Rosh Hashanah & Yom Kippur 2014

Hear that?

It's time for the Fall Festivals again! As always, the season starts with Rosh Hashanah or Yom Teruah, the Feast of Trumpets. It is a day of shouting or blowing the shofar in rememberance and looking forward to the return our King Messiah. It begins the month of Tishri, a month to examine ourselves and prepare our hearts. To celebrate the day, the kids made their own shofars from paper and noise-makers. We attended a service a our community center and heard the different traditional shofar sounds. It is a very upbeat and fun service with lots of shofar blasting and wonderful worship.

  

 Then we baked an apple and honey cake and cut out various shapes like shofars and torah scrolls. We also had pomegranates, apples and honey.

 As fun as it was to play, it was even better to eat!

 Then the kids made their own crown-shaped paper mache challah loaves.

 Finally we took a walk to Lake Brandt in preparation for Yom Kippur, The Day of Atonement. 

 It's traditional (Tashlich) to throw crumbs of bread into the water as you confess your sins to symbolize how our sins are as far removed from us as East is from the West. We read Micah 7:19.

While we know that Yeshua paid the ultimate price for those sins, the symbolism of watching those pieces of bread slowly float away from us still holds a great deal of meaning and power. We do sin and we are held accountable for those sins and yet even more so, we are forgiven if we ask. It is with grateful hearts that we worship the One True God who loves and forgives us in the midst of our shortcomings.

Reflections

Leviticus 23:26-33: Sabbath rest (from evening to evening), a holy day gathering, humbling oneself, fasting, a statute forever throughout your generations, to make atonement for you before the Lord

My friend described this day as one of looking in a mirror. Of truly seeing ourselves...

On this Day of Atonement, I was trying to figure out humility...

Humility:
        * 'a grace of the soul that allows one to think of himself no more highly than he ought to think' (from the New Unger's Bible Dictionary)
        * it comes by God's grace and involves all of a person and not just the feelings
        * characterized by obedience to God (Zephaniah 2:1-3), submission to authority (1 Peter 5:5), lack of pride in oneself (Proverbs 18:12), acceptance of God's providence (Phil 4:12), esteeming others as more important than oneself (Ro 12:3, Phil 2:3)

How do I know and practice humility?

Psalm 40, 51 and 63: I have been meditating on those.

Atonement:
       * to cover, to wipe out, to cleanse, to appease, and to purge
       * to make one

2 Corinthians 5:21: He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.


Galatians 3:13: Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, "Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree"— so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith.

James 4: 8-10: Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you men of double mind. Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to dejection. Humble yourselves before the Lord and he will exalt you.\


I am humbled, amazed and so very grateful of God's atonement of me through Yeshua on this day and forever. I can now come before God with confidence. I know that when He sees me, he sees the blood of his son (the perfect sacrifice and scapegoat covering my sins- the animal is a symbol/typology only). He transferred my sins onto his beloved son so that I could be made clean. Praise be to God!
But I must continue to examine myself, since there is still sin within me. To really see myself and my need for the messiah, redeemer. That is God's gift to me. I can examine myself and then He can do something about it. Praise be to God.
 
I pray that God's truth would touch myself and others deep in our hearts today.