Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.
God cannot be deceived, cheated, defied or treated with contempt, and whatever a person sows that person will also reap in corresponding harvest. This is a fixed, eternal and inescapable law of moral cause and effect, as certain as the processes of nature and the movements of the planets. Like always produces like, and the harvest is of the same kind and character as the sowing but in far greater abundance, as an act becomes a habit, a habit character, and character destiny. Sowing to the flesh by living for self and gratifying fallen desire reaps corruption, decay and death, while sowing to the Spirit by receiving God's Word and living in obedience reaps righteousness and everlasting incorruptible life. All that is thought, said and done is sown now and recorded in heaven, to be reaped in fixed destiny when each is judged from the books and meets words, deeds and influence again.
Warning Against Being Deceived
Be not deceived means no one can mock, deceive, cheat, defy, treat with contempt or evade God, for whatever a person sows that same person will also reap in corresponding harvest. The principle is as sure as the laws of nature, with each kind of seed producing its own kind and its own body, and the harvest coming in greater abundance than the sowing. It is Infinite Love pleading with people now not to be deceived about this law, given as a faithful warning to save them from sowing to the flesh and reaping corruption, death and exclusion from the kingdom. Sowing seeds of death, pain and woe cannot produce life, while planting Christ the living Seed shows Christ in words and deeds and yields Him as harvest day by day and fully when the King appears. God's mercy provides all needed for life and godliness and sanctification now, but it does not make His word false or remove the harvest of a life spent in sin.
Sincerity, good intentions, ignorance, being deceived about what was chosen, knowledge, status, profession of faith or confident persuasion do not cancel the harvest or allow escape from consequences and judgment. In religious matters sincerity does not cancel the consequence of believing falsely or disregarding God's word, just as in worldly affairs careless deception brings consequences, and the principle applies at the judgment. Sowing the wrong seed brings bad fruit just as surely when deceived about its nature as when knowingly choosing it, and rejecting God's truth while firmly convinced it is false still reaps unbelief's result. Mere wishing and so-called sincerity about a good time coming cannot fool God, and many who only sit and hope will be disappointed.
The warning exposes self-deception and the danger of following by nature a course leading to disaster while expecting to escape its result, as seed produces its kind and a tree its own fruit. It calls for examination by God's Word, for distrust of self and trust in God, and for testing teachings by Scripture, since religion is of the heart which God alone knows and can deal with. Only God's revelation of self and of God delivers from the greatest danger of deceiving oneself, for turning from truth does not make it disappear and willful unbelief that shuts the eyes to proof and tries to remove evidence cannot escape its fitting outcome.
Empty religious profession, outward show, form and hypocrisy cannot deceive God, who looks on the heart rather than outward appearance and knows whether it is wholly devoted to His service or given to worldly things. A life not corresponding with profession shows faith dead, and profession without doing is an abomination marked in heaven as not known, for no furnishings, promises, profession or appearance can deceive Him in judgment while human agencies can be fooled. Those who appear to defy Him or rely on empty profession really harm themselves and their eternal interests, for neglect of known duties or knowingly doing wrong is not hidden by profession. Sincere seekers live in keeping with profession by good works and self-denial even in food and dress to honor God rather than indulgence.
Satan walks as an angel of light in every assembly of Christian workers and in every church to win members, most earnestly seeking to ensnare those who have had most light so under his control they clothe sin with garments of righteousness and lead many astray. He works as planter as well as reaper, never presenting pure wickedness but concealing each lie in truth and diluting each drop of poison in pleasant nourishment, sowing invisible germs of evil among good through borderland indulgences, mild fictions, captivating plays, barely questionable pictures, doubtful tastes and free samples that create craving. By disguised deadly error even in Christian language and Scripture phrases, by pleasing false theories and broader philosophy and liberality, he leads even well-informed believers to disguise sin as righteousness, and while such misleading speculative theories are cherished there can be no unity with ministers bearing the gospel message.
Prayer, singing and worship mock God when the heart rejects holiness, cherishes sin or refuses duty. Praying for deliverance or holiness while continuing to indulge sin is self-deception and mockery, for prayer must be joined with hatred of sin and faithful effort to overcome it. A prayer offered falsely without a true heart cannot bring the genuine result sought but yields deception, as sowing cockle cannot produce wheat, and one alternating between flesh and formal profession of Spirit should not expect answer on the promise to ask and receive. Asking to know the ways of the Lord without a true heart is a prayer-lie on the lips reaping only self-deception and disappointment, and seeking a prayerful excuse to disobey His clearly spoken word brings displeasure rather than blessing. A father who prays for his children's conversion while his choices and example lead them toward worldliness, selfishness or frivolity mocks God, for he must work in harmony with his prayers toward godliness.
Excusing conduct, siding with wrongdoing, excusing children's rebellion or treating youthful wrong as a necessary phase does not cancel judgment. Even the young who sow to the flesh reap corruption, and youthful misconduct is not erased by growing older or reaching adulthood but must be answered for. Eli's sons illustrate the warning, for their sinful course ended in miserable deaths by the Philistines, and excusing gross immorality and siding with its doers sows to the flesh unto corruption and suffering.
God is not indifferent when people disregard His counsel, as Nadab and Abihu destroyed by fire for disobedience show. Holiday recreation and preparations should therefore honor God rather than be ruled by pride, vanity or desire to please the world. Those doing God's work must practice strict temperance, keep the whole being under God's protection and not tempt His Spirit, for consequences match sowing.
God cannot be fooled by mere wishing and so-called sincerity about a good time coming, and rewards and punishments soon come in the last days according to the eternal truths of His Word. Many who only sit and hope will be disappointed, for what a person sows determines what is reaped. People must therefore turn from watchmen and theories that withhold the message for the time, and search for themselves and follow Christ speaking through that Word to eternal inheritance beyond evil.
God is not mocked and cannot be deceived, and He does not mock His children. His promises are yes and amen in Christ, real and enduring, not phantom hopes, illusions, counterfeits or fables. He does not mock the discouraged sinner, for His appeals through the Spirit prove He truly wants return, and while the Spirit still bids turn the case is not hopeless. Nor can He be mocked by avoiding conviction of sin, for conviction does not make the sinner worse but reveals true condition and opens the way to the One who remedies every defect and washes away every sin.
Costly worship buildings, educational institutions and philanthropy do not compensate disobedience or make up for disloyalty. God's law and Sabbath remain unchanged requiring loyal faithful observance, delayed punishment does not mean evil goes unanswered, and true safety and happiness come from faithfulness and devotion while those who fear God fare well and the wicked do not. God cannot be fooled or trifled with over the Sabbath, for saying it makes no difference what day is kept is deceiving oneself. Trying to get Him to accept a different day instead of what He required mocks Him, since He blessed and sanctified the definite seventh day with sanctifying power and special blessing superior to every other day and gave no authority to any person, church or even apostles to sanctify another in its place. Those who try to do away with the Lord's Sabbath while professing to love Christ and await His coming deceive themselves, for following Jesus and readiness to meet Him require keeping the Father's commandments as Jesus did. Knowing His law but refusing obedience because inconvenient, especially in keeping the seventh day, brings consequences, and willingness to do right only when convenient does not excuse. Calling Sunday God's holy day without biblical proof does not make it so, and ministers whose confident teaching that Sunday is the Sabbath and use of the fourth commandment to support it, or who teach first-day observance under cover of Christianity in place of the seventh day, will reap that perversion though God desires them to learn now.
A young man's crime, ruined character and wasted life harvest ignoring instruction and choosing folly, for God's spiritual laws cannot be broken without consequence and belief that wrongdoing brings no spiritual disease or death mocks Him. Early disobedience beginning a course to crime and execution leaves sorrow for a wife and shame for a child, with penalty borne by parent and child, and those who mock admonition, reject advice, hate instruction and despise reproof suffer sorrows following rashness and disobedience. God cannot be mocked over sexual immorality, which brings judgment and requires personal and social purity. Excusing a young man's misconduct and lowering purity's standard sows a harvest of sorrow accountable before God's judgment, though society excuses the man and shames the woman, for His record will expose and right unjust judgments. Lusts of the eye and pride of life in sexual sin and luxurious living bring disease and death, and publications spreading songs and pictures making impurity acceptable sow vice that cannot produce a pure society. Cartoons, stories and songs jesting at marriage's sacredness plant seeds reaped in divorce courts and moral ruin, leading through jest and song to think disloyalty to the lifelong pledge not so bad until moral sentiment breaks down and the individual becomes sin's plaything.
God cannot be trifled with by partial obedience compromising His authority to gratify self. Lot's wife shows this, for though willing to obey in everything else she disobeyed in one little particular by looking back to gratify longing for children and home, reasoning God would not insist on so small a thing if she kept pressing on, and for that act was instantly destroyed as a monument of wrath for all ages, losing soul and body and all she coveted. Attempting to please God by obeying a different law or doing works other than those the gospel requires likewise mocks God and insults the Holy One of Israel. He requires walking in Christ's steps to a guileless state, and the requirement is attainable, so people must strive for complete victory, trust His promised help and not lower the standard or claim inability to obey, since that limits His power.
The warning not to be deceived rejects optimistic claims that the world is being converted while tolerated and respectable sins and scientific heresies taking the edge from the Gospel harden hearts against truth, with old-time piety and integrity rare and faith in the atonement wanting, so the mass within and without the church drift to doom and reap what they sow. This does not make Jesus Christ and the Gospel failures, for Christ is able to save to the uttermost all desiring salvation and to win souls from sin's wreck. God is not mocked by a character built on any foundation but Jesus Christ, for every other foundation will fail in the last-day storms. A foundation may seem almost as hard as rock, a thousand-year creed, a self-righteous character, hoary traditions of the fathers, something centuries old or lying very near the Rock, yet if not the very Living Rock itself the rain of error will loosen it and sweep it to destruction, and only building on the sure foundation laid in Zion, letting self be crushed on the Rock Christ Jesus, builds an eternal pure character.
Fixed Law of Harvest
The verse states an eternal, fixed, immutable, inescapable law of moral cause and effect, continually demonstrated in nature, where each kind of seed produces its own kind and is given its own body, as certain as gravitation and the orbits of planets and the earth turning on its axis. It cannot be evaded or mocked, and teachings that promise a different harvest, or a harvest without sowing, are deceptive. Deeds bring corresponding consequences for good or ill and follow the person to determine reward, in contrast with the possibility of atonement held by some.
Like produces like, and the harvest is of the same kind and character as the sowing but in far greater abundance and many times over, as a handful sown yields a bushel reaped and sowing wind yields whirlwind, spreading like wildfire because influence travels in every direction. An act becomes a habit, a habit character, and character destiny. Evil sown brings a far larger harvest of evil and good sown a far larger harvest of good that keeps increasing the farther it travels, so that eternity alone reveals the full good done; therefore no bad seed should be sown because it spreads, while good seed should be sown bountifully. A righteous God-loving life can influence others toward righteousness through succeeding generations unto eternal life, while an unrighteous life spreads corruption unto eternal death, though human choices can check righteousness and God works against sin for those seeking release, so sin and its influence are neither limitless nor eternal.
Unlike literal farming, where storm, drought, short seasons or other calamity can destroy the crop, this moral harvest never fails and holds no contingency, needing no watering or enriching of soil to produce corruption from flesh-sowing, which neither drought nor flood can stop. Delay, the prosperity of the dishonest, or apparent success in wrongdoing does not cancel it, for the harvest may ripen slowly and come soon or long afterward in God's time, with the seed reaching perfection above the earth. Secret fraud and deceptive business remain sinful even when undiscovered, because concealment deceives others but cheats the wrongdoer, since life's harvest is character determining destiny in this life and the life to come. No arbitrary interference will remove the dire results, leaving only the sower to blame, because nature and providence offer no forgiveness while revealed forgiveness comes only on conditions.
