Christian Holidays #11

One would presume that Christian people would like to know more about God. And yet there is a treasure trove in the Bible of which most Christian folk are blissfully unaware. In the first place, we don’t read our Bibles enough, and in the second place we dismiss parts of the Bible for one reason or another. Now I submit that, on the face of it, dismissing any part of the Bible is not a smart thing to do—for the Bible is the true record of the revelation of God to man. And if you want to know and understand God, the Bible is where you would expect to begin, right?

And in the Bible there is a thread that has been all but dismissed by most Christian people and it has been so for a very long time. That thread is a set of days that the Bible calls the appointed times of Jehovah. You may know these as the Jewish holidays but the premise of this series of programs is that they are much more than that. They are the holidays of God and therefore are Christian holidays, because they speak of Christ and his work, and they have just as much meaning for Christians as they ever had for Jews.

Of all these days, the one with the least obvious connection is the day the Jews call Rosh Hoshana and the public calls, The Jewish New Year. There is a complete list of all these days in the 23^rd chapter of Leviticus and this holiday is summarized:

And the Lord spoke unto Moses, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, saying, In the seventh month, in the first day of the month, shall you have a sabbath, a memorial of blowing of trumpets, a holy convocation. You shall do no regular work on it: but you shall offer an offering made by fire unto the Lord.

Leviticus 23:23–25 KJ2000

Like any religious holiday, you take a day off from work and you go to church, that is you assemble before God—that is what a holy convocation is. That part is simple enough, but after that it becomes a little more difficult. For example, the day is a memorial, but a memorial of what? And you may have noticed that this is the first day of the seventh month, not the first month. How then can it be the new year?