The Gospel Trumpet

This gospel trumpet is not, in its material, like other trumpets. It is not made from horn of ram or ox, nor has it been shaped in an earthly foundry. God furnished the material for this trumpet, twisted it, attuned it, bestowed it.

He made two trumpets–one for heaven, and John heard its blast about Patmos. He made the other for the earth, and He hung it in the church.

Simon Peter put that trumpet to his lips and all the docks and shipping of Galilee heard it. Luke took it, and, forgetting the medicines of his apothecary shop, he went everywhere to blow it. Paul took it and made Philippian dungeons ring and Corinthian palaces echo and Christendom resound with the harmonies of the resurrection.

A trumpet, God-made, heaven-manufactured, yet needing no giants to use it, but suited to faint lips and trembling hand and feeble lungs; so that sick Edward Payson, leaning against the pulpit, might hold it, and Frederick Robertson, worn out with ulcers and spinal complaints, might breathe through it, until the fashionable hearers at Brighton watering-place trembled and believed.

The gospel trumpet is great in its power. On a still night you may hear the call of a brazen trumpet two or three miles, but this is so mighty that it is not only heard from heaven to earth, but it is to arrest the attention of all nations. Men with physical hearing all gone catch the first strain of it. Men buried half a century in crimes have heard it. It is the power of God unto salvation. Amidst the rush of a cavalry troop, going perhaps a mile in three minutes, Saul heard it, braced himself in the stirrups, and reined in his charger on the road to Damascus. In a custom-house, amidst the chink of coin and the shuffle of feet and the dispute of merchants at the high tariffs, Matthew answered its mighty call.

Men have put their fingers in their ears to keep out the sound, but have been compelled to hear it. At its blast, walls fall, and thrones upset, nations leap from barbarism to civilization. There is no force in the shock of musketry, or in the boom of cannonade, as compared with the pealing forth of this great gospel trumpet.

Oh! that the eternal God might speak through it now! That all these people might rise up into the freedom of the gospel! 

T. DeWitt Talmage

The Church of God » gospel trumpet

The Gospel Trumpet

The Great Trumpet