Verses 1-28
The Trumpets of Providence
Moses was commanded to make two trumpets of silver. They were to be used in calling the assembly, and for the journeying of the camps. The trumpets were to be sounded in different ways. When one trumpet was blown, then the princes were to gather themselves unto Moses; when an alarm was blown, the camps were to move; when the congregation was to be gathered together, the trumpets were to be blown, but so blown as not to sound an alarm. The trumpets were to be blown by the sons of Aaron, the priests. Whether in war or in festival, the trumpets were to be to Israel for a memorial before God. Where are those trumpets? The sacred trumpets are still sounded; they still call men to worship, to festival, to battle. If we have lost the literal instrument, we are still, if right-minded, within sound of the trumpets of Providence. We do not now go out at our own bidding; we are, if wise, responding to a Voice, wherever we may be found. We impoverish ourselves by imagining that God does not now call the people to worship, the camp to war, the family to festival, the Church to victory. Look at the men who are pouring forth in all directions every morning; stand, in imagination, at a point from which you can see all the stations at which men alight; so present the scene to the fancy that you can see every little procession hastening to its given point of departure; then bring on all the processions to the various points of arrival; read the faces of the men; take in the whole scene. What action; what colour; what expression of countenance! And if we had ears acute enough to hear, what various voices are being sounded by every life; what tumult; what desire; what intersection of paths; what imminent collisions! and yet the whole scene moves on with a kind of rough order all its own. What has called these men together and yet not together? the trumpet! That it was not a literal trumpet does not destroy the high poetry of the occasion; the trumpet is the more wonderful that it is not material. These men are not in a trance; they are not night-walkers; they have not been seduced by some dream to come out all at once, wandering hither and thither, not knowing destiny, purpose, or intention. This is a scheme; there is a mind behind all this panorama; it never could settle itself into such order and effect and issue if it were the mere sport of chance. Watch the scene; it is full of pathos, it is loaded with manifold sorrow. An awful sight is a crowd of men; the bustle, the rush, the apparent hilarity cannot hide the tragedy. To what are these men hastening? Explain the scene. Some have heard the trumpet calling to controversy. Many of these men carry bloodless swords; they are well equipped with argument; they are about to state the case, to defend the position, to repel, to assert, to vindicate righteousness, and to claim compensation for virtue outraged; they are soldiers; they have mapped out the battlefield in private; all their forces have been disposed within the sanctuary of the night, and presently the voice of genius and of eloquence will be heard in high wrangling, in noble contention, that so the wicked may claim nothing that is not his own, and the righteous have the full reward of his purity. They are going to the political arena to adjust the competing claims of nations, or causes; war is in their eyes; should they speak, they would speak stridently, with clear, cutting tone, with military precision and emphasis; they would hold no long parley with men, for they mean the issue to end in victory. Others have heard no such trumpet: they have heard another call to peaceful business, to daily routine, to duty, made heavy often by monotony, but duty still, which must be done according to the paces and beatings of the daily clock. They cannot resist that voice without resisting themselves. Sometimes they long to be in more active scenes, to vary the uniformity by some dash or enterprise, to startle the blood into a quicker gallop by doing something unusual and startling; but they are not so called by the trumpet; they are moved in that direction by some mean passion or unholy rivalry. The trumpet has called them to the culture of fields, to the exchanges and settlements of merchandise, to the business without which the world, in its broadest civilisation, would stand still; having heard the trumpet, they obey. And other men, in smaller bands, more aged men, men who have seen service in the market field, in the political field, in the field of literature, how go they? Away towards sunny scenes, quiet meadows, lakes of silver, gardens trimmed with the patience and skill of love. They are men of leisure, men in life's afternoon. The sunbeam has been a trumpet to them; hearing it, they said, Who would remain at home to-day? All heaven calls us out, the great blue arch invites us to hospitality in the fields and woods and by the river-side. All men are obeying a trumpet; the call is addressed from heaven to earth every morning. We may have outlived the little, straight, silver trumpet, turned up at the ends; but the trumpet invisible, the trumpet of Providence, the call of Heaven, the awakening strain of the skies, this we cannot outlive: for the Lord is a Man of war, and must have the battle continued; the Lord is a Father, and must have the family constituted in order; the Lord is a Shepherd, and must have the flocks led forth that they may lie down in the shadow at noonday.
