When He Shall Come with Trumpet Sound
Today we speak less often about the return of Jesus than we did in the past. This neglect in Christian conversation and in Christian preaching affects our singing on Sundays. And our singing on Sundays certainly affects our living on all the other days.
I doubt any of us know definitively and exhaustively the reasons why, but I suspect part of our aversion to discussing the return of Jesus stems from an overreaction to perceived end-time obsession. Some Christians see every detail about the end times as crystal clear. That’s all they seem to talk about. Other Christians, myself included, look at this certainty and feel that the answers are too clean and tidy, maybe even a little contrived. This can lead to mistakenly overcorrecting by hardly ever talking about the second coming of Christ.
Perhaps our neglect also stems from the relative affluence of the Western world. In our wealth, we forget that we need a second coming to usher in heaven on earth. We try not to even think about our death. This is a relatively new phenomenon. “Throughout the history of the church, from the desert fathers to the Puritans, Christians have used the practice of meditating on death,” writes professor Kelly M. Kapic. “That is partly because the question was not about the possibility of pain but how to live with it.” Building on the work of a historian, Kapic notes, “Prior to modernity the question was not ‘a choice between pain and sickness or relief, but between a willing and a reluctant endurance of pain and sickness,’ since all were constantly in some level of physical discomfort” (Kapic, Embodied Hope, 60). To say it differently, only in our modern era has the desire for perfect health been anything but a fairytale. And the fairytale can cause us to neglect looking to the hope that God will bring in the end.
The experience of the cloud of witnesses, whether in the Bible or from the first century to modern times, was strikingly different. And this neglect of the afterlife and second coming has influenced the worship music we sing together when we gather. So many of the classic hymns so cherished by older generations of Christians featured climactic final stanzas that lifted eyes to the promise of heaven.
Consider the classic hymn “My Hope Is Built on Nothing Less” by Edward Mote from the 1800s. After a few verses that explore the trials we experience in this life and how Christ remains a rock and anchor for believers, the hymn celebrates the return of Christ with a trumpet. “When he shall come with trumpet sound,” we sing, “O may I then in him be found.” These lines celebrate a theme Paul writes about often, as 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. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed” (see also 1 Thess. 4:13–18).
Matthew Westerholm, a professor of worship, conducted his doctoral research on this subject, comparing extensive collections of worship songs from our era and previous eras. “Among many similarities,” he notes, “one difference was striking: Our churches no longer sing about Christ’s second coming as much as we used to.”
I do not want to argue with anyone about the musical beauty of hymns compared to modern worship songs. And I do not want to dictate what churches should or should not sing. But when examining the lyrics of most modern songs, many churches that sing for thirty minutes during their weekly gatherings include few songs, if any, whose lyrics explicitly direct believers to the hope of the end. This should not be.
To shift focus to God’s blessings now, to the exclusion of his blessings at the end, we do not lose a part of Christianity; we lose Christianity. Consider the analogy of the human body. In a tragic accident, a person might lose a finger or an arm and still remain very much alive. We cannot, however, lose the function of vital organs, such as our brain, heart, or lungs, without dying.
When the apostle Paul considers the implications of losing the doctrine of the physical resurrection of believers—the event that happens upon the return of Christ and when the trumpet sounds—Paul states that without the future resurrection, Christian preaching becomes in vain and misrepresents God, while the Christian faith becomes meaningless and futile, leaving us to perish forever in our sins and become the most pitiable of people (1 Cor. 15:12–19). The stakes could not be higher.
Of course, rather than complete avoidance of the indispensable doctrine of the return of Christ and the life everlasting, something more partial typically happens. We may not turn off the faucet completely, but we should not be surprised by our thirst when we only allow a trickle.
To quote Kelly Kapic again, “When the homes of believers are hit by chronic pain or mental illness, they often find the contemporary church strangely unhelpful, even hurtful” (38).
Perhaps songs that major on God’s blessings in the here and now, coupled with little emphasis on God’s blessings in the end, contribute to why suffering believers often find the church so unhelpful. Indeed, from a biblical perspective, to be the most helpful to believers suffering in the now, we must remember that the truth we regularly confess about the end—and the truth we regularly sing about the end—changes how we live today and every day. We must believe it all, and sing it all, to have it all.
* Photo by Madison Oren on Unsplash
