And then shall he send his angels, and shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from the uttermost part of the earth to the uttermost part of heaven.
And then shall he send his angels - "with a great sound of a trumpet" (Matthew 24:31), And shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from the uttermost part of the earth to the uttermost part of heaven. As the tribes of Israel were anciently gathered together by sound of trumpet (Exodus 19:13; Exodus 19:16; Exodus 19:19; Leviticus 23:24; Psalms 81:3-5), so any mighty gathering of God's people, by divine command, is represented as collected by sound of trumpet (Isaiah 27:13; compare Revelation 11:15); and the ministry of angels, employed in all the great operations of Providence, is here held forth as the agency by which the present assembling of the elect is to be accomplished. Lightfoot thus explains it: 'When Jerusalem shall be reduced to ashes, and that wicked nation cut off and rejected, then shall the Son of man send His ministers with the trumpet of the Gospel, and they shall gather His elect of the several nations, from the four corners of heaven: so that God shall not want a Church, although that ancient people of His be rejected and cast off; but that ancient Jewish Church being destroyed, a new Church shall be called out of the Gentiles.' But though something like this appears to be the primary sense of the verse, in relation to the destruction of Jerusalem, no one can fail to see that the language swells beyond any gathering of the human family into a Church upon earth, and forces the thoughts onward to that gathering of the Church "at the last trump," to meet the Lord in the air, which is to wind up the present scene. Still, this is not, in our judgment, the direct subject of the prediction; because the next verse limits the whole prediction to the generation then existing.