Sowing must come before reaping and without sowing there is no harvest; this lifetime is the sowing time and eternity the harvest time, the present limited season deciding the future, so people must watch what they sow, prepare now to reap life, and cannot rightly expect a different crop or complain of the result. The most common action of every day and hour sows seed for a great harvest extending into eternity, to be met again when graves give up their dead and the past gives up all it holds to witness for or against each person. The future is the consequence of the present, for time does not turn sin into virtue or create moral progress but reveals and intensifies existing tendencies; a better future comes not by waiting for easier circumstances but by confronting sin and leaving harmful companionships and temptations in settled penitence and trust, and by giving time, means and influence for God's work. Life yields thorns or flowers according to planting, with furrows watered with tears before the ripe harvest is gathered.
The law governs universally and eternally every responsible person and also companies, trusts, nations, governments, churches, families and cities, with no escape and with God's justice impartial. It applies independently across areas of life, so obeying health laws brings health even to the dishonest while neglecting health brings suffering even to the honest, and those sowing only for this world receive only this world's rewards because they have not sown for eternity. A church abandoning the Bible as its rule of faith, denying Christ's divinity and saving power, and turning to the state instead of the Holy Spirit cannot expect its course to end well whatever its wealth, education or charitable works, and churches neglecting warnings against covetousness while encouraging material gratification, luxury, fashion and pride bring fitting consequences on themselves.
Consequences are the natural harvest contained in the act, not arbitrary sentences imposed by decree, so no one can deceive God or destroy or escape the certain result, though people can deceive others for now about past lives. God permits and watches over the outcome and allows correction through suffering limited to what is needed to lead to change of course; when the wrong is recognized and repented of, Christ bears its consequences, but if not turned from, the intended blessing of correction is experienced as punishment. Present suffering is disciplinary and may be escaped, while final punishment is retributive and everlasting; present suffering does not justify or save for the future but demonstrates that sin brings evil and points to its final result, with sin moving toward death and its full end coming only when its course is complete. God in mercy leaves people to reap what they sow and gather fruit of self-plotting for gain and worldly greed, mingling His blessed bestowing with tare and thistle, to reveal His goodness and teach walking by faith in His way so as not to suffer again and again; repentance and surrender do not erase the past but God can build a new life from old experiences and turn their effects toward blessing.
The fixed law governs physical health and spiritual rest, where only what is sown is reaped. Satan denies it by suggesting good sowing will fail and evil sowing may escape, offering a shorter way of reaping without sowing through instant miraculous health apart from physical habits or moral condition; this evasion of sowing and reaping is evasion of obedience to divine law, and every apparent miracle of his aims to draw the mind from obedience, so the verse warns the elect to discern beneath miracles wearing truth's garb and hold to living principles rather than seeking manifestations. People should not ask for health while refusing God's laws of life and health and persisting in unhealthy habits, for neglect brings its consequences as sowing brings reaping.
Lasting good requires paying its price, and trying to gain by dishonest or sinful means ultimately brings ruin, with no exemption for the rich. Gain by fraud or sin is experienced even in this life as guilt, an accusing conscience and loss of peace, and failure is the fitting result of self-indulgence. Sin's apparent gains do not last, for what seems pleasant when sown may produce bitter destructive fruit, so every seeming advantage by compromise is really loss and a step backward; dishonest covetous schemes bring punishment even when the doer expects to keep the money and avoid capture, in disgrace, loss of family and home, imprisonment, suicide or ruined life.
Each person makes life failure or victory by fixed law that cannot be denied, escaped or changed by ignorance and is plainly made known, since the planting is one's own living and habits binding with iron strength, proving imprisonment voluntary and self-willed. Yet even under that law there is hope, for Christ commands every yoke broken and is able to save fully those who come to Him, calling the captive to loose himself and hasten to blood-bought freedom instead of dying in the pit. Continued indulgence strengthens sin's hold, deepens aversion to God and leaves increasing enslavement, so indifference or hard-heartedness toward divine truth is the reaping of what was sown.
Transgression brings grief, sorrow, pain and woe to the sinner and those around, and suffering throughout the world testifies to sin's consequences. Wrongdoing does not bring the good its doers hope for, and trying to harm others for gain does not escape consequence, as the path of sin ends in shame and suffering illustrated by the prodigal's misery and ruin by strong drink. Harm by cruelty returns its sorrow upon its cause, raising how much will be charged to the one who caused glad hearts to be made sad.
Sowing sin while expecting future happiness is like sowing cockle and expecting wheat or barley, which cannot be. God permits consequences of disobedience to teach that perverted law brings destructive results unto decay and death, with earth's shakings showing it waxing old toward dissolution. Jacob's trouble followed his own wrongdoing, and acknowledging sin brought recognition of God's presence and help, for reaping cannot be avoided while sowing continues and the way to avoid it is to stop sowing.
The verse is a divine unchanging prophecy that cannot fail because God cannot be mocked or deceived; what is sown determines what is reaped, with flesh-sowing reaping corruption. Those heeding it become willing glad witnesses to His power, wisdom, goodness and love, while those refusing it still become unwilling witnesses by eating their own way's fruit and receiving sin's wages, witnessing even in unholy abasement until the final fulfillment before the great white throne when every knee bows and every tongue confesses. A person may now declare God and His Word false, prefer human theories and seem successful for a while, but sooner or later even a truthless life will to everlasting shame prove the infallible Word true; the privilege is to side with the Word now and bear willing witness in righteousness like Moses, Samuel, Elijah and Jesus rather than unwilling witness at last like Pharaoh, Saul, Ahab and Caiaphas. Persistent obstinacy and resistance to light produce increasing unbelief and hardness, as Pharaoh's each rejection made further rejection easier until left hardened, and denying Bible creation brings consequences in keeping with that rejection.
God's sowing-reaping law is unalterable as the Second Commandment throughout His universe, so temporary apparent change does not remove consequences while producing habits remain, as indulging foods provoking irritability keeps that disposition from permanent overcoming. Life is not governed by chance, and the religious world's alienation, coldness, backsliding and formality have a cause just as harvest follows sowing. Its words will not fail amid the rush for wealth and fame, for wealth and recognition do not give lasting satisfaction, which belongs to God's kingdom treasures; life is like a vineyard where reward is measured by labor and deeds, providence cannot be cheated, and wealth or honors undeserved without ability to use them wisely become harmful rather than true blessing, with good coming through patient effort in earning and using, not unearned gain or luck.
Harvest follows the kind of seed sown, with actions and the feelings and motives behind them shaping outcome, for people sow now and reap later and sinful living does not lead to obedience's reward, means and ends and causes and effects being inseparably linked. Present choices form character and determine destiny, so every choice brings a corresponding harvest reflecting its nature, guiding present choice to shape future harvest; choosing wealth, worldly ambitions or own desires while rejecting counsel leads to sorrow and death, while choosing God's way leads to life, pleasantness and peace. Sowing for present pleasure while ignoring the future leads to sorrow and loss, while wisely turning from worldly temptations even through grief and hardship leads to lasting joy; God sees the harvest contained in sowing to come in due time, as in Paris's rejection of God for worldly pleasures reaping spiritual weariness and death.
Harvest follows a life of sowing and cannot be undone or changed once sown, for truth sown brings fruitful harvest while sinful deeds bring sorrow and regret, and God's harvest comes at the end when every sowing is faithfully gathered and none escapes judgment. Indulging sin and worldly pleasure leads to a painful harvest of repentance, and delaying response makes return harder and more wearisome, while truth sent along grace's path yields rich harvest. Evil deeds do not earn good's reward and wrong actions produce plentiful evil, for seed planted without care will grow and be reaped by the sower, and wrongdoing must be faced again together with the evil caused in the world, warning against allowing youth to sow wild oats. Wrongdoing does not become right because good is hoped from it, though God may bring good despite human evil, and people do better doing only good; sowing obstinacy by stifling conviction, refusing evidence and resisting the Spirit sows unbelief and reaps unbelief, hardness, pride, stubbornness, prejudice and growing power to resist clearer light until mercy is exhausted and the Spirit finds no access, though God commends none in impenitence, destroys none, decrees none to ruin, but follows sinners with light, opportunities, appeals, warnings and compassion while hope remains, leaving responsibility on the sinner with neglected light measuring guilt. Those sowing evil will soon reap its harvest, with hosts of evil moving toward the death their course brings, and moral actions produce results unto failure or success as God renders to each according to deeds.
Good seeds bring fair harvest while worthless seeds bring weeds, and harvest will come some day and somewhere reflecting what was sown, for thoughts, actions and deeds are seeds whose later harvest matches them. Seeds of sorrow sown in troubled times can spread and bear fruit for years, while words of comfort sown in hardship ripen to good; worldliness planted in Christian life can grow and spread unto spiritual decline and apostasy. Good seed yields good fruit and harmful seed harmful results when harvest, the time of reward for sowing and labor, comes. God's cause-and-effect law applies to moral and spiritual life as surely as to nature, so people cannot sow evil in hearts and lives while expecting good, for good fruit requires sowing and cultivating good seed, whether wheat, health or righteousness, with correct sowing bringing inevitable fruit of holiness; kind matters more than amount, for strife and discord bring unavoidable harvest while love, kindness, goodwill, honesty, charity and righteousness bring sure reward, though delayed.
The fruits of right and wrong conduct and the testing of each person's work illustrate that people reap consequences of what they do. The wicked ultimately suffer consequences of their own way and are filled with results of their own devices, as opposing light in hatred and rebellion brings darkness, barrenness and death as its fruit. Wrongdoing brings sure return upon the wrongdoer though delayed, and the return may bring repeated harm, supporting the call to be just, true and right. What is planted is sure to come up in one's own path, so those carelessly or purposely making trouble for others will feel it themselves as one planting thorns is pricked walking barefoot; repeated resistance to evidence strengthens rebellion toward its reaping, with condemnation not only for past sins but for continuing defiance that pardon would have met had there been submission. Forgetting that harvest matches sowing leads Egyptward to a broken reed piercing the heart and humbling pride when walls are broken, with fire following quake moved by worldliness and wandering with wish as guide.
What people sow determines the following harvest of harm or blessing, pain or pleasure, for sowing thorns hurts fellow travelers while sowing love and mercy sweetens life, yielding tares or golden wheat. Cherishing hatred brings greater harm on self, family and others taking up the same spirit, to face at last overpowering glory; pursuing worldly pleasure should expect trouble rather than lasting satisfaction, as Solomon's wealth, influence and freedom to pursue pleasure did not bring good results. How others are treated may come back, warning against harsh judgment and gossip and urging help to lift the fallen and weak remembering like need may come; what a generation sows will be reaped with harvest scarcely commenced, and receiving good depends on doing good. Life yields thorns or flowers according to planting. Sin is like seed producing suffering after its own kind, for its pleasure is certainly followed by penalty, and no one can be sure harm affects only the sinner, for it may ripen in loved ones' lives. Sin brings sorrow as consequence, for those admitting sin cannot keep its sorrow out.
Present daily experience can be the harvest or echo of what was done yesterday, and recognizing this reveals God's dealings and character. Ending greed and changing a people must begin by sowing truth in one's own soul, with thinking and loving truth mastering greed and acting on truth leading others, done with love not hate. Some have misused the verse to teach self-reform and bearing one's own sin by learning to sow only what one is willing to reap, as part of a teaching contrasted with salvation by grace and regeneration by the Spirit, and applied to the claim of no remission except through growth attributed to Spiritualists. Children must learn from early infancy that they cannot escape consequences even by sorrow afterward.
Consequences are already present in the seed, so harvest can be seen in sowing and the end in the beginning, which Christ understands with dangers along the way, knowing how to guide toward good and turn harms to blessings; what is sown points ahead as seed contains promise of what will grow. Labor is God's honorable beneficial plan while idleness and the no-work idea come from Satan in opposition, so those shunning honest sweat now will reap corresponding extra sweating afterward, for God's sowing and reaping cannot be evaded in work. The sowing-reaping link is a sure blessing and assurance between seed-time and harvest-time, and a person's acts make or mar life's outcome, with careful sowing of heavenly things bringing rare harvest and with what is put into life shaping what is received, so aimless living yields nothing while steady persistent purpose through effort and taken or made opportunities brings fitting reward. What a person does determines what is received, a cause-and-effect principle also applied to theosophical karma affecting a later incarnation, and to what is sown being reaped like a matching harvest, a universal principle also identified in Japanese Buddhism though applied differently by sects.
