Summer of 2023 was a busy one. My husband started working for our friends’ construction company. I had started a part time job to help make ends meet. On top of that, we were still running the cut flower business and attending farmer’s markets. There was a lot of family issues happening at the same time. Things that had been staples in our lives were slowly crumbling and I was trying really hard to focus on Jesus.
During this time, I truly began to look into the Biblical Feasts mandated in Leviticus 23. The beauty of these feasts is that these celebrations, looked into the past to see how God had worked and then illustrate for us the future that Jesus fulfilled. My desire was for our celebrations to be remembrances of God’s work and Jesus’ saving grace. I did not have mental/emotional/financial capacity to keep up with the world’s materialistic celebrations.
So when we set up our tent in the backyard and decided to celebrate the Feast of Trumpets, we had no idea what we were doing other than we knew we needed to take some time to focus on the Lord. We told the kids about when the Israelites were camped in their tents, the trumpets were used as signals to know when they needed to move, or stop, or prepare for enemies. The people had been wondering in the desert and were finally about to enter the Promised Land. God was bringing the Israelites out of their temporary dwellings into their new home.
We sat around the campfire that night and told the kids about the walls of Jericho.
“See, I have delivered Jericho into your hands, along with its king and its fighting men. March around the city once with all the armed men. Do this for six days. Have seven priests carry trumpets of rams’ horns in front of the ark. On the seventh day, march around the city seven times, with the priest blowing the trumpets. When you hear them sound a long blast on the trumpets, have the whole army give a loud shout; then the wall of the city will collapse and the army will go up, everyone straight in.” Joshua 6:2-5 (God’s Justice Bible, NIV 2016)
We played a trumpet blast from YouTube and had the kids march around the campfire. The Israelites obeyed and the walls came crumbling down. There was no mighty battle with mass casualties on both sides. They simply obeyed and God made the way.
In addition to this, now the Israelites were officially in the Promise Land. They were no longer to be wanderers in the desert. God had delivered them from slavery, brought them through the wanderings of the desert and finally given them what they had hoped for. The Feasts of Trumpets is about celebrating the victories God has given us and claiming His victory in our lives.