There is a smell in the air before it rains. You know it. The sky begins to darken. The wind changes. The leaves turn upward. The temperature feels different. You haven’t felt a drop. You don’t know exactly when the rain is coming. You don’t even know whether the storm will pass directly over where you’re standing.
But you know something is happening. You can smell it.
That’s probably the simplest way I can explain how I’ve been feeling lately. I’ve been dreaming. I’ve been praying. I’ve been studying Scripture and thinking deeply about things I have studied for years. And something keeps drawing my attention toward the horizon.Before anyone misunderstands what I’m saying, let me make something perfectly clear:
I am not predicting the date of the Rapture. I don’t know the day. I don’t know the hour. But Jesus never told us that because we don’t know the hour, we shouldn’t look at the sky.
He told us to watch. And that’s what I’m doing.
What Does a Watchman Actually Do?
Amos 3:7 says:
“Surely the Lord GOD does nothing, unless He reveals His secret to His servants the prophets.”
I’ve always found that verse fascinating. I don’t believe God left humanity completely in the dark about what He intends to do. Quite the opposite. I think He has told us an extraordinary amount.
Our problem is that we don’t always understand what He has told us until after it happens. Jesus demonstrated this with His own disciples. He told them He would suffer. He told them He would be killed. He told them He would rise again.
They heard the words directly from Jesus Christ Himself, and still didn’t completely understand them.
John 12:16 tells us:
“His disciples did not understand these things at first; but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered…”
Think about that. The prophecy was already there. The problem wasn’t revelation. It was recognition. The event happened, they looked backward at what Jesus had said, and suddenly something that had been difficult to understand became obvious.
That’s one of the great challenges of prophecy. Sometimes history supplies the missing piece.
You Don’t Need Any of This to Be Saved
This is also where Christians can make studying Scripture unnecessarily complicated. You do not need to understand biblical prophecy to be saved. You don’t need to understand Hebrew. You don’t need to know the biblical feasts.
You don’t need to understand Daniel’s seventy weeks, Revelation’s seals, prophetic calendars, Jewish wedding customs, Shemitah cycles or Jubilee years. You can come to Jesus Christ knowing almost nothing except that you need Him, believe in Him and trust Him.
That’s the beauty of salvation. But salvation should create something in us: Hunger.
If I believe this book contains the revealed Word of the God who created me, why wouldn’t I want to understand everything I possibly can about it? If the only information humanity needed was the minimum required for salvation, God could have given us the Gospel message and stopped.
Instead, Scripture gives us creation, genealogies, covenants, measurements, temples, sacrifices, appointed days, prophets, kings, numbers, symbols, dreams, visions, poetry and history. Why?
Because there’s more here. A lot more.
Learning God’s Language
Reading Scripture tells us what happened. Studying Scripture eventually makes us ask: Why did God tell us that? Why a lamb? Why blood? Why unleavened bread? Why first fruits? Why seven days? Why seven years? Why twelve tribes? Why trumpets? Why did God specify certain dates? Why did He establish appointments thousands of years ago that later seem to correspond with events surrounding Jesus Christ?
Those questions don’t save you. But once you’re saved, they can make Scripture come alive. Because eventually you realize the Bible isn’t a collection of disconnected stories. It’s an interconnected architecture.
One part explains another. Something in Exodus suddenly illuminates something in John. Something in Leviticus appears again in Hebrews. Something in Daniel reappears in Revelation. The deeper you dig, the more connections appear. So let’s start with one nearly every Christian recognizes.
Why Is Jesus a Lamb?
John the Baptist saw Jesus and declared:
“Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”
Most Christians have heard that. But why a lamb? Why not simply say: “Here comes the Savior”? Because the lamb already had a story. Go backward. Back to Egypt. Back to Exodus. Back to Passover. God instructed Israel to take a lamb without blemish. Blood would mark the house. Judgment would pass over those covered by that blood. The lamb’s bones were not to be broken. Then, centuries later, Jesus arrives. The Lamb.
Paul eventually makes the connection explicit:
“For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us.”
Suddenly Passover isn’t simply an ancient Jewish observance. It was also a template. Something established long before Jesus’ birth was pointing toward Him. And once you see that, another question becomes unavoidable: What else is pointing forward?
God’s Appointed Times
Leviticus 23 lays out God’s appointed times. Passover. Unleavened Bread. First fruits. Pentecost. Trumpets. Atonement. Tabernacles. Christians sometimes look at these simply as Jewish holidays. But Scripture calls them the appointed feasts of the LORD.
Then look at what happens surrounding Christ. Passover: Christ becomes our Passover sacrifice. Unleavened Bread: His body is placed in the tomb during the feast period. First fruits: Christ rises, and Paul explicitly calls the resurrected Jesus the “first fruits” of those who have fallen asleep. Pentecost: Acts 2. The Holy Spirit is poured out upon the believers.
Now stop. Because something should be bothering you. If the spring appointments correspond so remarkably with events surrounding Christ’s first coming… what about the fall appointments?
The next one is Trumpets. And that’s where things become very interesting.
