Offerings for the Festival of Trumpets

29 “Celebrate the Festival of Trumpets each year on the first day of the appointed month in early autumn.^[a] You must call an official day for holy assembly, and you may do no ordinary work.

²⁴ “Give the following instructions to the people of Israel. On the first day of the appointed month in early autumn,^[a] you are to observe a day of complete rest. It will be an official day for holy assembly, a day commemorated with loud blasts of a trumpet. ²⁵ You must do no ordinary work on that day. Instead, you are to present special gifts to the Lord.”

¹⁶ I am a special messenger from Christ Jesus to you Gentiles. I bring you the Good News so that I might present you as an acceptable offering to God, made holy by the Holy Spirit. ¹⁷ So I have reason to be enthusiastic about all Christ Jesus has done through me in my service to God. ¹⁸ Yet I dare not boast about anything except what Christ has done through me, bringing the Gentiles to God by my message and by the way I worked among them. ¹⁹ They were convinced by the power of miraculous signs and wonders and by the power of God’s Spirit.^[a] In this way, I have fully presented the Good News of Christ from Jerusalem all the way to Illyricum.^[b]

¹⁴ But how can they call on him to save them unless they believe in him? And how can they believe in him if they have never heard about him? And how can they hear about him unless someone tells them? ¹⁵ And how will anyone go and tell them without being sent? That is why the Scriptures say, “How beautiful are the feet of messengers who bring good news!”^[a]

¹⁶ But not everyone welcomes the Good News, for Isaiah the prophet said, “Lord, who has believed our message?”^{[b] 17} So faith comes from hearing, that is, hearing the Good News about Christ. ¹⁸ But I ask, have the people of Israel actually heard the message? Yes, they have:

¹⁵ And then he told them, “Go into all the world and preach the Good News to everyone. ¹⁶ Anyone who believes and is baptized will be saved. But anyone who refuses to believe will be condemned.

¹³ In that day the great trumpet will sound. Many who were dying in exile in Assyria and Egypt will return to Jerusalem to worship the Lord on his holy mountain.

⁶ Fifteen days before the Festival of Shelters began,^[a] the priests had begun to sacrifice burnt offerings to the Lord. This was even before they had started to lay the foundation of the Lord’s Temple.

²⁸ So all Israel brought up the Ark of the Lord’s Covenant with shouts of joy, the blowing of rams’ horns and trumpets, the crashing of cymbals, and loud playing on harps and lyres.