There are other men going forth. Fix yourselves again, in imagination, at a point from which you can see nations moving on as if to some great conference; they move from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south; fair men, men of darker hue; men speaking our own language, men talking an unknown tongue; stalwart men, trained, every muscle having been under the touch of culture; men carrying arms of various names, all meant to be steeped in blood. Have these men come out in some fit of somnambulism? Are they sleep-walkers? Is all this an illustration of nightmare? What is it? These men have heard a trumpet. Many trumpets have been sounded, and yet in the midst of all the blare and stormy blast there is one clear note. What is the meaning of all this movement of the camps? Strong nations are called to go out and support weak ones. It is a policy of insanity which says, Take no heed of other people; let them fight their own battles and settle their own controversies. That is not the spirit of Christ. Every weak nation belongs to the strong one; every fatherless child belongs to the man who can keep it, and teach it, and guide it. Were nations equal and causes equal, then the foolish talk of leaving men alone might have some point in it. We must not leave the slave and the slave-holder to settle the controversy; the slave-holder will soon settle it, if it be so left; it is not an equal fight. Freedom must plant all its soldiers on the field, and strike for weakness and beat down the oppressor and grind him out of existence. Who will speak one word in favour of war? No Christian man. War can have no purely Christian defence as war. It sometimes becomes a dire necessity; it is, in very deed, the last appeal. As war, it is not only barbarous and irrational, it is infernal, altogether and inexpressibly deplorable. Yet we cannot read history or study events without seeing that the Lord has not scrupled to call himself "a Man of war," and the sword has had a place in the history of freedom and the development of progress. What Christian men ought to see is, that the cause is good; that war is the only alternative; that having exhausted all the pleas of reason, all the entreaties of persuasion, all the claims of righteousness, all the appeals of pathos, nothing is to be done but to fight the tyrant with his own weapons. The Lord go with the right; the Lord support the weak; the Lord comfort those who are suddenly and tragically bereaved. But there is a call to difficulty, a call to battle, a call to sorrow. We must not delude ourselves into the notion that we are only called to Sabbatic calm, and the security of the sanctuary, and the delights of the mead, and the summer holiday of the verdant woods filled with sweet music of birds; we are called to battle, to loss, to die far away from home; and, rightly accepted, obedience to such a call means heroism upon earth and coronation in heaven.
The trumpets were to be sounded by the priests. The priests are not likely to sound many trumpets to-day. Ministers have been snubbed and silenced into an awful acquiescence with the stronger party. The pulpit should be a tower of strength to every weak cause. Women should hasten to the Church, saying, Our cause will be upheld there. Homeless little children should speed to the sanctuary, saying, We will be welcomed there. Slaves running away should open the church door with certainty of hospitality, saying, The man who stands up in that tower will forbid the tyrant to reclaim me, or the oppressor to smite me with one blow. It was God's ordination that the trumpet should be sounded by the priests interpreting that name properly, by the teachers of religion, by the man of prayer, by the preachers of great and solemn doctrines; they are to sound the trumpet, whether it be a call to festival or to battle. We dare not do so now, because now we have house-rent to pay, and firing to find, and children to educate, and customs to obey. Were we clothed in sackcloth, or with camels' hair, and could we find food enough in the wilderness were the locusts and the honey sufficient for our natural appetites, we might beard many a tyrant, and decline many an invitation, and repel many an impertinent censor; but we must consider our ways, and balance our sentences, and remember that we are speaking in the ear of various representatives of public opinion and individual conviction. The pulpit has gone down! It has kept its form and lost its power; its voice is a mumbling tone, not a great trumpet blast that creates a space for itself, and is heard above the hurtling storm and the rush of hasteful and selfish merchandise. Were ministers to become the trumpeters of society again, what an awakening there would be in the nation! Were every Sabbath day devoted to the tearing down of some monster evil were the sanctuary dedicated to the denunciation, not of the vulgar crimes which everybody condemns, but the subtle and unnamed crimes which everybody practises, the blast of the trumpet would tear the temple walls in twain! We live in milder times we are milder people: we wish for restfulness. The priests wish to have it so also, like priest, like people The man who comes with a trumpet of festival will be welcomed; the man who sounds an alarm will be run away from by dyspeptic hearers, by bilious supporters, and by men who wish to be let alone to creep into heaven, and to be as unnoticed there as they were unknown here.
