Last trumpet

It seems beyond question that these passages are all about the same thing:

Then will appear in heaven the sign of the Son of Man, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other. (Matthew 24:30-31)

For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. (1 Thessalonians 4:16)

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. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. (1 Corinthians 15:51-52)

The first two explicitly say these things happen at the return of Christ, and the other one sets the same timing earlier in the chapter. Two explicitly say the dead are raised, and the other one just says that the Lord’s elect are gathered, which would include the living and the resurrected dead.

And there’s one other difference. All three passages state that the event is accompanied by a trumpet blast. But only 1 Corinthians specifies that it’s the last trumpet. Last of what? Paul doesn’t say.

There’s one place in scripture where we hear about a series of trumpets. You guessed it, in Revelation chapters 8-11. The first six of these seven trumpets announce disasters. About the seventh one, an angel swears an oath “that in the days of the trumpet call to be sounded by the seventh angel, the mystery of God would be fulfilled, just as he announced to his servants the prophets.” (10:7) Sounds like everything is going to come to a head, right? And indeed it does:

Then the seventh angel blew his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven, saying, “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever.” (11:15)

The last trumpet is, indeed, the fulfillment of everything—the whole world becomes the eternal Kingdom of God and of His Christ. Fits right in with what Jesus and Paul had said earlier.

But what about the Old Testament? Are there any roots there for the idea of a last trumpet? Well, I’m not locating anything along those lines. Trumpets are around, of course. There are multiple Hebrew words used, which I won’t go into, but I did notice this:

In the seventh month, on the first day of the month, you shall observe a day of solemn rest, a memorial proclaimed with blast of trumpets, a holy convocation. (Leviticus 23:24)

This is Rosh Hashana, the Feast of Trumpets. It is the beginning of the High Holy Days. Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, follows on the tenth day, and then on the fifteenth begins Sukkot, the Feast of Booths, the Ingathering Feast. Celebration, reflection, remembrance, repentance, affliction, and more celebration—all wrapped up in this year-end harvest-time series of holidays. All kicked off with trumpets. But there’s no last trumpet.

Or maybe there is. You’re probably familiar with the concept of the jubilee year. In case not, a little background. What was supposed to happen was that every seventh year was a Sabbath year—no planting or harvesting except what grew by itself. It was also to be a year of release—slaves freed, debts canceled. And then after seven seventh years, in the fiftieth year, the jubilee was a super release, with land reverting to its ancestral owners. And look how the jubilee is to be launched:

Then you shall sound the loud trumpet on the tenth day of the seventh month. On the Day of Atonement you shall sound the trumpet throughout all your land. And you shall consecrate the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you, when each of you shall return to his property and each of you shall return to his clan. (Leviticus 25:9-10)

There’s no evidence the jubilee was ever kept in Israel. It’s not hard to see the important symbolism wrapped up in it, so maybe the failure to ever keep it is part of the symbolism—no way could the Mosaic system grant true release. Did you notice when the jubilee is proclaimed? On the Day of Atonement. The Day of Atonement is about the release from sin, which only Christ can give.

Trumpets announce the end—in this case the end of the year. A trumpet announces the jubilee—the release. And that’s it. It’s been a long wait for the jubilee year, but now it’s all done, so the jubilee trumpet is actually the last trumpet. Sin (and therefore death) have been dealt with. With that, the celebration of the great Ingathering begins: all the elect of all time gathered in, all the kingdoms of the world now the Kingdom of God. All the words of the prophets fulfilled.

I don’t know, maybe this is too much of a stretch. What do you think? One thing for sure, I am longing for the fulfillment of the jubilee, being called (perhaps from the grave) by the last trumpet, becoming part of the Kingdom of God and of His Christ.

Love, Paul