Sowing and Reaping
(6:7-10)

Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh shall from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit shall from the Spirit reap eternal life. And let us not lose heart in doing good, for in due time we shall reap if we do not grow weary. So then, while we have opportunity, let us do good to all men, and especially to those who are of the household of the faith. (6:7-10)

The universe is under the control of inviolable laws, as scientists and other learned men throughout history have recognized. The physical sciences are, in essence, the study of those physical laws. Apart from the consistent operation of absolute laws, science as we know it could not exist.

One evidence of the Bible’s divine authorship is that, insofar as it touches on science, it is always accurate—although it was written several millennia before most of the scientific truths it touches on were humanly discovered. Only the Being who made the universe could have given information to the human writers of Scripture that was unerringly consistent with every proven law and fact of science.

The eminent geologist James Dwight Dale told a graduating class at Yale University, “As you face scientific problems, remember that. . . there is nothing truer in the universe than scientific statements in the Word of God.”

The sacred writings of Hindus, Buddhists, and other pagan religions reflect and even teach the most bizarre ideas about the nature and operation of the universe. Science could never have originated out of such religions because they have no concept of divine design, order, and operation. Without exception, their cosmologies are built on blind chance or the capricious whims of manlike deities. The idea of a divinely ordered universe regulated by absolute laws is completely foreign to their most basic beliefs.

The Bible, on the other hand, not only is accurate when it relates physical facts but clearly teaches that the universe is orderly and dependable, and not by accident or chance but by the sovereign design and power of God, its Creator. God “stretches out the north over empty space, and hangs the earth on nothing,” Job declared. “He wraps up the waters in His clouds; and the cloud does not burst under them. . . . He has inscribed a circle on the surface of the waters, at the boundary of light and darkness” (Job 26:7-8, 10). Long before the voyages of Columbus and other adventurers proved the earth was round, Isaiah wrote, “It is He who sits above the vault of the earth” (Isa. 40:22). The Hebrew hûg (“vault”), which literally refers to a circle and is so translated in many versions, can also mean sphere. Yet the idea of the earth’s being round, much less spherical and suspended in space, was unknown to the ancient world.

It is grossly inconsistent for philosophers to argue that there are no moral absolutes, when everything physical that can be observed and measured is clearly and undeniably regulated by absolute and inviolable laws—apart from which even the smallest organism or subsystem in our vast and intricate universe could not operate.

Even the ancient Greeks recognized that there was a standard of right and wrong, a basic kind of moral sowing and reaping. According to their mythology, the goddess Nemesis sought out and punished every person who became inordinately proud and arrogant. No matter how much they might seek to evade her, she always found her victims and executed her sentence.

The Bible elucidates absolute moral law very clearly and frequently. For example, God had “granted sovereignty, grandeur, glory, and majesty to Nebuchadnezzar,” but because of the king’s arrogant pride, the Lord deposed him from the throne and made him become like a wild animal that ate grass. “Yet you, his son,” Daniel declared before Belshazzar during the great banquet in Babylon, “have not humbled your heart, even though you knew all this, but you have exalted yourself against the Lord of heaven; and they have brought the vessels of His house before you, and you and your nobles, your wives and your concubines have been drinking wine from them; and you have praised the gods of silver and gold, of bronze, iron, wood and stone, which do not see, hear or understand. But the God in whose hand are your life-breath and your ways, you have not glorified.” That is why “the hand was sent from Him, and this inscription was written out,” the prophet went on to explain, an inscription whose interpretation was: “God has numbered your kingdom and put an end to it. . . . you have been weighed on the scales and found deficient. . . . your kingdom has been divided and given over to the Medes and Persians” (Dan. 5:18-28).

The modern world has its own Belshazzars. Ernest Hemingway became famous for snubbing his nose at morality and at God, declaring that his own life proved a person could do anything he wanted without paying the consequences. Like many others before and after him, he considered the ideas of the Bible to be antiquated and outdated, completely useless to modern man and a hindrance to his pleasure and self-fulfillment. Moral laws were to him a religious superstition that had no relevance. In a mocking parody of the Lord’s Prayer he wrote, “Our nada [Spanish for “nothing”] who art in nada.” But instead of proving the impunity of infidelity, the end of Hemingway’s life proved the folly of mocking God. His debauched life led him into such complete despair and hopelessness that he put a bullet in his head.

