The Last Trumpet Like the Relief of an Oppressed City
What will the last trumpet (1 Cor. 15:52) be like? Is it something we should fear?
I recently came across a helpful quote on the subject by the Puritan John Flavel.
(Which he seems to have borrowed from the Westminster Divine Thomas Case, in a book that is being republished next week. Indeed, Case's quote is so good that Thomas Boston also used it.)
In order to feel its impact, it will be helpful to picture a seventeenth century siege.
The Siege of Derry: The Longest and Most Celebrated in Irish/British History
Every year, on the second Saturday of August — in 'probably one of the biggest popular demonstrations in contemporary Europe' — my home city commemorates an event which took place over three centuries ago.[1] On the 28th of July 1689, after 105 days, four ships sailed down the River Foyle to end the Siege of Derry.
Derry/Londonderry is also known as 'The Maiden City' because its walls have never been breached — despite being besieged three times in the seventeenth century. The most famous of these, in 1689, was the 'longest and most celebrated of its kind in Irish or British history'.[2]
The Catholic King James II had fled to France in late 1688 when William of Orange landed to take the English throne. In March 1689, however, James came to Ireland in the hope of regaining his kingdom. Measures were taken to arm the west and south-west coast of Scotland due to fears of invasion.
By April, Sir John Dalrymple of Stair, whose seat was near Stranraer in south-west Scotland, was urging William to send an army to Derry: 'I sie no appearance of safty of our cuntry if there be not an armie sent to Dary, able to take the field'.[3] At that point, only Londonderry and Enniskillen were yet to fall to the Jacobites.
105 Desperate Days
But no army was sent, and the 105 day siege began on 18th April when Derry refused a demand to surrender. James II himself appeared at the walls — and was promptly fired at. The defenders feared that if they surrendered they would be massacred, just as their fellow Protestants had been in 1641. The city's governor, Robert Lundy — burned in effigy every December — thought it indefensible and left it to its fate. In the words of his (joint) replacement, Rev. George Walker: 'It did beget some disorder amongst us, and confusion, when we looked about us, and saw ... our Enemies all about us and our Friends running away from us'.[4]
At the start of June, the besiegers constructed a wooden boom across the River Foyle to prevent ships arriving to relieve the city. Conditions within the overcrowded city became desperate as food shortage and disease began to take their toll. Mortars fired from outside the walls regularly came crashing through the roofs of houses and added to the sense of terror.
Like the siege of Samaria in 2 Kings 6, where a donkey's head was sold for eighty shekels of silver, Walker's diary records that a dog's head was sold for two shillings and six pence.
According to Walker, supplies had run so low that it looked like the next step would be to eat human flesh (as in 2 Kings 6:28-29). A certain fat gentleman thought the soldiers were looking at him greedily, so he hid himself for three days. Lanes and streets ran with human waste and urine, leading to the spread of disease such as typhus.
On the 100th day of the siege, Walker recorded that 435 soldiers had died in two days. In total, over 3,000 soldiers, and perhaps as many as 7,000 civilians, perished. Graveyards, gardens and backyards were packed with bodies.
An Oppressed City Relieved
But then on 28th July, three ships, protected by a fourth, attacked the boom and managed to get through. The captain of one of the ships, a native of the city, was killed in the process — but the siege was finally over and the Jacobites fled.
Think of the relief that would have flooded through the beleaguered citizens to see the boom breached and the ships arriving with their precious supplies. To see friends arriving and foes departing. Their long months of suffering were finally over. Their patience and determination were rewarded.
That, says Flavel, is how we should think of the last trumpet:
By this tremendous blast, sinners will be affrighted out of their graves; but to the saints, it will carry no more terror, than the roaring of cannons, when armies of friends approach a besieged city, for the relief of them that are within it.[5]
The Relief of Derry took place two years before Flavel died. It was a city where disease and death had become commonplace. Where the citizens hungered and thirsted. Where they wondered if their ordeal was ever going to end. But then relief came.
And it perfectly illustrates our world: 'The whole world lies under the power of the evil one' (1 John 5:19).
But relief is coming.
- T. G. Fraser, 'Introduction: the siege: myth and reality' in William Kelly (ed.) The Sieges of Derry (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), p. 11. ↩︎
- Fraser, 'Introduction', p. 11; The besiegers in 1649 included Scottish covenanters. See W. P. Kelly, 'The forgotten siege of Derry, March-August, 1649' in Kelly (ed.), The Sieges of Derry, pp 41-2. ↩︎
- cited in John R. Young, 'The Scottish response to the siege of Londonderry, 1689-90' in Kelly, The Sieges of Derry, p. 58. ↩︎
- Walker, an Episcopalian, was attacked by Presbyterians in the years after the siege for downplaying the extent of Presbyterian involvement in the city's defence. See Jim Smyth, 'Siege, myth and history: Derry 1600-1998' in Kelly, The Sieges of Derry, pp 18-30. W. P. Kelly says of 1689: 'Undoubtedly the burden of resistance was borne by the Presbyterians, the better sort having the means and inclination to flee the advancing Jacobites ('The forgotten siege of Derry, pp 47-8.) ↩︎
- The Whole Works of the Reverend John Flavel (London; Edinburgh; Dublin: W. Baynes and Son; Waugh and Innes; M. Keene, 1820), i, 528. Most of the quoted words appear verbatim in Thomas Case's Mount Pisgah, or a Prospect of Heaven. The whole quote appears verbatim in Thomas Boston's An Illustration of the Doctrines of the Christian Religion (published posthumously in 1755). Given that Case's Pisgah was published in 1670, and Flavel's Fountain of Life didn't appear until 1672, it seems that the basic illustration is Case's, and it was then used (without acknowledgement) by both Flavel and Boston. Plagiarism by today's standards, but unlikely by theirs. ↩︎
