Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary

And then shall he send his angels--"with a great sound of a trumpet" (Mat 24:31). and shall gather together his elect, &c.--As the tribes of Israel were anciently gathered together by sound of trumpet (Exo 19:13, Exo 19:16-19; Lev 23:24; Psa 81:3-5), so any mighty gathering of God's people, by divine command, is represented as collected by sound of trumpet (Isa 27:13; compare Rev 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 a 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; for Mar 13:28 limits the whole prediction to the generation then existing.