Video Transcript
For many people, this instrument conjures up a variety of responses. This is the shofar: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
All right, let’s start with the good. This is a biblical instrument. It’s a ram’s horn, a shofar. It’s a Hebrew word for trumpet. Where do we find this? Well, we find it all over in the Old Testament. God tells his people to blow a ram’s horn or a trumpet or a shofar numerous times. And we see it used for a variety of different reasons. So the main three things that we see the shofar being used for throughout scripture, both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, are:
Number one: It scatters the enemies of God. Number two: It announces the coronation of a king. And number three: It signals the coming of the Messiah. We see Paul talk about this in 1 Corinthians: 15 where he says, then at the last trumpet or shofar, we are going to then see the coming of the Messiah.
Now, the problem here is that a lot of times the shofar is used for a purpose that it’s not meant to be used for. In the Jewish community, the shofar is only blown one time per year, and that is on the Feast of Trumpets, Rosh Hashanah, the head of the Year, the Jewish New Year. Jewish people are commanded to blow the shofar during that feast. Why? The shofar is an instrument that announces a convocation, a coming together, and it announces a holiness. This is why it’s blown to try to scatter the enemies of God. And we all know that from Joshua, when they march around the city of Jericho and they blow the ram’s horn and the walls come tumbling down. So that’s the good of the shofar.
Okay, the bad of the shofar: Unfortunately, the bad of the shofar is that a lot of well-meaning gentiles who love Jewish things don’t understand that it’s only meant to be blown one time per year on the Jewish calendar. And so they get into a worship service and they just start to blow the shofar. Nobody really understands, why are we blowing the shofar today? No one knows where in the Bible does it talk about this? No one knows, but everyone gets really excited about it. I’m not saying it’s bad to do that. I’m saying that it’s bad in the sense that it’s no context for that. And the Jewish community would look at that and say, that’s strange. Why are they doing that?
Now, here’s the ugly: I’m going to personally demonstrate the ugly of the shofar. That’s the ugly. A lot of times it gets connected to the bad, which is that a lot of people don’t know how to blow this thing. So not only are they blowing it at the wrong time, or for maybe the wrong purpose, they’re blowing it terribly. And so all that does is it takes people who don’t understand this instrument, they don’t understand what the Bible says about it, and it makes ’em feel really, really weird. And that’s what we want to try to avoid.
Let’s use this instrument for what God intended it for. Let’s connect to the Jewish community and with them, allowing them to take the lead, blow this instrument to announce the coming of the King, to prepare ourselves for the coming of the Messiah, and do that together with them at Rosh Hashanah. And if you are going to use the shofar, let me just encourage you, please find somebody who knows what they’re doing and let them do the trumpeting for you.