There are trumpets which call us in spiritual directions. They are heard by the heart They are full of the tone of persuasion that highest of all the commandments. The heart hears the trumpet on the Sabbath day. The trumpet that could sound an alarm is softened in its tone into a tender entreaty, or a cheerful persuasion, or a promise of enlarged liberty. Everything depends upon the tone. The trumpet may be the same, but the tone is different. We cannot take up the trumpet of the great player and make it sound as he made it. What is it, then, that plays the trumpet? It is the soul. If we knew things as we ought to know them, we should know that it is the soul that plays every instrument, that sings every hymn, that preaches every discourse that has in it the meaning of God and the behest of Heaven. No man can deliver your messages; no man can preach your sermon. Never trust any man to deliver a message for you if you can by any possibility deliver it yourself. The words may be the very words you used, and yet what from you would have been a persuasion, from the lips of another may become almost an insult. Who can put the proper tone into the instrument make it talk lovingly, soothingly? Who can make the trumpet pronounce a benediction? Only the skilled player whose lessons have been begun, continued, and consummated in heaven. We perish for lack of tone. We have the right doctrine but the wrong expression; the words are the words of God, but the voice is an iron one a tongue heavy, and without the subtle emphasis which makes every note a revelation and every tone a welcome. Hear men read what you have written, if you would really see in it some other meaning than what you intended to convey. Ask another man to read the writing for you. Whilst you read it, you read it, with your soul's sympathy and with a purpose in your heart, and the words answer something that is within you, and therefore you imagine that the speech is sphered off into completeness and is resonant with tones of music. Hand it to your friend; let him stand up and read your sermon back to you, and there is no humiliation upon earth equal to the agony of that distress, every word misunderstood, the emphasis put in the wrong place, words that you shade off to a vanishing point are brought to the front and made to be principal actors upon the scene; and you, with a wounded heart, turn away and say that your word has returned unto you void. But hear some man read who has entered into the very music of your soul, and he brings back a larger sermon than you gave him; he has heard every word; all the minor tones, all the shades of thought have impressed themselves upon his heart, and when he reads you say "Would God he had first made the speech! Surely the people would have risen and then bowed down and said, The Lord, he is God; the Lord, he is God." The same trumpet called to festival and to war; so the Gospel has two tones: it calls lovingly, sweetly, tenderly; and it sounds an alarm, making the night tremble through all its temple of darkness, and sending into men's hearts pangs of apprehension and unutterable fear.
There is another trumpet yet to sound: "Behold, I show 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 trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed." The trumpet is not lost, then; it is in heaven, where the Ark of the Testimony is, where the Shekinah is, where the Tabernacle of God is. The Apocalypse has taken charge of all the things which we thought were lost. Reading on through the history, we say, This is evolution: see how we have dropped off all these elementary, initial, temporary things, and how we have risen up into spirituality and idealism and the freedom of an air which has no boundary lines, no foundations, no beginning, no ending. And as we are talking this religious licentiousness, behold, the Apocalypse comes, and puts before us all the things we thought we had grown away from. Without the Apocalypse, the New Testament would have come to a deadlock; with the Apocalypse, the whole Bible is reunited, consolidated into a massive consummation, and in the Apocalypse we have tribes ay, of Judah, and Asher, and Simeon, and Zebulun, of Joseph and Benjamin; we have censers and altars and significant blood, great lights, mighty voices, marvellous exhibitions of all kinds of strength. It seems as if all the Levitical ritual had been transformed and glorified into some sublimer significance. This is the Book of God. We thought the silver trumpets were lost, and we read, And at the last, a great trumpet was sounded in heaven, and announcements were made to earth by the trumpet sounded by an angel, and the last battle was convoked by the trumpet of a spiritual trumpeter. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth!
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