The Last Trumpet
Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:51–52:
“Behold, I tell you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed—in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.”
Then look at 1 Thessalonians 4:16–17:
“For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God…”
And believers are caught up to meet the Lord. Paul put the trumpet there. Not me.
So, when I discover that God established an appointed biblical feast centered upon trumpet blasts and then discover that Paul’s description of the resurrection and gathering of believers specifically includes a trumpet… I’m going to look closer. Wouldn’t you?
“But No Man Knows the Day or Hour”
Absolutely. Jesus said it. I believe it. But sometimes Christians stop right there.
Matthew 24:42 says:
“Watch therefore, for you do not know what hour your Lord is coming.”
Notice the logic. Jesus doesn’t say: You don’t know the hour, therefore stop looking. He says: You don’t know the hour, therefore WATCH.
Our inability to know the precise moment isn’t an argument against watching. According to Jesus, it’s one of the reasons we should. And this becomes even more interesting when we look at the cultural world in which Jesus spoke.
The Bride Doesn’t Know When the Groom Is Coming
The New Testament repeatedly describes Christ as the Bridegroom and His people through bridal imagery. That matters.
In the Jewish wedding imagery often used by Christians to understand Christ’s return, the bride prepares and waits while the groom prepares a place. The groom’s arrival is anticipated, but the bride must remain ready.
Then comes the arrival. The announcement. The celebration. The wedding. Does any of that sound familiar?
Jesus said:
“And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself.”
Then consider the parable of the ten virgins. They’re waiting for the bridegroom. The problem isn’t that they don’t know a bridegroom is coming. They know he’s coming. The question is whether they’ll be ready when he arrives. At midnight comes the cry:
“Behold, the bridegroom is coming; go out to meet him!”
That’s why “no man knows the day or hour” doesn’t communicate to me: Don’t pay attention.
It communicates: Stay ready.
I’ve written separately and much more deeply about the Jewish wedding and its relationship to the Rapture. It deserves its own study because once you understand the wedding imagery, many of Jesus’ statements take on another layer of meaning.
But for our purposes here, remember one thing: The bride doesn’t need the exact minute to know the wedding is approaching.
She needs to be ready.
What Does That Have to Do With Rosh Hashanah?
Everything we’ve established brings us here. Rosh Hashanah/Yom Teruah is associated with trumpet blasts. Paul describes a future transformation at the last trumpet. Thessalonians describes the trumpet of God. Jesus describes Himself through Bridegroom imagery. Jesus commands His followers to watch. And God’s spring appointed times provide an established biblical pattern of events surrounding Christ corresponding with appointed feasts.
Does that prove the Rapture happens on Rosh Hashanah? No. But it certainly gives a watchman a reason to put Rosh Hashanah on his calendar. There’s another distinction people sometimes miss. A Feast-of-Trumpets interpretation doesn’t require the Rapture to occur the instant the sun sets and Rosh Hashanah begins. Look back at Passover.
Jesus’ Passion wasn’t a one-second event. The meal. Gethsemane. The betrayal. The arrest. The trials. The beating. The scourging. The crucifixion. Hours of suffering. Then His death.
The sequence unfolded through an appointed period, with particular moments carrying extraordinary prophetic significance. When I think about the Feast of Trumpets prophetically, I’m not starting a stopwatch at sundown. I’m looking at an appointed window.
And I’m watching.
So Why Am I Thinking About This Now?
Because there’s a particular Rosh Hashanah approaching that I haven’t been able to get out of my mind. I’ve been dreaming. I’ve been praying.I’ve had thoughts that keep sending me back to Scripture.Then I noticed a date:
September 11, 2026.
Twenty-five years. To the day. And when the sun goes down that evening, something else happens.
Rosh Hashanah 5787 begins.
Maybe that’s nothing. Maybe it’s coincidence. Maybe September comes and goes like countless Septembers before it. But something about it made me start digging. I counted the years. Then I counted the days. Then I started looking at the Hebrew year. Then seven appeared. Then another seven. Then four of them. Then I started looking at biblical cycles. Shemitah. Jubilee. The Hebrew letters. The Metonic cycle. And eventually I found myself looking backward through more than two centuries of history.
Some things held up. Some didn’t. I discarded the ones that didn’t. But what remained was enough to keep me looking. In Part Two, I’m not going to tell you what September 11, 2026 means.
I’m going to show you what I found. Then you can decide what you think. Because I still don’t know when it’s going to rain.
But I can smell something in the air.
And if you think the biblical pattern is interesting, wait until you see what happens when the calendar, the numbers, the Hebrew year, the seven-year cycles, and the history surrounding September 11 all begin overlapping.
In Part Two: September 11, 2026 — The Numbers Behind a Convergence I Can’t Ignore, I’ll walk you through exactly what caught my attention—25 years, 9,131 days, 7,777, Shemitah, Jubilee, Hebrew year 5787, the Metonic cycle, and one strange remainder that ultimately brought the entire investigation back to a single word:
Humility.
I’m not asking you to believe September 2026 is the date.
I’m asking you to keep watching the sky with me.
