Trumpets

1 CORINTHIANS 15:51-52 reveals the Apostle Paul telling the Corinthian church, “Behold, I tell 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 trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.” His words to the Thessalonian church speak of the same event commonly referred to among believers as the Rapture: “…the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord” (1 THESSALONIANS 4:16-17). In both his letters to the Corinthians and the Thessalonians, the Rapture is accompanied by the sound of a trumpet and the raising of the physical bodies of believers who have died. Juliet must have recalled God’s Word about that sounding of the trumpet in Act III, Scene ii when she reacts to the news that both Romeo and Tybalt are dead: “Is Romeo slaughter’d, and is Tybalt dead? / My dearest cousin, and my dearer lord? / Then, dreadful trumpet, sound the general doom! / For who is living, if those two are gone?”