Rabbi Schneider - Are You Really Ready?
There have been different ways, different times when the Spirit of the Lord has moved in His church to bring reformation. And what is happening presently is that the Lord is restoring His people to the understanding of the Hebrew roots of their faith in Yeshua, in Messiah Jesus. One of the elements of recovering the Jewish roots of our Christian faith, beloved, is understanding the holidays that God gave Israel in the Torah in the Hebrew Bible. We find as we read the New Testament that Paul, the New Testament writers, and Jesus Himself celebrated the appointed days of the Lord that are outlined for us in the book of Vayikra or Leviticus chapter 23.
As we study the life of Jesus, we see Him for example, celebrating Passover, we find Him in the temple during Hanukkah, we find the Apostle Paul celebrating the Feast of Unleavened Bread, and other Hebrew holidays as well. So I say all that as a preliminary word to introduce the season that we're now in. We are presently celebrating the Feast of Trumpets. In Hebrew, we call this day Yom Teruah, which means the day of trumpets, or more commonly, Rosh Hashanah, which means the head of the year. It all points to the Lord's return. Because the Feast of Trumpets historically brings us back to the remembrance of the Father, Father God, blowing a cosmic divine shofar as the children of Israel were gathered at the base of Mount Sinai.
The Lord was about to bring mass revelation to His people, approximately 3 million Jewish people that were gathered at the base of Mount Sinai that heard a divine trumpet sounding from heaven. And then Moses went up the top of Mount Sinai where he received the Torah. And so this blowing, this sounding of the divine shofar reminds us of the announcement of God's kingdom. When we get to the Brit Chadashah, the New Testament, we read that Jesus is coming back with the voice of the angels and the trump of God.
And so as we're presently now in this season, celebrating Rosh Hashanah, the Feast of Trumpets, Yom Teruah, we remind ourselves that Yeshua is about to break into earth once again and reveal the glory of His kingdom. It doesn't even take a lot of faith anymore to understand that Jesus is coming soon. Yeshua's last words to us in the book of Revelation were "Behold, I come quickly..."
And we read in the New Testament the signs of the times that will be happening on the earth immediately preceding His return. And when we look at what's happening right now, beloved ones, in the earth, and I don't have time on this short devotional to list all those signs, it is painstakingly obvious that the world is unraveling, and this is a precursor to the soon imminent return of the Lord. And so I want to remind you today Yeshua is coming back soon, and He's coming back for you. And the application, of course, is this. You and I need to be ready.