Sowing to the Flesh
Sowing to the flesh is following the desires and inclinations of the natural fallen heart against the Spirit, gratifying fleshly desires and worldly comfort and living for self and present pleasure whatever the profession, instead of self-denial and cross-bearing and implicit obedience as a soldier of Jesus Christ who is not his own and who endures hardness without planning for selfish convenience. It is thinking only of pleasure and convenience and sowing to pride, vanity and ambition, living by uncontrolled desires apart from the Spirit of God, and giving way to corrupt desires of fallen human nature including lust for animal flesh though not limited to meat. The flesh lusts against the Spirit and the carnal mind is enmity against God and not subject to His law, and its works are adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revelings and such like, ending in darkness and ruin and death. Sowing to the flesh therefore ends in darkness while sowing to the Spirit brings light and righteousness and guidance, and it includes excess in eating and drinking and idolatry that brings captivity as Israel reaped to the full by becoming captives to an idolatrous nation.
He who sows to the flesh reaps corruption, decay, loss and death, which is the wages of sin, for the present is sowing time and the future state is reaping time and the wicked reap corruption not an incorruptible condition. That doom is death and destruction and the second death, not being kept alive forever in torment, for sinners who served sin for wages will certainly be paid their due. Using worldly goods only for self instead of acting with God's glory in view is sowing to the flesh, including spending on tobacco and other indulgences instead of self-denial and supporting family and God's cause. Indulging appetite through excess in eating and drinking, through tobacco use with spiritual as well as physical consequences, and through preference for flesh foods that defile the body and gradually dull discernment of truth, is sowing to the flesh bringing corruption in body and soul and requiring earnest reform in diet and habits by grace.
Everyone born again has flesh and Spirit striving and may sow to either with harvest according to the sowing, for sowing to the flesh feeds the carnal mind with food and exercise while sowing to the Spirit starves it by refusal and feeds the spiritual mind unto strengthening in the inner man. The carnal mind must be overcome and destroyed or the person will not be saved, and those who trust in Christ will be saved from bringing destruction on themselves by rejecting God's way. Choosing disobedience and sowing to the flesh connects a person to Satan, father of lies and author of corruption and source of death, reaping alienation from the life of God and being without hope and without God in the world. If that connection is continued it ends in certain consumption root and branch with all refuse in the fires of Gehenna prepared for the devil and his angels, when the dross of sin is burned out and evil hosts reap what they sowed while God brings forth a remnant to live and reign forever. A life spent largely in smoking and drinking that ends with the record that he accomplished nothing illustrates this sowing with a harvest not to be envied.
Evil desires sown in the heart produce evil fruit, for what is cherished within produces corresponding deeds and while the disposition remains confession of deeds alone cannot overcome sin. Yielding to sin brings the ruin that grows from sinful choices. The verse is therefore God's faithful warning to save people from sowing to the flesh and reaping corruption, death and exclusion from the kingdom, for no one can deceive God or call darkness light and change its outcome. Because humanity sowed the seeds of sin it reaps death. The degraded belittled condition of the intemperate without God and without hope is the harvest of their own course, though God willed not their loss and gave His Son to save from misery and they too often refuse and choose sin, a contrast set forth between destructive intoxicants and better outcomes.
Sowing to righteousness brings strength, security, life and prosperity, while sowing to flesh, falsehood, lust, greed and corrupt principles brings corruption, decay, crime, destruction and death, a law applying to societies so that widespread political and business corruption is harvest of corrupt practices and selfish covetousness produces misery and death while unselfish giving bears blessing. Thoughts, words and actions are seeds, so sowing to the flesh brings corruption and grief while sowing to the Spirit brings everlasting life, calling believers to walk in the light and give themselves wholly to God's service. The reaping is twofold, flesh sowing reaping corruption and Spirit sowing reaping everlasting life, displayed in Old Testament history rewarding unpurchasable fidelity, rectitude and civic uprightness as in Moses, Joshua, Hezekiah and Nehemiah and bringing ruin for greed and corrupt scheming for office. Sin's effects come as natural harvest without arbitrary mark, and young people must not suppose they can indulge worldly desires and later avoid consequences, for turning to God brings visible blessing though traces may remain like a scar.
Sowing to the Spirit
Receiving the seed of God's Word is sowing to the Spirit, to righteousness and to life, while refusing it leaves openness to sin and its harvest of death. Yielding the life with Christ develops the life He has placed within, for human beings are seeds with freedom, and keeping life for self leaves it alone but giving it up in the likeness of Christ's death leads to resurrection and glory. Sowing to the flesh ends in darkness, while sowing to the Spirit brings light from God's righteousness and guidance for the path ahead on the straight narrow road. Those who sow to the flesh reap corruption, while those who sow to the Spirit reap incorruptible, immortal life, and empty profession cannot alter that eternal consequence. The harvest is God's work, for His love and Spirit sustain the life truly yielded to Him, and the seed already contains the kind of harvest it will produce, picturing growth in grace and growth of God's kingdom in human hearts. Cultivating Christian character through good works and sowing seeds of truth brings what was sown in the world to come, where work begun on earth reaches completion in the higher life lasting forever, with self-denial and self-sacrifice outweighed by eternal reward.
Sowing to the Spirit is acting with God's glory in view, rendering obedience to Christ, bringing all possible good into life to glorify God and be a blessing to humanity. It is love, truth, kindness, forbearance and other good deeds in place of vulgar words, actions and thoughts, and unselfish benevolence in place of selfish motives and deeds, with certain fruit following kind of motive. Sowing faith and obedience reaps faith and power for future obedience, and seeking to be a blessing to others brings God's blessing in return. Mercy sown in this life will be reaped in glory. The principle applies to using worldly goods not only for self and to supporting those who teach the Word.
The verse is Infinite Love pleading with people now not to be deceived about the law of harvest. Like produces like as a certain spiritual law, which is ground of confidence and assurance and hope to one seeking salvation from sin and eternal death, for well-doing is sowing in the spiritual world and the harvest is sure to be of the same kind. He who sows to his own flesh reaps corruption pertaining to the flesh, which in the last analysis is death, but he who sows to the Spirit receives from the Spirit life everlasting and unending. Therefore believers must not grow weary in well-doing, because in due season they will reap if they do not faint, doing good to all especially fellow believers whenever they have opportunity. This warning applies during probation and calls Christians to keep advancing rather than repeating the foundation of conversion, for work will be tested against a perfect standard.
Sowing and reaping to flesh or Spirit stands among practical duties of Christian life with bearing one another's burdens, sharing in all good things, and doing good to all especially the household of faith. Its place in the last chapter of Galatians means it comes only after deliverance from this present evil world, standing fast in liberty wherewith Christ makes free, liberty by love to serve one another, and being filled with the Spirit with all His fruit shining in life. Without deliverance from sin, sonship of God, liberty in Christ, and receiving the Spirit as themselves the more practical things of Christianity, the other works can never be seen at all, and no one can sow to the Spirit and do these practical things without first having the Christian life itself as a practical thing.
The sowing takes place in this life but the harvest comes beyond it, realized at Christ's coming and the resurrection at the last trump when mortal bodies are made alive. The righteous rise incorruptible to life and glory, completing the moral separation from the ungodly begun in regeneration, while the wicked rise in corruption to damnation and the second death with no continuance, not to live forever. Final destiny corresponds to life lived, with those who have done good raised to life and those who have done evil raised to condemnation. Faithful sowing yields harvest of good fruit then, including sowing seeds of present truth through loyal deeds and labor for others before too late, bringing rest, deliverance from sin and sorrow, and an eternal weight of glory.
God's mercy provides what is needed for life and godliness and means to be sanctified now, but it does not make His word false or remove the harvest of a life spent in sin. God offers pardon for the past, salvation from guilt through Christ, cleansing through His blood, renewal through the Holy Spirit, guidance through His word, and deliverance through love and grace, yet actions have consequences that cannot simply be erased. Mercy offers pardon but does not cancel the law that thoughts, acts and deeds produce corresponding harvest whether good or worthless. God removes guilt of confessed sin immediately, but consequences may continue for a time as correction, and removing them may require persevering effort and fruits worthy of repentance, for faith, another's righteousness or later repentance cannot prevent bodily effects of violating physical and mental laws though forgiveness may be granted for the soul.
Planting Christ the living Seed shows Christ in words and deeds and yields Him as harvest, reaped day by day in joy or sorrow and fully when the King appears, while sowing seeds of death, pain and woe cannot produce life. Professing to follow Christ while indulging known sin does not secure entrance to God's kingdom, for those who belong to Christ crucify the flesh with its passions and desires. Sharing the saints' promised rest requires living for it through self-sacrifice, cheerful obedience and faithful devotion to God, for outcome follows life chosen, with living for flesh bringing corruption and living for Spirit bringing everlasting life.
Every day is sowing time and people cannot avoid choosing what kind of seed to sow, reaping in kind, with harvest in eternity and each life record kept in heaven during probation. God is not deceived into judging anyone otherwise than true character shows, and those who sow to the Spirit bring forth the Spirit's fruits in this life and share eternal life in God's kingdom. Daily choices and spiritual life determine eternal reaping, calling for continued growing and overcoming through faith rather than yielding to sin. Good works and Christian character developed through service bring harvest in the life to come, with work begun on earth completed in eternal life.
Spiritual harvest follows kind of seed, for evil thoughts, sinful desires and passions lead to death, while cherishing holy desires, receiving God's Word and living by it lead to joy, strength, peace and eternal life. The harvest is certain though scant when worldly interests, cares or riches hinder growth, and abundant in receptive responsive hearts, for sowing tares or thorns and briars of human nature cannot produce roses of immortal life. Choices and actions determine receipt, with flesh sowing bringing corruption and Spirit sowing bringing everlasting life, and God cannot be deceived or treated with contempt about life lived. Deeds of purity and love lead toward lasting life while evil deeds leave scars and bring misery, and earthly pleasure cannot prevent coming judgment. Using talents and opportunities for serving others and commending truth through holy life yields fruit, rewarded at Christ's coming and day of reckoning according to work, and sins of omission are serious while spiritual renewal gives power for faithful work whose full fruition is glorious immortality.
Blessings received and experiences gained through prayer must be put into practical use not set aside, and continued faithfulness in doing God's bidding leads to abundant future blessing and victory. Good works are seeds whose harvest is reaped in the life to come, and those who use abilities for good develop Christian character through service, with kindness and self-denial blessing others while shaping the giver and even secret acts having results that cannot remain hidden. Sowing to righteousness brings harvest of mercy, but as with seedtime and harvest the good result may not be visible at once, so people should do God's will and wait confidently for outcome without growing weary, for they will reap in due season if they do not give up.
Judgment and Final Reaping
The sowing is everything a person does, says, and thinks each day, including every idle word and every evil and impure thought, and the reaping is the fixed destiny for glory or despair decided from the angels' record kept in the courts of heaven before the Father's throne. Thoughts are understood and chronicled with care, purposes, plans, work, character, secret sins and vile motives are weighed in the eternal balance, and profession counts for nothing while character alone has precious value. Life is not an empty bubble for gay fancies, vainglory and display but a real and earnest planting given for a purpose, whose present sowing returns in the eternal harvest as eternal blessing or eternal loss at last. Deeds and words like seeds do not simply disappear but appear later as harmful or wholesome fruit, and they will meet the sower in the judgment, shaping the joy or fear of which the coming life is made and filling the future atmosphere with sunshine or with shade. The tissue of the life to be is woven with colors of one's own choosing, and in the field of destiny each one receives the harvest of what was planted, deciding destiny by actions each day with no repeal of the sentence passed when the Judge is revealed in the clouds of heaven.
