'A winnowing time of judgement will come': Bishop Bull on the last judgement and the Psalms

In this Advent series of 18th century Anglican sermons on the Last Things, we turn to Bishop Bull's sermon 'The Vanity of this Life, the Eternity of the next'. In this extract, Bull points to the Psalms as proclaiming the last judgement, particularly seeing in Psalm 1 a declaration that the "winnowing time of judgement will come". It is a reminder to us that to pray the Psalter during this season is to be prepared in heart and soul for "the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious Majesty, to judge both the quick and the dead".

To the same purpose are those Psalms of David, wherein he amply describes the prosperous and flourishing estate of many wicked men; and, on the other side, the calamitous and afflicted condition of many good and virtuous in this world; and yet in the close pronounceth these to be most happy men, and the other to be most miserable; which cannot be true, but on supposition of a future state and resurrection. Of this sort are the forty-ninth and seventy-third Psalms throughout.

But what need we search far into the Book of Psalms? The very first Psalm affords us a clear proof of this truth ... Now what judgment or tribunal of God is that, to which all the ungodly shall be cited, in which none of them shall be able to stand? i.e. to carry their cause, but they shall all, causa cadere, "be cast, and utterly overthrown?" Certainly this cannot be understood of any judgment of God exercised in this life. For here wicked men often prosper, and go out of the world without any discernible mark of God's judgment on them. And, on the other side, many good men, as to the things of this world, are cast and overthrown, ruined and undone. David, therefore, undoubtedly speaks of a "judgment to come." And accordingly, the author of the Targum, or Chaldee Paraphrase, thus renders the words, "The ungodly shall not be justified in the great day.” The great day, i.e. the day of the last judgment, the day of the great assize, wherein all men shall receive their final doom and sentence, called by St. Peter " the day of the Lord." Again, what is that "congregation of the righteous," wherein "no sinner shall appear?" 

Surely there neither is, nor ever was, nor ever will be, any such unmixed company of righteous men to be found in this world. Here the chaff and the wheat, the good and bad, are mingled together; but a winnowing time of judgment will come, wherein "the wicked shall be as the chaff which the wind driveth away," (as the Psalmist expresseth it,) and nothing but the pure and clean wheat shall remain, and be laid up in God's granary. There shall then (as our Saviour assures us) be a congregation or gathering together, from one end of the heavens to the other, of all God's elect, who have been from the beginning of the world; which being placed at the right hand of the Judge, shall receive that joyful sentence, "Come ye blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world." In this congregation of the righteous, no sinner shall be found: the ungodly shall be placed altogether in another herd, at the Judge's left hand, and hear that dreadful sentence, "Go, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels." This is the clear sense of those words of the Psalmist, "The ungodly are not so : but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away. Therefore, the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous." And by these texts it is evident, that David believed a future state and a judgment to come.

(The photograph is of St. Davids Cathedral, Pembrokeshire. Bull was Bishop of St. Davids 1705-10.)