, I watch my kids, they have their stuff in and they can be rocking out whatever while they're doing homework and I'm like, I can't do that. Some of you can, that's awesome. You're weird. I can't do that. But occasionally I will put on something that's instrumental. And so I have this song on my phone that I was actually listening to while I was working on this message. Again, it's instrumental, but it's by a guy named Miles Davis, the title of the song is So What. And it's from an album from 1959 called "Kind of Blue" and it's not all that listen tom but I was listening to that. And it you know who Miles Davis is, Miles Davis is revered as one of the great trumpet jazz players of all time. And the thing about Miles Davis' music is it's very complex. He's very complex. Those that know music know that. I'm not one of those people, but I know how complex his music can be, kind of from a jazz prospective. But what I remember people saying about Miles Davis was that every note he plays has intention. Every note he plays matters. They're not throw- aways, he knows what he's doing. And even if it's confusing at times to the listener, he knows what he's doing. And so kind of the advice to the listener is just trust him. Sit back and listen to him play and just trust him, right? Well, in some way I feel a little bit like that in this message series where even if we don't fully understand every note that God is playing through these Feasts that are trying to help us see Jesus more clearly, we can just sit back and trust the Lord that He knows exactly what He's doing and when He's doing it. And I really feel that way as well about the message that I want to talk to you about today, because what we're studying today is one of the Feasts of the Lord that God has designed, He has ordained for this to be a Feast of the Lord. Yet there's just not much said about it that you kind of go, okay, you read it and you go, okay, but there's not much said about it. So we have to dig a little bit and start to understand what the notes actually mean, what they sound like. So, I'm going to point you to Leviticus chapter 23, because that's where we've been looking at how God chronicles these various feasts that we're talking about. And today I want to mention something about the feast that we call the Feast of Trumpets. And here's what it says in Leviticus chapter 23. It says: "The Lord said to Moses, 'Say to the Israelites: 'On the First day of the seventh month you are to have a day of Sabbath rest, a sacred assembly commemorated with trumpet blasts. Do no regular work, but present a food offering to the Lord.'" Okay, so that's what we have in Leviticus chapter 23. In Numbers 29, we also read about this Feast and here's what it says: "On the first day of the seventh month hold a sacred assembly and do no regular work. It is a day for you to sound the trumpets." There you have it. Let's pray, you're dismissed. Go in peace. So, you've got these two passages of Scripture. And there some ancillary facts around particular types of offerings that are supposed to be given as well that are common to the sacrificial offering system. But generally speaking you've got this day to kind of set aside that we call the Feast of Trumpets. Now it has some other names that you may or you may not be familiar with. There's a name in the Hebrew, it's called Yom Teruah, which simply means the Day of Blowing or the Day of Shouting. That's what the idea is, right, because it's the Feast of Trumpets. We call it the Feast of Trumpets. But the Jewish people began to adopt a different name for this much later on, much, much later on after the time of the initiation of this Feast. And now today the term they use around this Feast-time is Rosh Hashanna, so maybe you've heard of that. But Rosh Hashanna actually means, in the Hebrew language it means the head of the year. Here's why. Because this day, the first day of the seventh month actually is the beginning of the Jewish Civil Calendar. It's not the beginning, and this gets confusing, it's not the beginning of the Jewish Holy Calendar because that begins in the first month. But it is the beginning of the Jewish Civil Year during that time, which is why it's called Rosh Hashanna. It's also the time where the Jewish people, as a whole celebrate what they believe to have been the creation of the world on that particular day. That they believe that the first day of the seventh month, what we call you know, modern people kind of call Rosh Hashanna is a celebration of the day that creation was born. When everything was made. Now the Scripture doesn't say that explicitly, this kind of came through Rabbis in terms of their interpretation and what they believed that they were celebrating during that time, but that's what it's come to be known as. So you've got the Feast of Trumpets, Yom Teruah, the Day of Blowing or the Day of Shouting, or Rosh Hashanna is some of the ways that this particular feast is known. Now what's obvious about this feast is obvious to all of us. It involves trumpet playing, right? That's kind of what's so obvious about it, we call it the Feast of Trumpets and it's like hey, set aside this day, and on this day do no work and blow trumpets. That summarizes it, right? So that's the most obvious thing that we see about the idea of kind of having the blowing of the trumpets. Now in modern Judaism, those that kind of like if you went into Israel and found some of the orthodox people who were embracing this particular day on the Feast of Trumpets, most of them would blow one hundred sounds on this particular day in the trumpet. A hundred sounds. Every one of those sounds actually has meaning. And in kind of the blowing of the trumpet, there are like four different, I'm not going to chronicle those for all of us, but there are at least four different types of sounds. Like you can have kind of a long pause, then long pause, then long pause, that's one type of blowing. Then there's the kind of short burst blowing. Then there's the staccato blowing. Then there's the long held out sound at the very end, right? So you've got kind of what is the first trumpet in all of that, and then you've got kind of the last trumpet call at the end, and that's the long sustained blowing at the very end. So you've got all of that in terms of what happens with the trumpet, but all of those sounds actually mean something. And the trumpet is chronicled in Scripture in a number of different ways with a number of different meanings. I'm not going to go into all of those because that would take up all of our time trying to figure that out. I just want to point out some things that are what I would say are pertinent to the Trumpet Feast that we're talking about here in terms of what trumpets mean and what trumpets do. I'm going to just chronicle about four of those for us. And maybe we'll begin to see some resonance as to why these things kind of have relevance for what we're talking about. Here's the first thing relative to trumpets. What they do is they help us to remember the provision for Isaac. Now some of you are going, okay, that feels random. You just threw that out of the middle of nowhere. Like what are you talking about, trumpets make us remember the provision of Isaac. Well, I've got something that I want to show you here, you were wondering what this was sitting up here anyway. It is not the kind of trumpet that you might be thinking that it is, but it is the kind of trumpet that the Feast of Trumpets utilizes. This is called a shofar. Some of you know what it means. Have you ever heard what it sounds like? Cool. I'm not playing it. There's no way that I'm playing this. You have to actually know what you're doing, because if I do it it sounds like a dead elk, right? I mean it's like, not good.

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