The verse requires a future judgment in which reward and punishment are measured to fit the deeds done in the body, reaping exactly what was sown, so punishment cannot justly begin at death. If people went to reward at death, one murderer dying two thousand years before another would suffer two thousand years longer for the same sin, which would be unequal and unjust even to the worst sinners and to the best saints, and contrary to the character of God. Judgment after death determines the future from the person's past choices rather than imposing a penalty to make the dead obey, and future punishment is both consecutive and retributive, continuing this life so that the wicked's punishment corresponds to what they did here. At the final judgment, when the dead are raised and all stand before God, those consequences are revealed, and the time to respond to the Spirit and receive pardon is while the door of mercy remains open, before the day of hope has passed.
Each person receives a consequence corresponding to what was done and to the master served, as blossom follows seed, with the nature and measure of reward determined by the nature of the service, and choosing righteousness leading to heaven and eternal joy. The suffering and duration preceding the wicked's final destruction may be proportioned to differing degrees of guilt and deserts, though exactly how this just proportion is carried out is not specified, and punishment can differ in degree even if death or destruction is its final result. Lasting influence must be fully measured, and everyone will find the fruits of what was sown and receive what is his own, fully paying for evil done to others and giving account before God. For the man behind the bar, planting is robbing the man or boy across the bar of decency, thrift, honesty, innocence, manhood and every opportunity in life by drink, leaving him ragged, unkempt, poverty-stricken and degraded, and harvesting is bearing the shame for that ruin and paying every farthing of that heavy debt.
Probation ends at death and no later work can change the outcome, for choices and character formed in this life determine eternal destiny. Time is the only season of probation and what is sown now is reaped hereafter in eternity, deciding whether one is in a state of nature or grace, justification or condemnation, a child of God or a child of Satan, an object of divine favor or wrath, and whether to ascend to heaven among the ransomed or sink irretrievably. If the flesh is not overcome and destroyed the person will not be saved, and turning from sin and overcoming the flesh leads to restored favor and salvation in the day of the Lord Jesus, not at death. The deathbed is too near the harvest to begin sowing then, so judgment and reward depend on actions in life, not feelings at death, and a moment can be seed-sowing whose harvest is death, while no length of worldly pleasure guarantees happiness beyond it. The last day is the time of reaping that tests and reveals the character formed through present choices, not a time to create a new character or seek grace whose opportunity has passed.
God holds every person to the harvest of his own planting and will call him to render account according to deeds as probationary time closes, with the specific closing work to overcome sins, bring forth the peaceable fruits of righteousness, and acknowledge allegiance to the righteous government of Heaven. He cannot be mocked by postponing devotion while spending life on worldly ambition and sinful pleasure, for a way of living shapes the end of life and death or Christ's advent will reveal the error of neglecting God. Mercy is offered today and postponing response until tomorrow risks losing it forever, since no one is promised another day and no one can count on a last-minute warning or opportunity to prepare. Half-way work in repentance and reform with lingering confession, half-hearted undoing of wrong, and dodging of hard places sows untrustworthiness and reaps being passed by when grand opportunities for service are given to others, leaving chagrin, defeat, bitterness and a lesser place. Giving life's energies to Satan's service and then offering self to God only when strength fails dishonors Him and will not stand, and hope must not rest on sick-bed repentance which may not be granted, so the call is to seek the Lord now while body is strong and mind clear.
The harvest at the end of the world will reveal what each person has sown, whether wheat or tares, with sowing to the flesh bringing corruption and sowing to the Spirit bringing everlasting life. Good is not the natural fruit of evil, and this inexorable law applies both to individuals and to the world as a whole, so those who choose selfishness and sin meet the fate of the sin chosen, utter negation of being. Earth's final harvest bestows upon every soul the fruit of his own reaping, so that those who follow righteousness receive eternal life and immortality while those who choose selfishness deprive themselves of life. When sentence is pronounced in God's court day this reaping vindicates His wisdom, justice and love, leaves no charge of injustice or unwisdom against Him, and leaves no ever-burning hell to mar His universe because all have had their choice, with evil forces and their followers reaping destruction when sin is burned out of the world.
Sin brings death not because God takes pleasure in the sinner's death or acts from vindictive wrath, but because those who reject God identify themselves with sin and perish when sin is destroyed by His presence. Sin earns death as its proper wages, so the sinner receives what is deserved as the inevitable end of continuing on sin's path, each sinner bringing about his own destruction. Selfishness and a wicked way cut a person off from God, the source of life, light and power, and bring death, yet God does not arbitrarily separate people from Himself but calls them to turn and live. When people reject truth and Spirit and identify with sin, sin works out in them and ends in death, as the seven last plagues give people what they have chosen, and the wicked reap destruction as inevitable fruit of their own sowing, not everlasting torment imposed by God.
At Christ's coming those who cling to sin reap destruction while those who receive God's way reap life, for God cannot be mocked and choices produce their fitting outcome. The response made to God's final call has lasting consequences, so the warning must be heeded before the opportunity for salvation closes. God is not to be trifled with and will certainly execute what He has said, with not one jot or tittle failing, and it will be dreadful for those on whom Christ's day comes unawares with sudden destruction, while watching, expecting Christ daily and obeying all commands is the only safe ground.
Young people must not turn a deaf ear to the promise of coming again while hoping for long years of gaiety and pleasure, for brightest plans formed without consulting the Maker may be defeated at any moment and fondly cherished hopes blasted long before fruition. Such neglect ends in the lament of failure or that the harvest is past, the summer ended, and we are not saved, yet there is no need for such failure. Each should bring whatever talent God has lent and work with a will, for harvest time is waning and a place in the many mansions is being prepared for all the faithful. A person's actions determine the harvest, with the wicked facing destruction while those who fear God receive the promised reward, and the hosts of evil soon receiving the harvest of their sin.
The verse calls for wise belief and living because choices have consequences leading either toward destruction or toward inheriting the kingdom prepared by God. Every person faces an inevitable harvest of death or life carrying serious responsibility, and daily choices either lay up treasure in heaven or store up wrath for the day of judgment. Those who live for worldly pleasure or gain rather than Christ face a poor harvest when entering eternity, for worldly gains cannot make up for loss of the soul, and even those who hear the final call of mercy and begin the Christian struggle may fail to reach the promised land if they turn back. People are not doomed by fate, for God sets life and death before them, holds them responsible for their choice, and His invitation to be saved is genuine.
Under the gospel each person is accountable for his or her own conduct and receives according to it, rather than bearing the fathers' sins. Continuing in sin and breaking God's law brings sin's wages, the second death, applied especially to breaking the fourth commandment and teaching others to do so, for God cannot be mocked or deceived. Sin has a final result according to what is sown, with the harvest bringing the fitting consequence of a person's choices.
In rejecting God's means of correction a person is allowed to reap that rejection's results, and persistent refusal to repent leaves no hope of salvation. After mercy's final plea is rejected sin reaps destruction, and those who laugh at warnings will later mourn when consequences come. Unrepented sin will bring suffering and death, and those who resist light and loving appeals receive unmingled wrath untempered by mercy, with response to the Spirit's convictions determining whether they share eternal life. Sowing obstinacy by stifling conviction, refusing evidence and resisting the Spirit sows unbelief and reaps unbelief, hardness of heart, pride, stubbornness, prejudice and growing power to resist clearer light. Each rejection of increasing light brings increased resistance and indifference until mercy is exhausted and the person is given up to unbelief, yet God commends no one in impenitence, destroys no one and decrees no one to ruin, but follows sinners with light, opportunities, appeals, warnings and compassion while hope remains, so responsibility rests on the sinner and neglected light becomes guilt incurred. Egypt's repeated rejection of warnings in the plagues leading to final judgment on its firstborn shows that persisting in contempt of warnings faces consequences.
Those who turn from God and ally with sin bring destruction on themselves and lose their place through their own choice, for no one can deceive or defy God and escape the outcome. Those who oppose counsel make the good law their adversary and perish with the sin chosen, with calamities and destruction following the perverted good law, not because the law is evil. Those who refuse the call are left outside the purpose to save and gather all things, and by rejecting salvation through Jesus' atoning sacrifice and spurning the Spirit of grace the ungodly cannot stand in the judgment or share the righteous place.
Claiming to love truth while neglecting duty, wasting abilities, pursuing wealth, remaining spiritually complacent or clinging to harmful habits cannot leave people safe in the judgment and time of trouble, for God cannot be mocked or deceived. Millions trusting false hopes and theories will be disappointed, and those who use God-given abilities to spread moral ruin and corruption sow seeds whose harvest they will not want to reap. Persisting in selfishness, sin and rebellion cannot bring God's peace and rest while disregarding warnings and precepts, for sin may briefly numb or disguise consequences but ultimately brings misery, troubled conscience and fear by inexorable law. Those who reject truth and take pleasure in unrighteousness face ruin as a delayed consequence becoming clear too late.
The two Sauls prove that disobedience leads to failure while obedience leads to faith's victory, showing human choices have eternal consequences. Blaming sin on first parents while continuing disobedience still brings the harvest of one's own choices, so people should turn toward things of life and live so that death points to everlasting hope. Harvest follows sowing by universal righteous fact, not arbitrary decree, so no one can deceive God or destroy or escape the certain result, though others can be deceived for now about past lives. What each truly is will be known by every neighbor when the King comes, and hoping in deception brings manifold deception at last, while sowing vice brings its fearful entail of corruption and sowing to the Spirit brings life everlasting. At the day of judgment the wicked wish to avoid reaping what was sown but cannot hide guilt or evade delayed vengeance.
Sinful choices such as lying to hide wrongdoing produce an evil harvest where one lie calls for others until heart and character are shaped by falsehood. Grace can forgive sin and reach beyond its consequences, but receiving it requires sincerely renouncing the sin and confessing honestly, when God washes it away and gives victory. Each must reap what was sown in mercy, so withholding mercy lessens mercy received while deeds of mercy are met with mercy, warning against harsh condemnation since each must answer for the chosen course of life. A life of merciful giving brings a harvest of glory.
Effects begin when sinful action begins though the full result comes later, with present suffering as disciplinary consequence that may be escaped, while final punishment is retributive and everlasting. Suffering now does not justify or save but demonstrates sin's evil and points to its final result. Service for God and others sown now is reaped at the Judgment, and coming rest in the kingdom will be sweeter because of toil and suffering endured. Cause and effect govern the soul's great interests including immortality and retribution, disregarded when God's Spirit is absent. A day of reckoning will come because God is just, and people and forces will face consequences of what they have done, with God's word of judgment overtaking sinners so none escape by moving away.
Nations and Historical Fulfillments
Nations as well as individuals reap exactly what they sow, for the law of harvest governs peoples and churches no less than single men. Sowing hatred and war brings a harvest of hatred and war that becomes the end of the worldly nations, and sowing weapons and military training sows the means and spirit of war whose harvest is war. The hatred and distrust sown by war do not produce lasting peace but bring future conflict, and even a time of seeming calm leads on toward Armageddon and the world's last great war. War cannot be eliminated from national life by armaments but only by removing the desire to fight from individual hearts, since naval and military training encourages that desire. The church likewise reaps the consequences of what it has sown, and its conduct shapes outcomes such as that between Spain and the Vatican.
France sowed infidelity to the core, both open unbelief and the worse hypocrisy of a professed church departed from the living Word, no longer studying it closely or letting it guide life, keeping outward bishops and priests and divine service with no inner work of grace on the heart except for an unnoticed minority. With that condition came selfish greed that gathered the wealth of the country into the hands of a few lords of Church and State spent in luxury while the people groaned under the burden, and the revolution followed as the sure result. France sowed the seeds of revolution toward the close of the last century and reaped a most terrible harvest, and the reaping lasted on through a whole century of turmoil from which she had still not recovered, seen in turbulent disorder and revolutionary demonstrations. She had rejected calls to reform and cast away the means of salvation, so she reaped destructive retribution and divine judgment in the French Revolution. Choosing human authority in place of God produces reaction against that system, as seen in the infidel revolution after the period of Catholic triumph.
