The Last Trump: Why the Watchman Listens for One Trumpet, Not Two
Scripture names the trumpet that gathers the saints, and tells us when it sounds. So did the church's earliest teachers.
A watchman's whole job hangs on a trumpet. So it is worth asking a plain question of our Bibles: when does the trumpet sound that gathers the people of God to the Lord Jesus Christ?
Our Lord answered that question Himself on the Mount of Olives, and He placed it on the calendar for us.
“Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken: And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.”
Matthew 24:29-31, KJV
Notice the order. Tribulation first, then the sign in heaven, then the trumpet, then the gathering of the elect. Paul describes the same gathering to the Thessalonians: “For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first” (1 Thessalonians 4:16). And to the Corinthians he calls it the last trumpet of all: “In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed” (1 Corinthians 15:52).
One coming. One gathering. One trumpet, and Paul says it is the last one. When the same apostle had to settle a church that was shaken by rumors that the day had already come, he did not tell them they would be gone before trouble arrived. He told them what must happen first:
“Now we beseech you, brethren, by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by our gathering together unto him, That ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand. Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition;”
2 Thessalonians 2:1-3, KJV
This is not a new teaching. It is the old one. Around the middle of the second century, Justin Martyr told the Jewish teacher Trypho that he and other “right-minded Christians on all points” were “assured that there will be a resurrection of the dead, and a thousand years in Jerusalem, which will then be built, adorned, and enlarged” (Dialogue with Trypho, chapter 80).
A generation later, Irenaeus of Lyons, who learned from Polycarp, who learned from the apostle John, laid out the order of events plainly. When the Antichrist “shall have devastated all things in this world, he will reign for three years and six months, and sit in the temple at Jerusalem; and then the Lord will come from heaven in the clouds, in the glory of the Father” (Against Heresies, Book V, chapter 30).
Antichrist first. Then the Lord from heaven. Then the kingdom. The earliest church expected to see the man of sin before they saw their Saviour, and they did not count that a reason for fear. They counted it a reason to watch.
That is why this matters for a newsroom with a trumpet on its masthead. If the church expects to be gone before hard days come, it may be caught sleeping when they do. Our brothers and sisters in Sudan and Nigeria, whose stories run on this site, are not waiting to be spared tribulation. They are living through it, and holding fast.
Our Lord did not leave us guessing about our duty in the meantime. “Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come” (Matthew 24:42). Keep your lamp trimmed. Keep your eyes on the eastern sky. And listen for the last trump.