Other famous authors, such as Sinclair Lewis and Oscar Wilde, who openly attacked the divine moral standard and thumbed their noses at God, mocking His Word and His law, were nonetheless subject to that law Lewis died a pathetic alcoholic in a third-rate clinic in Italy, and Wilde ended up an imprisoned homosexual, in shame and disgrace. Near the end of his life he wrote, “I forgot somewhere along the line that what you are in secret you will some day cry aloud from the housetop.”

Until the last days there will continue to be “mockers, following after their own ungodly lusts” (Jude 18). But their “end is destruction, whose god is their appetite, and whose glory is in their shame” (Phil. 3:19).

In every dimension, including the moral and spiritual, the universe is structured on inexorable laws. In Galatians 6:7-10, Paul uses a well-known law of botany—that a given seed can reproduce only its own kind—to illustrate God’s parallel and equally inviolable laws in the moral and spiritual realms.

Paul has completed the presentation of his main thesis, that legalism, in particular the legalism of the Judaizers, has no part either in receiving or in living the Christian life. After giving instruction for spiritual believers to restore their sinning brothers who have fallen to the flesh, he now admonishes any of the fallen brethren who might presume upon God’s grace and resent being rebuked and offered help.

Do not be deceived, he warns them, God is not mocked. Deceived is from plana, which has the primary meaning of leading astray. In part, the apostle was calling on the misguided Galatians to stop being deceived by others, because many of them had been led astray, or “bewitched” (3:1), by the Judaizers into thinking that obedience to the Mosaic law, represented especially by circumcision, was necessary for receiving and living the Christian life (2:15-21; 3:2-3; 4:8-11).

The great danger of false teachers is not only in the evil of the teachings themselves but in their being taught as God’s truth. A person who teaches heresy in the name of Satan, or simply on the basis of his own authority, seldom has much influence, especially in the church. It has always been and will continue to be false teachers who claim to teach in God’s name who are the most destructive. “Evil men and impostors will proceed from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived” (2 Tim. 3:13). During the last days, Jesus said, such deceptive teachers will multiply greatly in both numbers and influence. “For false Christs and false prophets will arise and will show great signs and wonders, so as to mislead, if possible, even the elect” (Matt. 24:24).

It is for that reason that careful and consistent teaching of the full counsel of God’s Word is so important, not only for building up the church in the Lord but also for protecting it against being weakened and destroyed. An untaught believer is a weak believer and therefore a vulnerable believer. Scripture not only is the believer’s food but also his armor (Eph. 6:10-17).

The supreme deceiver, of course, is Satan, who, “whenever he speaks a lie,. . . speaks from his own nature; for he is a liar, and the father of lies” (John 8:44). The Lord assures His children that Satan’s conquest is certain, that “the serpent of old who is called the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world [will be] thrown down to the earth, and his angels . . . thrown down with him” (Rev 12:9). But in the meanwhile he is the great adversary, whose chief purpose is to deceive and destroy.

But the strongest implication of Paul’s warning in Galatians 6:7 seems to be that misled believers were deceiving themselves. As Jeremiah warns, “The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick” (Jer. 17:9; cf. Obad. 3). “Therefore, just because you are saved,” Paul was essentially saying, “don’t think you can sin with impunity. You are terribly deceived if you think that God does not deal severely with sin in the lives of His children—including the sin of legalism, which substitutes man’s work for God’s.”

John specifically warns believers that, “if we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). James gives a similar warning to those who think it is enough simply to know God’s Word without obeying it: “Prove yourselves doers of the word,” he says, “and not merely hearers who delude themselves” (James 1:22).

When believers fail to acknowledge the reality or seriousness of sin in their lives, their hearts are deceived and God is . . . mocked. The second consequence is by far the worse, because it amounts to treating the Lord with contempt. Mocked is from mukteriz, which literally means to turn up one’s nose, and therefore to scorn or sneer. In the passage cited above from his first letter, John declares that for a Christian to deny his sin is to make God a liar (1 John 1:10) and to mock His absolute holiness.

For a believer to sin willingly in any way and to any degree is to deny his Lord. But to sin while thinking he is somehow immune from God’s standard of holiness is to mock the Lord and to mimic the world.

In Galatians 6:7b-10, Paul drives home the point that even believers can become guilty of mocking God and that being saved does not exempt them from the inexorable consequences of His law of sowing and reaping. After stating and explaining this divine law, he then shows how it is spiritually fulfilled and applied.