Russia's lawlessness and terror are the harvest of seeds of religious intolerance, sedition and anarchy, showing that judgments follow when a nation overturns religious and civil freedom. Her defeats, revolt and naval disasters are the harvest of centuries of wrongdoing, and her hope lies in humbling herself before God and those she has wronged and vigorously doing what is right. She was reaping tyranny, oppression and ignorance imposed by both state and church, a double tyranny now reaped in awful revolution sweeping the empire with burning and pillaging and killing.
Spain sowed corrupt seed when she established the Inquisition, crushed the Reformation, prohibited investigation and freedom of speech, took the Bible from the laity, and made the people servants of the priests in Spain and in her American possessions. She reaped national decadence, paralysis and death, taking four hundred years to gather the last fruits from the seed she had sown, with her colonial branches dropping off one by one until her humility, weakness and poverty became as conspicuous as her former arrogance, power and wealth.
America cannot depart from the principles that gave it life and adopt those associated with the Dark Ages yet expect good to come of that course, for God's law cannot be mocked. The nation's tolerance and practice of lynching sowed defiance of law, so it shared responsibility for the lawless violence it condemned. Its injustice toward Indigenous peoples and its treatment of enslaved Africans bring bitter fruits under God's justice. The sick and disabled soldiers, discharged men, army prisoners, and 300 dead bodies including smallpox victims brought back from Manila are the harvest of sowing imperial war in the Philippines.
Israel sowed idolatry in spite of all entreaty, so God willed their chastisement and delivered up the city, and the Assyrians otherwise powerless against Israel carried them captive about thirty years later. Having chosen idolatry, Israel reaped it to the full by becoming captives to an idolatrous nation. Israel's persistent distortion of truth and misplaced confidence in human effort brought the experience of those consequences, which served to turn them back to faith in God and hope in the promised Seed. Israel rejected God as king and chose a system opposed to Him, so they suffered the fruits of their own choice, yet God did not stop loving them while they reaped those consequences. Jerusalem's destruction by Babylon was the harvest of its course despite false prophets' optimistic predictions, and Jeremiah's warnings proved true. They had been loading the cloud for years by disobedience and by rejecting the Son of God and choosing Barabbas instead of Christ, so when Titus the Roman took the city and the vessel was shivered in pieces and over a million were slaughtered and the dead were buried till there was no place to bury, they felt to the end the cruelty of the Barabbas they chose. God's mercy waits long and gives opportunity to be redeemed from evil ways, but His word is true and sooner or later destruction awaits the hardened and impenitent.
Babylon and Belshazzar reaped the result of their oppression, tyranny, fraud, licentiousness and injustice, and God's justice is impartial and those consequences cannot be escaped. Babylon's gradual fall is the sure result of its selfishness, expressed in self-glorification, self-indulgence and proud self-exaltation, rather than an arbitrary decree. Nations reap the consequences of what they sow in that their wars and efforts to rule the earth against God's purpose lead to destruction, for no earthly empire has a lasting right to rule and God's kingdom alone will fill the earth and endure.
Oppression of enslaved people sowed seed harvested in the Civil War, while concentration of wealth and oppression sow conditions that bring a destructive harvest. The wealthy sow seeds of discontent through wasteful extravagance displayed amid growing poverty, and this can lead to violence and social upheaval. The seed has been sown and the harvest is now appearing in social conditions surrounding wealthy men, Socialists and labor organizers, with reaping about to begin. The generation's repeated denunciation of the rich together with rich men's extravagant conduct sows seed whose harvest approaches in widespread revolutionary unrest and violence. Spreading discontent will not remain without consequences but will help bring about revolution. Sowing greed for gain, restraint of competition, limiting production, shutting down works, cutting wage earners, oppressing labor and making living wages impossible through trusts and monopolies sows seeds of hatred and unrest, and the coming harvest can only be bitter fruit, revenge, panic and revolution. One man taking $400,000,000 while 20,000 workers receive $350,000,000 for thirty years illustrates the sowing that brings that reckoning.
Sowing the evil of church-and-state union brings a certain and unfailing harvest of evil to nations. The union will bring despotism to the republic, worldliness to the church, and ruin to both. Every nation that starts on union of Church and State by placing religious dogmas in organic or statute law chooses ruin of both even when advocates would not choose it, for the sowing looks good but its fruit is ruin proved by what was written in blood and fire and flame over so-called Christian countries during the Dark Ages between the sixth and eighteenth centuries. That same sowing is now repeated in efforts like requiring Scripture instruction in State schools and recognition of God in a national constitution, which if yielded to will turn to persecution of the innocent and force others to persecute to maintain national dignity. Attempts to enforce religious duties through the state sow a harvest of the same kind, reproducing the harms and absurdities of earlier generations. Coercive Sunday-closing laws sow principles that like those that produced the Dark Ages will bring their own harmful harvest. Religious legislation that appears beneficial is seed that will inevitably produce an evil crop, including persecution, anarchy and national disaster.
Teaching or compelling disregard for God's law brings the fruit of that conduct, and a nation that refuses to obey God's law will perish. Those who sow lawlessness will reap anarchy and violence, and the claim that Christ abolished the Ten Commandments fosters the violations it rejects even when the teacher does not intend or encourage those acts. Railroads compelling Sabbath desecration thereby foster defiance of law, and the resulting social disorder is the fruit of that sowing. Disrespect, irreverence and disobedience toward God and His law produce disrespect for parental and governmental authority, leading to disorder, treason, anarchy and destruction, and these consequences surely come though not intended or expected when the wrongdoing begins. Those who promote disregard for God's law and disloyalty to God sow lawlessness and will reap a bitter harvest whether they triumph or are defeated. Teaching lawlessness brings a harvest of crime, murder and anarchy, and hatred against the commandments reaps increase of crime and wrecked civilization.
Solomon's sins planted evil whose abundant harvest brought suffering, sorrow and bitterness across generations, and wickedness produces further wickedness whose fruit adds to consequences even when sin is forgiven and the sinner ultimately receives the righteous reward. Doing wrong never pays because wrongdoing brings calamity and sorrow back upon the wrongdoer in the very kind of evil caused to others. Jacob's deception toward Esau and his father brought more than fifty years of sorrow distinctly traceable to his own acts, including deceit suffered in return and lasting misery in family relations over the loss of Joseph, ending only when he found Joseph in Egypt. David's wicked conduct toward Uriah brought retribution through all the rest of his life, principally in his own family in the history of Amnon and Tamar, the rebellion and unnatural crimes of Absalom, and the rebellion and death of Adonijah. Jacob's deception brought him years of hardship and grief, and neither time nor repentance could turn the wrong he had done into good. David reaped bitterly after his sin involving Uriah when judgment came through evil arising within his own household as his wives were taken publicly, and Absalom also reaped the result of his wickedness soon afterward. The unrepentant will be caught and destroyed by the sin they have committed, just as Haman died on the gallows he had prepared for Mordecai.
Jacob reaped deception after deceiving, Isaac's willingness to leave matters with the Lord was followed by blessing and the Philistines' submission, and Joseph's pride was humbled through two years in an Egyptian prison. God in His providential dealing lets every sin bring its own punishment so sinners surely reap its fruitage sooner or later, as proved by following the career of Abraham and the two generations following him in Genesis 12 to 27. The Jewish rulers' continued resistance to light and repeated refusal to repent prepared them to reap the ruin their choices had sown. Israel was given 490 years after the Babylonian captivity to learn from consequences, and the nation's demand for the crucifixion of Jesus brought its wrongdoing to its full measure, so God declared desolate the earthly house where He had set the symbol of His government.
A father's approval and example of moderate drinking helped lead his son to alcoholism, and the father later reaped sorrow and shame as he watched his son suffer and die. Words and actions take root and bring a harvest sometimes after years, as illustrated also by Jacob reaping deception from his sons, David reaping shame and death within his family, and Saul of Tarsus reaping persecution, chains and imprisonment even after becoming an apostle. A mother who chose to marry a man known to drink heavily and to come from a family marked by drunkenness sowed that choice and reaped sons with an inherited appetite for strong drink and lasting sorrow, which later repentance and prayer do not undo. Mrs. Peebles's choice to leave the farm for the hotel led to ruin, loss and grief as fruit of what she had sown. Leopold of Belgium's cruel, merciless rule in the Kongo, impoverishing and maiming the natives and using wealth taken from them to corrupt governments and officials, was vicious sowing, and his incurable gangrene and necrosis of the bones of the heel was its harvest. Traders cheating Indians with rum likewise reaped death.
The human race sowed the seed of spiritism at its beginning, and that seed has continued to grow for six thousand years until its harvest of fully developed abundant fruit, which may be checked for a time but returns and bears its crop. The Sunday-closing movement cannot escape what it sets in motion, for its promised harmlessness is false: it already causes harm to innocent godly people and greater harm to its supporters, and its evil consequences will continue. What the world sows determines what it reaps, for like produces like, and the world's widespread folly, self-love and wilful living have grown into terror, hatred, shame and crime foretelling a troubled harvest with war clouds and hate-driven hosts gathering toward the end of time. For centuries the world has sown seeds of sin and immorality to the winds, and now it reaps the whirlwind in terrible epidemics sweeping the world that modern science is totally unable to cope with.
The harvest is of the same character as the seed sown, so the wealthy men of the country by the corrupting fraud and oppression seen in San Francisco and just as much in other large cities are sowing a sowing still being done that will surely reap a fruitage of violence, training for a conflict of violence that will pale the bravest hearts. The worsening tensions and industrial disputes between organized labor and consolidated capital are seeds of a fearful harvest soon to come in keeping with what Scripture records about the last days. Selling body and soul from love of money plants a crop ripening toward punishment, for greed makes men callous to shame and drives boodle, bribery and corrupt control of public power, and that evil sowing grows into a harvest requiring God to put in the sharp sickle of retributive justice. What men sow in the desire to get money in fabulous amounts they will reap, as in sowing to elect men to state and city office in order to bribe them to do their bidding, and the reaping is a fearful harvest of graft just before the world in the perilous last days.
People reap the consequences of what they do, and those who break the law including influential people who disregard its demands will face a harvest of their own lawlessness, for all will reap transgressing God's law. The destruction and loss suffered by the rich in calamities are presented as the harvest of what they had done. A society that promotes the nude for public display sows to the flesh and will reap corruption, with such moral consequences inevitable for people and nations. Causes produce corresponding results, and history of nations and individuals shows that rejecting God's principles and transgressing His law, the law of life and being, brings deterioration, ruin and death. Biblical history records actual events of men and nations in their relations with God and each other to show this principle working out and the result of rejecting truth, and those histories stand as prophecies of the same principles and similar circumstances yet to rise. Continued sin brings corruption and destruction, while turning from sin to righteousness and accepting God's grace in Jesus Christ brings healing, life and peace, so Jerusalem's doom was not irrevocable and Protestantism and America likewise may avoid ruin through this change in course.
Rome experiences the consequences of its own high-handed actions in that the hierarchy's operations helped bring about the election of a Jewish mayor in the heart of the papacy. When people reject God's ways and turn the earth from its entrusted purpose to selfish use, God may withdraw His rejected Spirit and let them experience those consequences, and the resulting harm to the earth is part of the fruit of their sowing. Allowing worldliness and treating sinful practices as harmless sows bad seed and brings a bad spiritual harvest, including few people joining the church on confession. Because a community disregarded God's warning and followed practices it had been told to shun, it suffered physically, mentally and spiritually and could not pass God's blessing on to others.
