Somewhere last night, in synagogues across Michigan and around the world, a man lifted a curved ram's horn to his lips and blew. Rosh Hashanah began at sundown on Friday, and the headlines have been calling it what it is — a threshold, the turning of a year. It isn't our holiday. But it is our Bible.
“Speak unto the children of Israel, saying, In the seventh month, in the first day of the month, shall ye have a sabbath, a memorial of blowing of trumpets, an holy convocation” (Leviticus 23:24). God set a day on the calendar and told His people to make a noise on it. Not a song. A blast.
A sound that interrupts
If you have ever heard a shofar, you know it isn't pretty. It doesn't blend. It has no accompaniment and no polish, and it is nothing like the music we cue up on the drive to work. It is a sound designed to stop a conversation mid-sentence.
That is the point. Before God gave Israel a sermon, He gave them a summons. Before He asked them to think, He asked them to look up. And I notice that God, who could have chosen anything, chose a sound that cannot be background noise.
Most of us are not short on input. We are short on interruption. We can go weeks with the radio on, the feed scrolling, the group chat buzzing, and never once have our attention arrested by anything larger than our own schedule. The horn is God's mercy to people like us.
Blessed are the people who know the joyful sound
Here is the verse I keep returning to this weekend: “Blessed is the people that know the joyful sound: they shall walk, O LORD, in the light of thy countenance” (Psalm 89:15).
Notice what the psalm blesses. Not the people who make the sound. Not the priest with the horn. The people who know it — who have heard it often enough to recognize it, who don't mistake it for something else, who hear it and turn toward the light of God's face instead of away.
That is a learnable thing. Knowing God's voice is not a personality type or a spiritual pay grade; it is what happens to people who keep showing up where He speaks. The teenager who has been praying six weeks and the grandmother who has been praying sixty are both learning the same skill: that's Him. I know that sound.
And He still makes it. I watch it happen at our Tuesday morning prayer, when somebody arrives carrying a week they couldn't fix and leaves with a settled heart they can't explain. The Holy Spirit has not gone quiet. He interrupts people — gently, usually, but unmistakably. A verse lands. A name comes to mind and won't leave. A burden lifts in the middle of a worship song. That is a trumpet too.
Ten days, and a table
In the biblical calendar, the trumpet blast opened ten days that led to the Day of Atonement — the one day a year the high priest went behind the veil with blood, on behalf of a whole nation, to deal with what the people could not deal with themselves.
That ancient rhythm lands close to home this month. Our Communion Sunday, September 20, sits right at the close of those ten days. I don't think that's an accident worth ignoring. When we take the bread and the cup that morning, we will be doing what Israel's calendar was always pointing toward: “Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us” (Hebrews 9:12).
Once. Not annually. The horn sounded, the year turned, the priest went in — and then, in the fullness of time, a better Priest went in and did not need to come back out and do it again next fall.
If the horn sounds like nothing to you
Maybe this past year cost you more than you expected, and talk of fresh starts feels thin. You prayed, and the answer hasn't come. You showed up, and you didn't feel a thing. Hear me: the blessing in Psalm 89 is not on people with goosebumps. It is on people who know the sound — and sometimes knowing the sound simply means you keep facing the direction it came from.
God is not waiting for you to feel the year turn. He is the one who turns it. The trumpet was never asking you to produce something. It was telling you, loudly and without apology, that the God of Israel is awake, He is near, and He has already made a way in through the blood of His Son.
Lift your head. That sound is for you.
Join us this Sunday at 10:30am — Outpouring Worship Center, Ravenna.