THE DIVINE LAW STATED

for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap. (6:7b)

In its literal, physical sense, that rudimentary law of agriculture is self-evident. It is absolutely universal, applying equally to every farmer and gardener in every time and place—to the young and the old, the experienced and the inexperienced, the wise and the foolish, and the saved and the unsaved. It is as impartial, predictable, and immutable as the law of gravity. There are no exceptions, and the person who plants the seed makes no difference at all in the law’s operation. Whatever he sows, this he will also reap.

On arriving home after vacation, our family discovered a large, strange plant thriving in the garden. It proved to be a giant sunflower, which, as it was later discovered, had been planted there by a friend as a practical joke. Despite our perplexity, however, the idea never entered our minds that the plant could somehow have sprung up from a carrot, cucumber, or squash seed. Before we had any idea as to how the plant came to be in the garden, we knew it had grown from a sunflower seed and no other kind. In the natural world men never question the law of sowing and reaping.

But the principle is just as true in the moral and spiritual realms, although men’s sin and self-deception often prevent them from seeing or acknowledging it. God’s Word is clear. “Those who plow iniquity and those who sow trouble harvest it” (Job 4:8). Those who spurn God’s way “shall eat of the fruit of their own way, and be satiated with their own devices. For the waywardness of the naive shall kill them, and the complacency of fools shall destroy them. But he who listens to [God’s wisdom] shall live securely, and shall be at ease from the dread of evil” (Prov 1:31-33; cf. 11:18). The wicked “sow the wind, and they reap the whirlwind,” whereas those who “sow with a view to righteousness, reap in accordance with kindness” (Hos. 8:7; 10:12).

To a great extent, a person’s character is the product of seeds planted in his early life. A child brought up to have his own way will grow into an adult who wants his own way. One English writer observed, “What strikes me more and more each day is the permanence of one’s early life, the identity between youth and manhood. Every habit, good and bad, of those early years seems to have permanently affected my whole life. The battle is largely won or lost before it seems to begin.”

That observation does not surprise the person who knows Scripture. “Train up a child in the way he should go,” it teaches, and “even when he is old he will not depart from it” (Prov 22:6).

The law of sowing and reaping is just as valid in the spiritual as in the physical and moral realms. The frustration and hopelessness of humanistic psychology, psychiatry, and counseling can be traced, among other things, to their refusal to consider the immutable spiritual law of sowing and reaping. A person’s character cannot change until his nature is changed, and that can happen only through the new creation that comes from trust in Jesus Christ.

“Be sure your sin will find you out,” God warned ancient Israel (Num. 32:23). “Thou hast placed our iniquities before Thee, our secret sins in the light of Thy presence” (Ps. 90:8), the psalmist confessed. In the spiritual world a person sows what he reaps. “There will be tribulation and distress for every soul of man who does evil, . . . but glory and honor and peace to every man who does good” (Rom. 2:9-10).

The law of sowing and reaping is not contradicted by the gospel of grace. The law of salvation in Jesus Christ is, in fact, the ultimate demonstration of that law Jesus Christ sowed perfect righteousness and reaped eternal life, which He gives to those who trust in His finished work. The believer reaps eternal life because, in faith, he is united with Christ and with what He has sown and reaped on man’s behalf.

But the believer is not thereby exempt from all the consequences of his own sowing. He will never reap the ultimate consequences of sin, which are death and judgment, because his Lord already reaped those consequences for him. But he continues to reap the earthly heartaches, wounds, shame, and pain of his sins and foolishness. God’s law of cause and effect still operates in the lives of His children.

A genuine feeling of guilt reaped from sin is a believer’s ally and friend. It is God’s warning that something is wrong. When heeded, true guilt is purifying, because it prevents a person from committing a sin or, after he has committed it, will lead him to repentance—in light of which the Lord “is faithful and righteous to forgive [his] sins and to cleanse [him] from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).

THE DIVINE LAW EXPLAINED

For the one who sows to his own flesh shall from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit shall from the Spirit reap eternal life. (6:8)

The Christian has only two “fields” in which he can sow, that of his own flesh and that of the Spirit. As has been stated, the flesh refers to the believer’s uncleansed humanness, which awaits the day of glorification (Rom. 8:23). But in the meanwhile it can produce all manner of selfish, fleshly desires that are contrary to God’s will and standards and are expressed in everything from blatant immorality to cold indifference to the things of the Lord. The flesh is the residence of sin that still remains in a believer’s life (Rom. 7:18). The person who sows to his own flesh panders to its evil desires instead of letting the Spirit subdue it. He submits to its passions instead of overcoming it.