Home Health and Character
Health follows sowing and reaping through the blood and the machinery of the body, for clean habits and natural foods reap health while unclean, stimulating, poorly cooked and irregular food, tea, coffee, beer, tobacco and gluttony reap impure blood, disease and death, and remedies or denial do not remove the consequences. God cannot be tricked and His law of cause and effect in the body works as fixedly as gravitation whether believed or not, so mistreating the digestive organs harvests the sure result in the organism, and eating to satisfy drunken craving and filling the stomach with bulk without regard to fitness is sowing to the flesh whose harvest is corruption. Like gravitation this cause-and-effect law cannot be escaped or reversed by taking a pill, and deliberately living so as to sow impure blood reaps impure blood that becomes an agent of death to every part instead of a messenger of life. God allows pursuit of harmful choices such as unwholesome food and tea, coffee, beer and tobacco, but those choices bring harm to health and other consequences just as sowing leads to harvest.
Violating the laws of health brings penalty including disease and untimely end even when harm is not immediate, for self-deception supposes disregard can go without consequence. Obedience to physical and spiritual laws sows conditions for well-being while transgression sows disease and harm, though effects may be delayed while inherited health and resistance provide a reserve that can be squandered over time. Violating the laws of life harms mind and body and can reach beyond the actor to children and later generations through hereditary evils, as with tobacco and other stimulants damaging the user and burdening the family. Health is a harvest that comes through planting good seed and allowing time to grow, not through stimulants that briefly relieve and are followed by worse decline, and recovery begins with understanding and obeying definite bodily laws. Temperance, self-denial and sound principles of health brought greater vigor and sustained usefulness through a long life, as seen in John Wesley.
Eating to drunken craving, highly spiced foods creating thirst, perverted appetites leading boys to tobacco then alcohol, and stimulants sowing the drink habit show temperance reform must begin at the table with simple tastes. Highly spiced foods create the thirst that causes drunkenness, so working for temperance while such cooking continues at home sows in sons the drunkenness reform seeks to remove, and treating only outward results is useless like picking leaves while roots grow again. Feeding a boy irritating indigestible foods sows craving that can lead toward cigarettes and alcohol, and a mother who does this helps create the habits she hopes Providence will prevent. Wrong habits of life, especially improper food and pampered appetite, can lead to stimulant use and ultimately to the crime and misery of intemperance, so parents should keep harmful influences from the home and teach simple tastes. A mother who perverts children's appetites sows seeds that may drive boys toward tobacco then alcohol, leaving them enslaved with ruined health and dishonored lives even when she intends temperance. Drinking brings ruin to property, work, reason, family and life, pictured as sowing fields with wild oats and thistles, and drinking with other harmful practices sows moral decline, vice and crime affecting both actors and offspring.
Sickness may be corrective harvest from violating nature's laws, permitted by God and not always instantly healed lest cause and effect be despised. God does not heal promptly every time asked, because instant healing would make people careless about cause and effect and toward His laws, while pain and sickness help straight thinking and respect for law. Breaking natural law is as much sin as breaking moral law, and persevering in planting seeds of disease reaps a bountiful harvest of disease, yet God holds no grudge but is grieved at self-injury through lack of knowledge, and cooperates to secure health as soon as right sowing begins. Prayer should seek healing of cause as well as effect, removing wrong habits and disposition, for genuine faith is joined to obedience and reaping is in God's hands always for the best. Ill health is not necessarily accident but natural result of violating nature's laws, preventable by correct eating and drinking, pure air and suitable mental and physical exercise even amid germs, though some suffer parents' debts. Satan tempts to sow seeds of ill health but is not its cause; prolonged transgression weakens mental, moral and physical resistance which he may then exploit. This does not forbid immediate healing in answer to prayer of faith or by divine promise, as shown by the healing of the disabled man at Bethesda.
Youth is sowing time shaping whole life and destiny, when choice between sin and righteousness while character is unformed blesses or blights the future. To sow is to choose amid schools and colleges where sport and folly, shunning good and joining evil, are open as with Samson; to reap is to receive the match, gratifying the flesh bringing corruption and ruin while sowing to the Spirit brings life everlasting. Youthful indulgence is not harmless nor escapable by growing older, for wrongdoing including youthful indulgence, ambition, dishonesty, hardness, suspicion and greed produces corresponding harvest at every age. Young men given to dissipation already suffer without waiting for age, in weakened body and mind, degraded morals and premature death. Choices and habits formed in childhood and youth bring enlarged consequences in maturity, petulance growing into bad temper, idleness into unreliability, neglect of duty and pursuit of pleasure into dissipation and ruin.
Calling reckless conduct wild oats does not excuse it, for youthful wrong can take deep root beyond later undoing. A handful sown yields a bushel reaped with increase, evil sowing yielding far worse harvest as sowing wind yields whirlwind, so young men scoffingly excusing sin as wild oats will certainly reap those oats. Every action is sowing bringing its own kind, evil deeds not earning good's reward but plentiful evil, and seed planted will grow without care so the young cannot safely be allowed to sow wild oats but must face wrongdoing again with the evil caused. A life sowing sin can become deeply rooted leaving little time and strength for better choices, and later efforts do not necessarily undo damage, so turn early rather than presume time to mend. Youthful indulgence in lust, drunkenness, drugs, tobacco, gambling and other destructive pleasures can root deeply bringing ruined health and character, addiction, crime, imprisonment, broken family hopes and even death, which later goodness cannot simply erase and which may bring regret in age and condemnation at judgment. Allowing a boy to indulge in wrongdoing even excused as wild oats brings its consequences, and parents excusing drinking and harmful conduct forget painful results.
Parents reap in children what they plant through example, instruction, books, associations and government. Indulging children to their harm produces sorrow and difficulty, while wise faithful training brings lasting good. Mothers sowing carelessness and neglect by shirking duties reap bitterness, and responsibility remains even when others carry those duties. Neglecting to guide children toward Christ risks a harvest where they do not follow parents in righteousness, and giving little effort to guiding reaps little while sowing to the Spirit reaps everlasting life. Teaching children to prize idleness and despise honest work sows seeds that can grow into moral ruin including crime and sexual exploitation unless grace saves from the full harvest. Patient training, giving daughters responsibility and money of their own, consulting them and exemplifying noble womanhood are seeds that can bring loving service and respect.
Mothers modeling pride, fashion and display reap it abundantly in children. Teaching children to prize dress and fashion plants vanity that later bears sad harvest, and sowing pride by example reaps plentiful harvest with no failure in the crop. Teaching pursuit of outward display plants habits and values shaping growth, so errors later deplored are harvest of those lessons. Indulging food whims trains fixed distaste, deceiving a child plants lying that may return in the child's own lying, and tormenting animals or a lame hen sows mercilessness later turned on parents. Allowing a child to torment animals sows misery for child and parent, for unchecked cruelty later brought sorrow and disgrace on families, and neglecting to teach mercy while molding is in hand leaves children growing more merciless until parents have none to blame but themselves.
Answering a child's questions plants adult character, as cherry stones dropped in youth become trees in age. A fair truthful answer respecting desire to learn plants good seed, while snubbing, ignoring or misleading with false impressions plants bad seed, and even slight impression today can grow into a rule of life twenty years later, while a parent wounded by ingratitude bleeds from thorns of own planting. Parents' prayers, counsel and watchfulness may seem unfruitful at first but effects appear later, for holy impressions in childhood seldom disappear in adulthood. Seeds of truth planted in childhood and nurtured in youth generally produce righteousness, while failing to sow good seed likely produces thorns. What a mother sows in the child's heart she reaps in old age, death and eternity, faithful sowing reaping loving care, tender burial, sweetest memory, and at the opening of God's gates eternal life for children and a star-gemmed crown for the mother presenting them to the Master. Gentle words and care plant seeds whose effects may lie dormant long before springing to life when conditions are right, and seeds of sacred knowledge in tender receptive minds may lie dormant before developing into good life.
Choosing companions, business and marriage unions against God sows bitter harvest of ruined souls and obstruction. Forming friendships and matrimonial and business unions with those who cannot elevate and who oppose God, walking contrary to wise arrangements to follow unsanctified heart ruled by passion and impulse instead of God's voice, surely reaps obstructions to serving God, ruined souls, dead aspirations, being without hope and without God, held in Satan's net by circumstances, and possible loss of soul. Character and choices brought into marriage shape the home, purity and unselfishness reaping joy and beautiful possibilities while selfishness and impurity yield weeds. Choosing chiefly for money, appearance or passion can lead to regret, while seeking God's guidance leads toward sound marriage and avoids need for divorce. Disobeying parents to marry a drinking gambling laborer brought loss of home to gambling, abandonment, poverty, dying and care of a small child; to speak the verse to refuse forgiveness and leave her to die is cruel and must not stand, for Christians must forgive, relent and welcome the erring home. Cruelty to animals sows cruelty toward people and dulls finer sensibilities, for which God calls to account, and cruelty sown in one generation may be repaid in the next as the way parents treat elders and raise children shapes how children later treat them.
Thoughts, words, looks and deeds are seeds; evil thoughts become acts, acts habits, habits character to destiny. Evil thoughts produce evil acts, acts become habits, continued habits shape character headed for destruction, as grain produces its own kind. Harboring evil purpose trains mind wrongly even when outward act is restrained, and that training will find expression in other wrong ways or time, so even one bad thought is dangerous. Thoughts, words and deeds reveal what is sown and express heart character, calling for self-examination and life according with the gospel, whether sowing to flesh unto corruption or to Spirit unto everlasting life. God is not deceived by profession, but knows whether heart is wholly devoted or given to worldly things; life not corresponding with profession shows faith dead, while sincere seekers live accordingly with good works even in food and dress for God's service not indulgence. Vulgar words, actions and thoughts sow to flesh unto corruption, while love, truth, kindness, forbearance and good deeds sow to Spirit unto everlasting life, with harvest in due season for those not weary in doing good especially to fellow believers.
Reading sows reaping, for books and papers chosen are seeds whose effects appear in future. Widespread demand for novels rather than religious books points to future harvest of tares, since every kind produces its own kind. Putting corrupt stories of robbers, murder, suicide and daring wickedness into the mind plants seed bringing in due time natural certain harvest of admiring wicked adventure, robbery, violence, threats, self-destruction and punishment, working even in the young and in children of well-to-do and ministerial homes. Feeding mind on degrading trivial material cannot produce sound strong character, but corruption, and scenes of crime and vice sow evil in youth that maturing can lead to ruin. Youth is time to sow good seed including by good books developing character, and the Word sown in the home including through temperance bears intended fruit protecting from drunkenness.
Doubt, skepticism and unbelief sown in speech multiply into deeper unbelief and infidelity in children and hearers. Doubt and skepticism encouraged and expressed take root and produce deeper unbelief, the life becoming continuing witness against the sower. Words of unbelief strengthen tendency to doubt and plant doubt in others, just as wheat or thistle seed produces matching harvest. Doubt planted in children's minds by parents questioning God's commands bears infidelity by immutable law. Sowing unbelief brings unbelief, pride brings pride, stubbornness brings stubbornness, for each day's attitudes are seeds requiring steadfastness in faith and God's word. Doubt and discouragement produce same-kind harvest, so sow words of faith, hope and light, and years sowing disbelief and skepticism about God's Word and disregard for eternal law harvest loss of interest in religious things and declining attendance.
Little sins and seemingly small errors can change life's course and destiny, just as small kindnesses and duties help shape the future. Even little sins and faults bring discord, sorrow, discontent and dimming of God's countenance, weaving life and destiny to be reaped. A cherished sin like seed in fertile soil even if small produces abundant harmful harvest, perverting right sense, lowering principles and bringing destruction unless cast out and given to Christ for His righteousness. Indulging bad habit like sowing seed produces crop of harmful results as thistles grow from seeds in heart, and choices and habits repeatedly practiced shape character so even small routine actions have lasting effects. Sin affects the soul in later years.
Choices and influence sown in others bring corresponding results, warning against leading anyone in the wrong way. Choices and influence planted in others warn against leading astray, for people continually sow good or evil in own hearts and others' hearts through conduct. Example plants seeds others copy growing into good or harmful character and actions, so examine planting. Corrupting manners and morals of the rising generation by principle or practice brings terrible harvest of woe so terrible it were better never to have been born. Teachers planting false ideas in young minds must face consequences, a pupil secretly sowing evil can spread bad traits through many before noticed, and teacher's actions and discipline leave moral impressions whether moral instruction is intended or not.
