What Does Matthew 24:31 Mean?

(31) **He shall send his angels.**—The words are memorable as the formal expansion of what had been, as it were, hinted before in the parables of the Tares (Matthew 13:41) and the Net (Matthew 13:49). **With a great sound of a trumpet.**—The better MSS. omit “sound:” *With a great trumpet.* We know not, and cannot know, what reality will answer to this symbol, but it is interesting to note how deeply it impressed itself on the minds not only of the disciples who heard it, but of those who learnt it from them. When St. Paul speaks of the “trumpet” that shall “sound” (1Corinthians 15:52), of “the voice of the archangel and the trump of God” (1Thessalonians 4:16), we feel that he was reproducing what had been thus proclaimed, and that his eschatology, or doctrine of the last things, was based on a knowledge of, at least, the substance of the great prophetic discourse recorded in the Gospels. **They shall gather together his elect.**—The “elect” are the same in idea, though not necessarily the same individuals, as those for whom the days were to be shortened in Matthew 24:22; and the work of the angels is that of gathering them, wherever they may be scattered, into the one fold. As with so many of the pregnant germs of thought in this chapter, the work of the angels is expanded by the visions of the Apocalypse, when the seer beheld the angels come and seal the hundred and forty-four thousand in their foreheads before the work of judgment should begin (Revelation 7:2). In each case the elect are those who are living on the earth at the time of the second Advent. In these chapters there is, indeed, no distinct mention of the resurrection of the dead, though they, as well as the living, are implied in the parable of judgment with which the discourse ends.