The Trumpet Sounded on the Day of Atonement

He reads it every autumn. It has become a habit, the way some men read a particular book every winter, and he could tell you where the paragraph breaks fall.

Leviticus 25. The sabbath for the land. The seventh year. And then the fiftieth, with the counting of seven sevens, and the trumpet, and the release, and every man returning to his possession and to his family.

He thinks it is the most extraordinary chapter in the law. He has said so out loud in a room of people who agreed with him. He can explain why the land could not be sold in perpetuity and what that did to prices and why it makes the whole economy provisional. He has taught it twice.

And every autumn he closes the book with exactly the same feeling, which he has never named until now, and which is best described as admiration from a distance.

He is fifty one. He has a job that was a step down eight years ago and has stayed a step down. He has a sum in his own life that he does not expect to change, and a position he has quietly accepted as permanent, and if you asked him about it he would say something reasonable about being realistic at his age.

Those two things have never once touched each other. The chapter is a subject. The position is a fact. And in eleven readings the trumpet has never sounded over anything that belongs to him.

That is what he noticed this year, on about the third page, and it stopped him for a long time.

You know that chapter. Yours might be a passage you love, or a doctrine you can defend, or a shelf of books about grace. And there is a place in your own life you have marked realistic, and the two live in separate rooms, and you have never let the one walk into the other.

Come and sit at the end of the table. The light is good and there is bread. There is one verse in that chapter that says which day the trumpet was blown on, and it changes what the whole thing is aimed at.

There is no code, and there is a day the horn sounds

Let me say the plain thing first, because the name over the door of this site promises a secret and I will not keep a serious man reading in hope of one.

There is no code. There is nothing in this chapter that operates as a mechanism, and I am not going to tell you that God is about to reverse your position, because I have not been told that and no honest teacher will say he has. Nothing here promises a reversal and nothing here dates one.

Here is the verse. It is the timing instruction, and it is easy to read past because it looks administrative.

Then shalt thou cause the trumpet of the jubile to sound on the tenth day of the seventh month, in the day of atonement shall ye make the trumpet sound throughout all your land.Leviticus 25:9

Stop on the day.

The jubilee could have started on any day of that fiftieth year. It could have begun at the new year, which would have been tidy. God attaches it to the Day of Atonement, the one day in the calendar when the nation's debt of another kind was dealt with, when the blood went in and the goat went out and the whole people stood under a settled account.

So the horn that released every family's land was blown on the afternoon of the day their sin had been dealt with. The two releases were fastened together on purpose. One deals with what a man owes God. The other deals with where a man's life has ended up. And God tied them to each other so that nobody could hold one and stand outside the other.

You are not permitted to admire this from a distance, and the horn was deliberately sounded on the day that has already been applied to you. That is not rhetoric I have arranged at a table. It is written in Leviticus 25 in the timing clause, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an administrative sentence and turns it toward a man who has read the chapter eleven times.

You have already stood under the atonement, and the trumpet in that chapter was fastened to it by God's own instruction. Scripture says in the day of atonement shall ye make the trumpet sound, and His Spirit is the one who makes a fastening like that stop being interesting and start being personal.

Now let me be exact, because that is how you prefer to be handled and because vagueness would let you escape.

Admiration from a distance is not a small fault. It is the specific occupational hazard of a man who reads well. You have built, without ever deciding to, a way of handling Scripture in which the text is a country you visit and your own life is the house you live in, and the two have separate weather.

And the sentence you use to keep them apart is realistic. Being realistic at my age. That word has been doing an enormous amount of work in your life for eight years, and it is not a theological word, and you have never once submitted it to the chapter you teach.

You are not being realistic, and the position you have accepted was never presented to you by God for acceptance. Scripture says that with God all things are possible, said not as an inspirational line but by Jesus in answer to men asking who could then be saved, which is the hardest possible case, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and puts it in the room where the word realistic lives.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because eleven readings did not move it and a twelfth will not. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what study never does on its own. So speak, out loud, in your own house. You have the standing to speak to a position you have accepted and tell it what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that yours by position rather than by scholarship, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word much further than a study.