One who knowingly eats thirst-producing food cannot presume God will prevent thirst or remove consequences, even while seeking rescue from the drink habit. A church supporting and operating a liquor saloon will later reap the harm it sows, just as crop follows seed, as with profitable sale of beer and ale harming the mining community and bringing shame and distress to family. Turning from God and misusing entrusted abilities brings sure result, and great light and blessings do not protect the disobedient when not received, for there is no mockery of God without consequences. Medical treatment cannot undo this law or guarantee erasure of sin's consequences, as syphilis may break out again after apparent cure, and sowing idle words, sin while conscience sleeps, broken promises, hatred, strife, tares and weeds reaps toil and pain with no garnered sheaves but withered leaves from wasted life.
Feeding children impoverished, stimulating and irritating food can bring bodily irritation and disorder affecting the brain. God grants choice to do evil even to self-destruction without hindering, but sowing will be reaped, as when unwholesome food, tea, coffee, beer and tobacco clog the liver and ruin digestion and nerves. Habits such as excessive unbalanced diet can bring disease, and patients cannot expect doctors to cure resulting illness while continuing those habits. When people depart from God's instruction an unwelcome harvest follows wrong choices, and God faithfully warns of consequences before too late.
As with seed and harvest, thoughts and words as well as actions produce results, so right sowing brings good fruit while folly and vice bring sin, crime and regret. Choices made in youth can affect a whole life, good and evil growing together for a time before harvest, and faithful sowing yields lasting reward. Sow seeds of better deeds and thoughts while life remains, linking present choices with later reaping. Choices and habits formed in youth can shape a whole life and wrong patterns may root deeply hard to undo, with reaping in God's time and way ultimately at final judgment when saints are gathered and wicked receive doom. Youthful thoughts and actions form habits and shape character, so godlessness, frivolity, dishonesty and other wrong choices bring increase of harm in later years and continue guiding after school, while bad habits as heart thistles plant seed springing into larger crop of same weeds with every indulgence. Young people left to decide and learn from results reap kind sown.
The law applies to pleasure or pain, good or harm, and deeds follow like a shadow. In relationships love begets love, and those wishing to be loved must make themselves lovable, while striving for wealth at health's cost has consequences and living for love can yield more beautiful life. Sowing loving thoughts brings good words, and kind words bring love and sympathy, so the good find pathway strewn with flowers springing behind footsteps as result of own kindness. A fretful hostile manner tends to meet hostility while being helpful, generous and true tends to bring kindness, as echo returns sound. Thoughts, words, deeds and choices are seeds whether open or unseen, in weakness or strength, meekness or anger, so kind words and deeds bring sweet harvest while selfish gain and harmful choices bring dark harvest, even idleness leaving sad result, certain though delayed. Life is a field giving back what is put in, yielding thorns or flowers, and none gathers ripe golden grain without sower's work and tears. Evil words bring harm to speaker's soul and others and weaken influence, and those injuring others with words and actions, often from envy and jealousy, will be required to account and experience suffering caused, for every wrong is recorded. Sowing discord brings later regret, as when a wife gossips about her husband.
As seed determines crop, living shapes becoming, so kindness and forgiveness shape habits and character while hatred and falsehood lead toward despair, yet Christ's redemption can heal, cleanse and turn sorrow to joy. Pleasantness, cheerful honesty, helpful speech and joy in work are seeds shaping a girl's character and later life, though she is not responsible for inherited disposition but for acquired disposition. What is sown today produces harvest for good or ill in this life and eternity, for even a look, word or act shapes character and may influence another soul toward eternal loss or blessedness, sowing to flesh bringing corruption and to Spirit eternal life. Words and deeds whether kind or harsh leave lasting influence and do not perish, calling for will to make influence good, and a life sowing kindness brings blessings temporal and spiritual in later years. Thoughts and deeds bear seed of what follows, so an hour's worth is judged by later fruit. Planting hate brings hate, while planting love brings love, and love sowing with toil is tried and purified on earth with harvest in heaven.
Choices at every age keep growing toward harvest, for work relying on Christ for His glory leads to hope of immortal reward while vain pursuits produce tares warning of doom, and reaping day comes when each seed yields its harvest. Joy given to others returns to the giver, while educating the soul in doubt and questioning God's dealings produces more doubt, especially when faith and confidence are essential, and sowing to flesh leads to corruption. What is sown determines what is reaped, so success is not accidental but results from steady well-directed effort, and for youth education developing body and mind is part of sowing for success through daily reading and completing work. Words are seeds reaped later, for careless filthy speech can lodge in a child's mind and bear sinful conduct even after seeming forgotten, with judgment revealing full result and responsibility, and private speech can undermine public example; speaking sows and hearing reaps. People reap consequences of sowing, for reckless conduct produces bad habits, harmful companions, corrupt tastes, disease, crime, death, remorse and sorrow, while good resolutions and noble conduct grow better character, and drunkenness cannot simply be left behind for lasting damage may remain though partly healed.
Applied to life's course, deeds and choices over years produce harvest to consider in old age, for careless living and neglected opportunities leave inability to know what might have been accomplished, and life's evening takes character from preceding day. All daily sow countless good and evil seeds in words, looks, actions, thoughts and passions, falling everywhere and some growing even when sower is dead, so weak humans need God and angels to guard furrows lest sin spoil the land, with certain reaping either sin and sorrow or glorious eternal harvest with rest. Every moment including hearing, reading and thinking provides seed to scatter through influence, so choose good to sow like flowers rather than nettles, for harvest reveals living. Thoughts, words and influences gathered and spread produce corresponding harvest, even small seeds having power, with full result known when life is finished. Even small daily defeats like neglecting prayer can weaken faith, leave children without spiritual help, and spread through influence on neighbors and friends into eternity. Words and deeds do not disappear though passing from sight or memory but continue influencing for good or ill, including unconscious influence planting seeds that later bring glory to God, so heart must be shaped by love to stand in judgment.
Everyone continually sows through thoughts, words and deeds in all places and states, even with idle hands, and sure harvest matches sowing from pleasant, gentle, noble deeds to dark harvest of hate and sad harvest of idleness whose weeds cannot soon be rooted out. What is taken in and chosen to spread has consequences, for what is gathered from each moment and from hearing, reading and thinking becomes seed sown, and harvest reveals gathering and sowing. In raising children irritable speech, angry looks and harsh rejection plant bitter harvest, while patient selfless care shaped by Christ's example brings mature children gladdening parents in old age. Sin's sowing can bring weakness, crime and disease upon children and later descendants by heredity without God arbitrarily imputing parents' guilt, each answering for own conduct, yet grace can work mighty miracles when descendants turn rightly to God. Physical excess such as heavy drinking may seem unpunished in the practitioner yet penalty can fall on later generations, and widespread drinking of earlier generations produced lasting intemperance and physical and mental disorders in later ones. Like begets like and harvest accords with sowing, children in measure reproducing parental traits welcomed or deplored, raising whether release exists from unenviable inheritance.
Thoughts are the sowing and life is the reaping, so a person realizes the settled vision of the heart rather than idle wish. One gravitates toward what is secretly loved most, receives exact results of thoughts, earns no more and no less, and falls, remains or rises with thoughts, vision and ideal, becoming as small as controlling desire and as great as dominant aspiration. Thoughts allowed to root produce actions and consequences, good bearing good and bad bearing bad, for circumstances reveal rather than create character, and the path toward vice or virtue grows from fostered desires. Seeds of virtue bear virtuous results and the Word sown in heart can transform a person in one generation to reflect the Lord's image, while effects of sinful heredity may extend through generations and virtuous life tends to repair those effects. A good harvest from words and instruction depends on choosing seed well and planting wisely, since excessive words heaped over it can crush its life and prevent fruit.
Those who sow evil habits may carry the harvest throughout life in a damaged body, wavering will, impaired intellect and weakened spiritual power, even if they reform, so addressing evil early matters and parents can shape habits toward good. Dwelling on illness may worsen it while meeting it cheerfully can support improvement, and even when physical defects remain a person can cultivate a loving nature and bear them happily. Apparent progress in expanding dry territory and passing prohibition laws does not mean the alcohol evil is overcome when consumption continues to rise, so the underlying cause must be eradicated or apparent advance will bring terrible recoil. Children who treat an aging parent with ingratitude and resentment should expect their own children to treat them likewise when they grow old and frail. Rewarding a child with money for goodness or service can plant selfishness and covetousness, while encouraging loving unselfish service in imitation of Jesus can lead the child to become a blessing to others, for outcomes follow pattern planted and shape eternal destinies.
Using a gifted mind to chase pleasure, fan passion and drive melancholy away brings gloom at life's close, while virtue and useful service bring a different close. A man receives what he plants and cannot escape by hoping or striving otherwise, chasing pleasure where it is not found and indulging to keep spirits up bringing gloom, unhappiness and painful review, unlike useful service. In child training a child should experience natural consequences of misdeeds rather than arbitrary punishment to learn from result, and harm inflicted can fittingly return as correction, as when a boy doused in icy water felt the pain he caused. The heart requires early thorough planting of pure heavenly thoughts and removal of harmful influences, with harvest as reward of faithfulness and right conduct. Hypnotism may temporarily change behavior but weakens will and resistance and leaves the soul more vulnerable to evil, bringing fearful harvest even when used with good motives. A person's own actions determine character formed, and another's words cannot injure it unless own conduct gives cause. A mother reaps honor or dishonor in the world's verdict according to her son's conduct, whether just or unjust. A young person reaps according to treatment of mother, with neglect and hurt bringing sorrow and kindness bringing comfort and peace, urging kindness before too late while mother lives. People reap according to sowing in Bible reading, with hasty reading yielding little retention and inaccurate quotation and careful unhurried reading yielding understanding and remembrance. Neglecting strangers can lead to experiencing loneliness and neglect oneself, while tender care brings peace and blessing. Turning sacred melodies into dancing tunes brings eventual harvest unless forsaken, though immediate harm may be avoided.
Gospel Work and Giving
What is done for God is seed sown now that brings an eternal harvest of saved people in His kingdom rather than earthly wealth, multiplied as those reached lead others to Christ, and though sown in faith and watered with tears with long waiting before fruit appears, as in family prayer and Bible study, it yields sure joyful fruit, seen in twenty deciding in one colony and in growth on Norfolk Island and in Chinchow and China, by denying self to distribute tracts of pure truth while praying for the Spirit to carry truth home to readers unto a crown of rejoicing and the overcomer's rest and reward for those who rally, work, watch and pray. The harvest is guaranteed by God though not at once, so discouragement over slow visible results is unwarranted.
Giving follows the same rule that harvest matches sowing: generous cheerful giving and scattering truth reap abundance while sparing withholding reaps sparingly, and God who cannot be deceived by pretended service knows when means are withheld to spend on self-desire, calling those taught spiritual things to share material good with teachers and to support missions and the cause of truth rather than hoard, with the final realization at the end of the world when the Lord of the harvest comes lest little effort grieve over a small crop. Giving freely to the needy and scattering truth bring abundant repayment from God.
Use of money is sowing that decides eternal harvest: sacrificing to sustain God's cause and faithfully trading entrusted talents lays treasure in heaven to be met with satisfaction, while hoarding property unused for God amounts to nothing in the burning day and ends in loss and sad regret for energies bent worldly, requiring more faith, nearness of the cause to the heart, awakening to duty, and wise appropriation of much or little as unto the Lord. Vain excuses for neglecting His requirements will not stand at judgment, for faith without self-denial and active work to save others does not save, and the plea that charity begins at home will not avail the covetous rich who refuse the worthy poor, widow and fatherless, the house of the Lord and the spread of truth, since God sees hiding places and men are known by fruits, and those professing to prepare for a better country yet refusing to sell, give alms and send goods on before must hasten to send treasure on that they may follow after. Profession contradicted by covetousness cannot deceive God, for liberality belongs with faith, love and prayer, covetousness bars heaven, and the early church's sharing teaches abundant giving while Ananias and Sapphira and Achan stand as striking examples to study, though not as a rule that God deals identically with every covetous person. What is given in service is truly kept: withholding a God-given talent by refusing use for others loses it, while freely giving time, talent and means builds future reward, enlarges capacity to give, and remains possessed through faithful use even when results are unseen.
