For if the trumpet makes an uncertain sound, who will prepare for battle? (NKJV)
Again, if the trumpet does not sound a clear call, who will get ready for battle? (NIV)
The context of this wonderful verse from 1 Corinthians 14:8 is the spiritual gift of tongues. Whatever you may believe about that personally, the passage is clearly stating that words spoken with understanding will always be more powerful than words that carry no understanding.
To illustrate this point, the Holy Spirit evokes military imagery. The job of the bugle and the bugler is to play, loud and long, a series of recognizable notes to direct battalions that danger is encroaching—and the time to fight for kin and country is upon them. How tragic, how unalterably pathetic, that the man given the responsibility to wake the troops from sleep or distraction as the enemy marches in, would fail to sound the warning. With death to the entire army imminent, all hope is hanging on the urgent effectiveness of the trumpeter. Scouts bring reports of enemies marching, generals form strategies to defeat and destroy their foes, but none of it happens if the warning is not sounded, if the trumpeter fails. The prospect is almost silly—was his mouthpiece clogged, did his breath fail, was the trumpet itself unfindable when urgently needed? Soldiers’ bodies litter the landscape as civilizations are ravaged and ruined by heathen hordes . . . why? Only because the one commissioned to warn, to awaken the resistance, to ready the defense was fatally ‘uncertain,’ ‘not clear.’
It’s difficult to see our president fumble with the bugle when the threat is within our own borders.
For those of us who have witnessed decades of American nobility in sending our treasured young men to fight and die in causes that were urgent but not our own, it is especially difficult to see our president fumble with the bugle when the threat is within our own borders. President Obama’s steadfast refusal to recognize the enemy, to accurately label that threat for what it is, to deploy our greatest strength in defeating that enemy is a true A.W.O.L. Recent efforts to raise the clarity of rhetoric slightly seem paltry in the context of lecturing the American people in condescending tones and refusing to reinstate the Terrorism Alert System dismantled by Homeland Security in 2011 with his support.
President Obama (let’s keep praying for him) could solve this so easily by saying:
“Extreme times call for careful words . . . I want to be sure I do not invoke a parallel irrationalism in peace-loving people by equating ISIS with Islam. [We heard that alternate irrationalism yesterday.] Yet I cannot allow that concern to cause confusion about where I stand on this growing threat. I call upon Muslim clerics and adherents in America to denounce ISIS as an evil and abhorrent form of Islam and to work with us to defeat it. I ask all Muslims to understand that equivocation on this point will call into question where their sympathies truly are. We call upon all Americans to join together in vigilance and alertness to possible threats around them, even as we work with our allies to wipe ISIS from the face of the earth.”
IF President Obama said that, it would end all discussion—but sadly the problem goes beyond his faltering, unclear words. The situation is so dire, and his role as Commander in Chief is so universally understood, that his silence causes growing uncertainty about where his true loyalties lie. People speculate, foolish conspiracy theories abound all because President Obama is unclear. It would be difficult for a father to make the case that he cares about the safety of his family, while carefully wording mild warning sentences that caused no one to run for cover as the glass was breaking and the burglars were entering the residence. In modern times and across all partisan argumentation, our nation always rallies around its president’s firm resolve in a national crisis. (Remember “God Bless America” on the steps of the Capitol Building, right after 9/11?) Urgent times demand clarion certainty to avoid division within the ranks. We are paying a great price for presidential equivocation.
All of this has me thinking about preachers who equivocate. How hypocritical of us to criticize the president for seeming to mince words, when preachers with eternal consequences on their lips too frequently offer the same kind of fatal equivocations. Just last week, another preacher resigned from a prominent pulpit, citing his own journey and the need to self discover as his first priority. If you don’t believe hell is a real threat and you don’t believe the atoning death of Christ is the only solution, you have no right to be in a Christian pulpit. You are a spiritual terrorist of sorts, aren’t you? Hiding in open sight, allowing the public to think you are safe, even as you make decisions which put them in harm’s way. If you don’t believe the Word of God, yet people are gathering with the expectation that you do, you have actually hijacked a congregation for ‘parts unknown.’ If you were not so consumed with self, you would see that the ‘passengers’ are terrified and praying you will just land the plane safely and walk away. “It would be better for [you] if a millstone were hung around [your] neck and [you] were cast into the sea than that [you] should cause one of these little ones to sin.” (Luke 17:2)
All of that has me praising God for the brothers who stood up again this past weekend and preached their hearts out—heralding the authority of God’s Word without apology and seeing the Spirit of God use it to the salvation of souls and the building up of Christ’s church. We had a banner day yesterday, declaring the grace and mercy of God from Exodus 34:6-7. That same grace is available to all of us, if we need to repent of failing to “preach the word” (2 Timothy 4:2). Let’s get back to our calling and, in His strength, sound the alarm, blow the bugle, and alert every hearer that the cup of God’s wrath has to be getting pretty full.
“For if the trumpet makes an uncertain sound, who will prepare for battle?” (1 Corinthians 14:8)
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