Trumpet, Harvest, Sacrificial Meal and Cup

Immediately after the command to silence, Zephaniah makes a shuddering announcement. You would expect that upon "be silent, for the day of the LORD is near" there would follow a thunderclap, a word of judgment, a threat. Instead there follows an invitation: the LORD has prepared a sacrifice, He has sanctified His guests.1 A host who lays on a meal and sanctifies his guests for the feast — it sounds almost warm, until you realize who lies on the table here. This is the fourth and darkest of four images with which Scripture depicts the Day as one great ingathering: the trumpet, the harvest, the sacrificial meal, and the cup. They come from different corners of life — the worship service, the field, the altar, the table — but all four say the same thing. On the Day there is a gathering; and once there has been a gathering, there is a separating. No one is left untouched, and in none of the four is there a place for the spectator.

The first image is the trumpet, and it is the oldest of the four. It first sounded at Sinai, where "the sound of the trumpet was exceedingly strong" and the people trembled (Exod 19:16, chapter 5); there the tone was set that would keep sounding through all of Scripture. Ever since, the trumpet has been the fixed signal of the Day. Joel: "blow the trumpet in Zion, sound the alarm on My holy mountain" (2:1). Zephaniah counts it among the very essence of the Day: "a day of trumpet and battle-cry" (1:16). But the trumpet calls not only to battle; it also calls home. Isaiah: "on that day a great trumpet shall be blown, and they shall come who were lost in Assyria and driven away in Egypt" (27:13) — here the trumpet gathers the scattered. And Zechariah binds both together: "the Lord GOD shall blow the trumpet [...] the LORD shall shield them" (9:14-15). In the New Testament it finally becomes the resurrection-signal: "the last trumpet, for the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised incorruptible" (1 Cor 15:52, chapter 18); "with the sound of the trumpet of God the Lord Himself shall descend" (1 Thess 4:16); "He shall send out His angels with a loud trumpet-blast, and they shall gather His elect" (Matt 24:31). And in Revelation it becomes seven trumpets, each a judgment (8-11). Thus that one sound carries the whole Day: it is alarm (danger is coming), gathering (come together), and resurrection (rise from the grave) all at once. And there is an older undertone sounding within it that this book may not pass over: the trumpet was also the shofar of the Jubilee, the ram's horn that pealed through the land on the Day of Atonement to proclaim liberty, to cancel debts, and to let each return to his inheritance (Lev 25:9-10). The Day is, in that sense, the ultimate Jubilee — the "year of good pleasure" that Isaiah announced (61:2, chapter 7) — and the trumpet that ushers it in calls not only to judgment but also to deliverance. For the prisoner the same blast sounds like a key in the lock.

The second image is the harvest, and by nature it carries a twofoldness within it. "Put in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe; come, go down, for the winepress is full, the vats overflow," Joel cries over the valley of decision.2 Note: in one breath he names two harvests — the grain harvest (the sickle in the ripe grain) and the grape harvest (the full winepress). Jesus unfolds the first in the parable of the weeds among the wheat: "let both grow together until the harvest; and in the harvest time I will say to the reapers: gather first the weeds and bind them in bundles to burn them, but bring the wheat together into my barn."3 And He explains it Himself: "the harvest is the consummation of the world, and the reapers are the angels" (Matt 13:39). Two things leap out there. First, that the harvest is the Day itself — not an image for it, but the event. Second, the order: first the weeds are bundled, then the wheat is stored — a detail that keeps playing along in the debate over "who is taken first" (chapter 22). John then unfolds Joel's two harvests separately (Rev 14:14-20): the Son of Man on the white cloud reaps with a golden sickle "the harvest of the earth" (the grain harvest, the ingathering), and an angel casts the clusters into "the great winepress of the wrath of God," from which blood flows "up to the bridles of the horses" (the grape harvest, the judgment — Isaiah's winepress, chapter 7). Grain is brought in; grapes are trodden. The Day is a harvest time, and the only question that counts is whether you are stored as grain or pressed as a grape.

The third image is the sacrificial meal, and this is the image of Zephaniah with which this chapter began — it runs straight from him to the end of the Bible. God lays on a sacrifice, but the sacrificial victim is no lamb or bull; it is the hostile power itself. Isaiah paints it over Edom: "the sword of the LORD is full of blood [...] for the LORD has a sacrifice (zevach) in Bozrah, a great slaughter in the land of Edom" (34:6). Ezekiel makes it macabrely concrete at the fall of Gog: God calls the birds of prey and the wild beasts together — "assemble yourselves and come, from every side, to My sacrifice which I am slaughtering for you, a great sacrifice on the mountains of Israel; and you shall eat flesh and drink blood" (39:17-20). The guests at God's sacrificial meal are the vultures, and the flesh is that of fallen armies. And John completes the image word for word: an angel, standing in the sun, calls "all the birds that fly in mid-heaven" to "the supper of the great God," to eat the flesh of kings, captains, mighty men, and of all, free and slave (Rev 19:17-18). That is no new vision; it is Ezekiel, taken up again. And note now what stands, in that same chapter 19, a few verses earlier: the wedding supper of the Lamb — "blessed are those who are called to the marriage supper of the Lamb" (19:9). Two suppers, in one chapter, on one Day. At the one you recline as a beloved guest, in shining linen; on the other you lie as the flesh the vultures tear apart. And every human being is present at precisely one of the two. That is the sharpest form the "two faces" of chapter 3 can take: the same Day sets two tables, and there is no third seat — you are a guest, or you are the dish.

And the fourth image is the cup — the thread already set in motion in chapter 8 and which here runs its full course. God hands Jeremiah a cup with the wine of fury and makes him pass it round among all the nations: drink they shall, and stagger, and vomit, and fall (Jer 25:15-27). In God's hand that cup foams, "full of mixture," and "all the wicked of the earth shall drink it, to the dregs" (Ps 75:8). And there is a movement in the cup that most people miss. Isaiah paints it: Jerusalem has drunk "the cup of reeling" to the bottom — but then God takes that cup out of her hand and gives it "into the hand of those who afflict you" (51:17,22-23). The cup that first struck the people of God passes over to their afflicters: the judgment that began at the house of God (chapter 9) completes itself at the nations. And at the hinge of the history of salvation stands the deepest movement of all. In Gethsemane One kneels and asks whether "this cup" may pass from Him — and drinks it nonetheless, to the bottom, in the place of His own (Matt 26:39). Whoever sees that cup drunk empty in Him need drink it no more himself. But whoever rejects Him keeps the cup in his own hand, and shall "drink of the wine of the wrath of God, poured out undiluted into the cup of His indignation" (Rev 14:10; 16:19). There are therefore, here too, two possibilities and no more than two: the cup that Christ drank empty for you, or the cup that you drink yourself to the dregs.

See the four now together, for that is what this part is about — not four loose images of menace, but four windows that look out on one hall. The trumpet that calls and gathers and awakens; the harvest that stores the grain and treads the grape; the meal that is a wedding and a battlefield; the cup that carries death and, in Christ, has already been drunk empty. Four times there is an ingathering, and four times the ingathering issues in a separation — and each time straight through the middle. The trumpet separates the waking from the sleeping; the harvest the grain from the weeds; the meal the guests from the carrion; the cup those who take refuge in Christ from those who must drink it themselves. And with each of the four returns, inescapably, the question of Amos (chapter 1), now posed four times and from four directions: on which side do you stand? That is no rhetorical question. It is, as proves true again and again, the only question the Day truly poses.