The particular sin that Paul addresses so strongly throughout this letter is the sin of legalism, particularly that of the heretical Judaizers, who undermined the gospel of grace by placing human works between Christ’s sacrifice and man’s salvation. Because that sin was so centered in the flesh, it led to countless other sins. It turned believers back to their own resources and power, in which they could do nothing but stumble from one trespass to another, producing only the deeds of the flesh (see 5:19-21; 6:1).

Corruption is from phthora, which refers to degeneration, going from better to worse. It was sometimes used of decaying food, which turns from that which is beneficial to that which is harmful. The deeds of the flesh are always corruptive and can only make a person progressively worse. The ultimate corruption is eternal death, the wages of sin (Rom. 6:23).

Although his trust in Christ saves him from spiritual death, a sinning believer can nevertheless reap corruption, suffering physical death and many other tragic earthly consequences, as did some of the unrepentant Corinthians (1 Cor. 11:30).

The British evangelical leader John R. W Stott has written, “Every time we allow our mind to harbor a grudge, nurse a grievance, entertain an impure fancy, wallow in self-pity, we are sowing to the flesh. Every time we linger in bad company whose insidious influence we know we cannot resist, every time we lie in bed when we ought to be up and praying, every time we read pornographic literature, every time we take a risk that strains our self-control we are sowing, sowing, sowing, to the flesh” (The Message of Galatians [London: Inter-Varsity, 1968], p. 170).

On the other hand, the believer who sows to the Spirit shall from the Spirit reap eternal life. The Christian who is preoccupied with the things of God rather than the fleshly things of the world will produce the fruit of the Spirit (5:22-23). To sow to the Spirit is the same as to walk by the Spirit (5:16), to be led by the Spirit (5: 18), and to be filled with the Spirit (Eph. 5:18). It is the same as abiding in Christ and in His Word and having His words abide in us (John 8:31; 15:7). It is the same as walking in Christ (Col. 2:6) and setting one’s “mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth” (3:2). It is the same as giving one’s body as “a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God,” and not being “conformed to this world, but [being] transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom. 12:1-2).

The product of sowing to the Spirit is eternal life. It is not that only Spirit-filled believers go to heaven. Every believer goes to heaven because every believer is forever a child of God and a citizen of God’s kingdom.

Throughout Scripture, eternal life refers primarily to quality, not duration. The believer begins participating in eternal life the moment he trusts in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. But just as his life does not always perfectly reflect the righteousness he has before God in Christ, neither does it always perfectly reflect the eternal quality of life he has in Him.

Because it is external, no sin in a believer’s life can separate him from eternal life, but any sin in his life corrupts his reflection and enjoyment of that eternal life. That is why some Christians are among the most miserable, unhappy, and wretched of people. A persistently sinning believer can sometimes be more miserable than an unbeliever, simply because his sin is in constant conflict with and warring against his new nature in Christ. The sinning Christian has a battle raging within him that an unbeliever never experiences. The believer who sows to his own flesh does not lose the Spirit, but he loses the fruit of the Spirit, among which are love, joy, peace, and patience (5:22). David did not pray, “Restore my salvation to me,” but, “Restore to me the joy of Thy salvation” (Ps. 51:12).

That fruit represents all the blessings of a life sown to the Spirit, life that, in faithfulness and obedience, fully enjoys “every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ” and “the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints” (Eph. 1:3, 18).

THE DIVINE LAW FULFILLED

And let us not lose heart in doing good, for in due time we shall reap if we do not grow weary. (6:9)

For those who walk and sow in the Spirit, the fruit of patience (see 5:22) often seems among the most elusive. After years of faithful, unselfish service to the Lord, a believer may have experienced little obvious evidence of the Lord’s blessing. Like Paul, he may have more problems, frustrations, and persecution at the end of his life than he had when he was a new believer.

The Puritan saint John Brown wrote, “Many Christians are like children; they would sow and reap the same day.” It is easy to become tired of sowing and be anxious for the harvest.

