Chapter 29

Voting: Anyone who has yet to vote, please do so – we’re stuck in No Mans’ Land!

Chapter 29 continues on the theme of the sacrifices that God demands of His people. However, as well as the regular daily sacrifices, now we’re looking at a couple of important feasts.

The most important of these is Passover, which was dealt with at the end of yesterday’s passage. Camel-bump chapters again, I’m afraid. But today we look at another of the festivals that were important to the Israelites, specifically the Feast of Trumpets. Note that we’re looking at it from a particular point of view, however – it’s not so much a detailed explanation of what is to be done on each day of the festival. Instead we have instructions to the priests and Levites about what animals are to be sacrificed and how many. So in this respect it’s a little unrevealing.

However, this brings us to the topics of festivals. Christians have had an amazing variety of stances on festivals over the years. Catholic and Orthodox Christians have a festival for nearly every day of the year. It’s almost always some saint’s day! And there are those familiar to Protestants such as Christmas and Easter as well.

On the whole, Protestants seem to be less excited about festivals. Mostly we’ll celebrate Easter and Christmas, and that’s about it[1]. And sometimes we’ll even do so apologetically, for example recognizing from the pulpit that yes, Christmas isn’t actually likely to be close to Jesus’ birth day!

Of course, there’s always another extreme. The quasi-Christian group known as the Jehovahs’ Witnesses don’t celebrate any festivals at all – not even their own birthdays.

Is there a Biblical stance on this? Well, we read here that God commands people to keep the Feast of Trumpets. So we can see that at least some festivals are important enough to Him to issue a directive to His people. . . .

. . . . ISRAELITES, that is!

Now comes the tricky part – are any festivals required of the Christian?

As I said in yesterday’s commentary, we are free as Christians to do as we please, so long as we don’t disgrace the Lord’s name. So really, we don’t have to participate in any festivals – but there are good reasons for doing so!

1) God’s command to the Israelites at least indicates that God thinks some festivals are important.

2) People all over the world celebrate festivals, even those in agrarian societies. They serve an important sociological purpose in that they bind the community together tightly,.

3) Festivals are a great opportunity to participate in public worship.

So some degree of celebration would appear to be warranted for Christians.

But since we’re given no commands as to what and how we are to celebrate, a bit of common sense is called for (celebrating something every day, for example, would be misguided).

One thing that IS important is to remember that the main purpose of these festivals that were kept by the ancient Israelites was to provide the people with an opportunity to worship God Himself. They weren’t about having fun (though clearly people enjoyed them) or taking time off (though that was one of the observances people probably enjoyed).

Similarly, there is no problem for (for example) Christians celebrating Christmas at the time we do (i.e. the date of the old Roman festival of Saturnalia!). But we need to be honouring God when we do celebrate. If our main thought in ANY Christian festival is about our own enjoyment, we may well be in serious danger of missing the point.

On the other hand, we’re not being asked to live miserable enjoyment-free lives either. Enjoyment of festivals is right and proper, and as it happens, inevitable if we are celebrating festivals correctly. The key thing is this – why is it being done at all? If part of the answer is “To glorify God”, then we’re on our way to getting our celebrations right.



[1] We also, oddly, celebrate some of the really commercial holidays such as Mothers’ Day and Fathers’ Day. But to be fair, we usually do this because we have an ironclad excuse for dragging non-Christian parents and friends to church on those days.