Lose heart is from enkake and grow weary is from eklu. Both terms carry the ideas of becoming exhausted and giving up. They are the opposite of being “steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your toil is not in vain in the Lord” (1 Cor. 15:58). It was to counter the temptation to lose heart and grow weary that the writer of Hebrews said,

Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance, and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you may not grow weary and lose heart. (Heb. 12:1-3)

Sometimes, of course, the problem is not spiritual weariness but spiritual laziness, becoming weary from doing nothing rather than from doing good. Sometimes the problem is spiritual hypocrisy, hearing and talking about serving the Lord but doing little of it (cf. James 1:22).

But when a believer is genuinely and persistently faithful in doing good, he has God’s assurance that in due time he shall reap. As in regard to reaping eternal life (v 8), Paul is not talking here about salvation but about blessing, and ultimately eternal reward. He is saying that it is possible to serve God for a long time and then to give up and lose blessing here and reward in glory. The apostle John warned, “Watch yourselves, that you might not lose what we have accomplished, but that you may receive a full reward” (2 John 8).

Paul knew what it was not to lose heart and grow weary in the Lord’s work. On the shore near Miletus, he declared to the elders from Ephesus, “I do not consider my life of any account as dear to myself, in order that I may finish my course, and the ministry which I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify solemnly of the gospel of the grace of God” (Acts 20:24). To the Corinthian church he said,

Since we have this ministry, as we received mercy, we do not lose heart, but we have renounced the things hidden because of shame, not walking in craftiness or adulterating the word of God, but by the manifestation of truth commending ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God. . . . We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body, . . . knowing that He who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and will present us with you. (2 Cor. 4:1-2, 8-10,14)

Paul reaped blessing in this life because he never gave up. He called the Thessalonian believers his “joy or crown of salvation” (1 Thess. 2:19). At the end of his life he could say, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith; in the future there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day; and not only to me, but also to all who have loved His appearing” (2 Tim. 4:7-8). The reaping is both in this life and in the life to come.

THE DIVINE LAW APPLIED

So then, while we have opportunity, let us do good to all men, and especially to those who are of the household of the faith. (6:10)

Here is a final, practical injunction that goes with the principle of sowing and reaping, given as a guide to believers in their walk in the Spirit.

Opportunity translates kairos, which literally refers to a fixed and distinct period of time. The phrase while we have does not refer to occasional opportunities that may arise in a believer’s life but to the total opportunity of his present earthly existence. The idea is, while we have opportunity during our life on earth. In other words, a believer’s entire life is his unique but limited opportunity to serve others in the Lord’s name. The idea is also implied of seeking for and even making particular opportunities within the broader opportunity of our time on earth. The reflexive exhortation, let us do is from ergazomai, which means to be active, to work effectively and diligently, and is here a self-call to great effort in taking every opportunity to sow for God’s glory.

Good is from agathos and has a definite article in front of it in the Greek. In other words, Paul is speaking of a particular good, the good. It is the agathos goodness of moral and spiritual excellence that is a fruit of the Spirit (5:22), not simply kalos goodness that is limited to physical and temporal things. It is the internal goodness produced by the Spirit in the hearts of obedient believers, which then finds expression in external goodness spoken by his mouth and performed by his hands.

It is also good that is unqualified and unrestricted, to be shown all men, including unbelievers. “For such is the will of God,” Peter said, “that by doing right you may silence the ignorance of foolish men” (1 Pet. 2:15). One of the best ways to thwart criticism of Christianity is for Christians to do good to unbelievers. Loving concern will do more to win a person to Christ than the most carefully articulated argument. The heart of every Christian testimony should be kindness. “In all things show yourself to be an example of good deeds,” Paul admonished Titus, “with purity in doctrine, dignified, sound in speech which is beyond reproach, in order that the opponent may be put to shame, having nothing bad to say about us” (Titus 2:7-8). Later in the same letter Paul says, “Concerning these things I want you to speak confidently, so that those who have believed God may be careful to engage in good deeds. These things are good and profitable for men” (3:8).

As important as doing good to unbelievers is, however, it is especially to be demonstrated to those who are of the household of the faith. The first test of our love for God is our love for His other children, our brothers and sisters in Christ. “We know that we have passed out of death into life,” John says, “because we love the brethren” (John 3:14). “If someone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from Him, that the one who loves god should love his brother also” (4:20-21).

Such sowing makes for joyful reaping, and it is also dynamic testimony to those outside salvation. How we treat each other is our greatest attraction to a world seeking love, kindness, and compassion.