Labor brings results and earnest faithful work produces victories, for mental and physical powers strengthen by use while indolence and ignorance sow their own crop, and a short life doing much outweighs a long one doing little, since life is measured by doing rather than length. Seed sown in the heart as affection, truth and love, carefully cultivated through hardship with hope and faith, shows good fruit and great gain from God, and faithful sowing of right seed with persevering stand for right brings outcome in God's time even in weakness, as in Miss Worthen reaping a free year of schooling for gathering subscribers with further kingdom fruit hoped from spreading truth, and in school members taking a stand for Christ, baptism and joining the church. Christians are therefore called to keep sowing faithfully and patiently trusting harvest will come, and one success calls for fresh sowing on a higher plane for what is still ungained.
Sowing love, faith, truth, honor, kindness and pity returns in kind: smiles and good cheer bring the same, love begets love and is returned by brethren, enemies and even domestic animals each after its nature, while harshness, bitterness, unkindness, slander and curses return to trouble the giver, and joy shared brings greater joy whereas grief caused brings sorrow. Giving one's best enriches and its good lies in the giving, even when sowing seems fruitless, while withholding impoverishes, and care yields beauty.
Idleness and selfish inaction sow no good seed and yield no harvest but weeds, pain and withered leaves instead of golden sheaves, as in the fig tree bearing only leaves and the life that scattered nothing, answered no call to work in the vineyard, spoke not of the Saviour's love and prepared not for life's end. Sowing must come before reaping, so daily work from morning light till evening, cheerfully taking the nearest duty instead of standing still or gazing to the far future, with honest sweat by evening, must precede rest at last as labor's prize and wages from the Master at His coming with approval of good and faithful, and those idle now sowing no kindness will have no sheaves when probation ends, while remaining time used in weeping toil for the Master ends in welcome to heaven and rejoicing with sheaves. Joys reaped hereafter come only from what is sown today in giving, loving cheer, kindness, smiles to lonely lives, grander birth to truth, deeper worth to faith and food to hungering souls, not from intending much next year or in the afterwhile, for idle dreams do not count and each must ask what was sown, built, given, spoken and fed today.
God's retribution is as eternal as justice, sure though sins are hidden and judgment delayed, returning suffering, deceit, oppression and harm upon the wrongdoer when pay-day comes. For the rich with power and opportunity this means grave responsibility to deal justly, love mercy and care for fellow men unto blessing, but oppressing or despising the poor and needy while reveling in luxury and wealth reaps anger, misery, vengeance and upheaval when the lean, hungry, hunted, driven and despairing from mine and mill, factory and sweatshop, tenement and slum rise with armies from among them, and wealth cannot bribe the crowd nor power intimidate God the Judge, as seen when kindness like Mrs. Alton's spared her husband while exploiters faced wrath, and selfish injustice toward the poor robs both giver and poor of good and life's sweetest pleasures whereas just dealing brings happiness to both.
Societies likewise reap what they sow: New York's intemperance, gambling and corrupt publications spread dishonesty, irreligion and impurity whose moral harvest appeared and cannot be escaped or hid from God, as a law of nature. Public education glorifying battle and violence reaps war rather than peace, as in the trouble in the Transvaal. Destroying birds for feathers may bring increase of insects they once controlled, a judgment from human acts. The Chicago theater fire warns that God's love does not set aside His established laws and purposes nor allow lightness without consequence.
The verse belongs with Matthew 5-7, Romans 6-8 and 12, Galatians 5-6, Ephesians 4-6, James 2-3, Peter and 1 John in teaching holiness as the design of all grace and providence, for life is seed-time and eternity harvest, judgment following death, harvest matching kind, and character formed here fixing how persons remain. Idleness and vice bring barrenness and cannot yield respected happy age, while diligent use of means of grace, earnest redeeming of time, and sowing for righteousness, God and heaven yield spiritual growth and joyful future harvest, with the year's harvest revealing earlier sowing and calling for regular examination of what the past prepares, since future glory unfolds from present grace and none reaches glory without first receiving grace in Christ.
Evil imparted returns upon the doer to teach tenderness: Jacob's deceitful course made hard Haran experience necessary, and whoever condemns or discourages is brought over the same ground to feel what others suffered from lack of sympathy, which God in love decreed to make hardness hated and open the heart for Jesus, turning curse to blessing. Present suffering as past planting explains seeming unfairness, as in tramps' broken homes, hearts, poverty, homelessness and wrecked bodies reaped from former sowing, seen plainly as life closes and eternity opens, driving many in despair to self-destruction, yet the way to change harvest is to change sowing. Reasons for grief now unknown will be learned sometime somewhere in the future harvest, giving ground to hope and believe while weary, tearful, weak and impatient, asking God for patience, faith, strength to work on, courage, hope and submission.
Sowing truth brings truth while sowing falsehood brings emptiness, requiring upright sound conscience, rejection of hollow words and deeds, and filling each hour with what lasts and buying up moments, because the life above when this life is past is ripe fruit of the life below, and to live well is to live long with all else thrown away, sowing love unto pure fruit, peace unto bright harvest, and brightness even on hard barren ground unto a harvest home of light.
Refusing the light of the third angel's message and its reforms leads to darkness, for God cannot be mocked and each reaps what is sown, calling for self-examination whether in harmony with it.
Professed believers must surrender self and possessions to God, giving cheerfully and ready to sacrifice even principal, for conduct reveals the heart and has consequences, and His purposes cannot be thwarted nor His favor gained except in His appointed way.
What is sown is reaped manyfold, as the farmer expects far more than planted, because influence spreads every way: evil spreads like wildfire to a far larger evil harvest, and good spreads far and wide as truth passed from one to friends and neighbors keeps increasing till eternity alone reveals the full good, so no bad seed should be sown and good seed sown bountifully to reap bountifully.
Faithfulness in present time and opportunity, including cheerful generous giving, prepares abundant kingdom harvest to be revealed in the coming day, sowing to the Spirit bringing everlasting life and sowing to the flesh corruption, while withholding can lead to poverty, and church fundraising schemes planting selfishness in takers or beholders will reap matching seed.
Work for Jesus is never wasted and no well-doing seed is lost, for God loves workers and keeps His harvest promise unto a crown and a home above for faithful early sowers, so even when sky is dark and toil costly they take courage and serve on without turning aside, strength renewed daily, trusting Christ's favor to return in kind what was sown, with even small faithful service amid weakness or doubt later bearing benevolence and love.
Sowing lotteries, chances, church fairs and kindred doubtful methods to raise church money plants gambling by example in boys and young men, reaping bountifully gamblers, saloon keepers and hardened irreligious youth, with sons of good people growing to fifteen or twenty unconverted, unmoved by revival, refusing prayer from gambling Christians and using good men's error as excuse to reject the gift, so even well-meant sowing brings ruin and its profit is loss.
Obedient daily thanksgiving reaps its blessings, to be known by those obeying the rule each day. Gospel sowing must be faithful without demanding immediate results or endlessly repeating one unreceived subject, first addressing heart needs like covetousness, malice or anger with the Word before seed can take root, trusting God for harvest in proper time. Sowing seeds of love in given working time reaps result to lay as golden store at Jesus' feet. Seed cast into the ground, literally and spiritually, illustrates trust that God will multiply at harvest, and those sowing for God must faithfully return to Him what is His.
Further points
A person reaps what is sown. Belief in this principle bears on daily life. That belief can inspire right doing. Just as belief in a holy, just, and merciful God bears on conduct and character.
God cannot be deceived, cheated, defied or treated with contempt, and whatever a person sows that person will also reap in corresponding harvest. This is a fixed, eternal and inescapable law of moral cause and effect, as certain as the processes of nature and the movements of the planets. Like always produces like, and the harvest is of the same kind and character as the sowing but in far greater abundance, as an act becomes a habit, a habit character, and character destiny. Sowing to the flesh by living for self and gratifying fallen desire reaps corruption, decay and death, while sowing to the Spirit by receiving God's Word and living in obedience reaps righteousness and everlasting incorruptible life. All that is thought, said and done is sown now and recorded in heaven, to be reaped in fixed destiny when each is judged from the books and meets words, deeds and influence again.
Warning Against Being Deceived
Be not deceived means no one can mock, deceive, cheat, defy, treat with contempt or evade God, for whatever a person sows that same person will also reap in corresponding harvest. The principle is as sure as the laws of nature, with each kind of seed producing its own kind and its own body, and the harvest coming in greater abundance than the sowing. It is Infinite Love pleading with people now not to be deceived about this law, given as a faithful warning to save them from sowing to the flesh and reaping corruption, death and exclusion from the kingdom. Sowing seeds of death, pain and woe cannot produce life, while planting Christ the living Seed shows Christ in words and deeds and yields Him as harvest day by day and fully when the King appears. God's mercy provides all needed for life and godliness and sanctification now, but it does not make His word false or remove the harvest of a life spent in sin.
Sincerity, good intentions, ignorance, being deceived about what was chosen, knowledge, status, profession of faith or confident persuasion do not cancel the harvest or allow escape from consequences and judgment. In religious matters sincerity does not cancel the consequence of believing falsely or disregarding God's word, just as in worldly affairs careless deception brings consequences, and the principle applies at the judgment. Sowing the wrong seed brings bad fruit just as surely when deceived about its nature as when knowingly choosing it, and rejecting God's truth while firmly convinced it is false still reaps unbelief's result. Mere wishing and so-called sincerity about a good time coming cannot fool God, and many who only sit and hope will be disappointed.
The warning exposes self-deception and the danger of following by nature a course leading to disaster while expecting to escape its result, as seed produces its kind and a tree its own fruit. It calls for examination by God's Word, for distrust of self and trust in God, and for testing teachings by Scripture, since religion is of the heart which God alone knows and can deal with. Only God's revelation of self and of God delivers from the greatest danger of deceiving oneself, for turning from truth does not make it disappear and willful unbelief that shuts the eyes to proof and tries to remove evidence cannot escape its fitting outcome.
Empty religious profession, outward show, form and hypocrisy cannot deceive God, who looks on the heart rather than outward appearance and knows whether it is wholly devoted to His service or given to worldly things. A life not corresponding with profession shows faith dead, and profession without doing is an abomination marked in heaven as not known, for no furnishings, promises, profession or appearance can deceive Him in judgment while human agencies can be fooled. Those who appear to defy Him or rely on empty profession really harm themselves and their eternal interests, for neglect of known duties or knowingly doing wrong is not hidden by profession. Sincere seekers live in keeping with profession by good works and self-denial even in food and dress to honor God rather than indulgence.
Satan walks as an angel of light in every assembly of Christian workers and in every church to win members, most earnestly seeking to ensnare those who have had most light so under his control they clothe sin with garments of righteousness and lead many astray. He works as planter as well as reaper, never presenting pure wickedness but concealing each lie in truth and diluting each drop of poison in pleasant nourishment, sowing invisible germs of evil among good through borderland indulgences, mild fictions, captivating plays, barely questionable pictures, doubtful tastes and free samples that create craving. By disguised deadly error even in Christian language and Scripture phrases, by pleasing false theories and broader philosophy and liberality, he leads even well-informed believers to disguise sin as righteousness, and while such misleading speculative theories are cherished there can be no unity with ministers bearing the gospel message.
Prayer, singing and worship mock God when the heart rejects holiness, cherishes sin or refuses duty. Praying for deliverance or holiness while continuing to indulge sin is self-deception and mockery, for prayer must be joined with hatred of sin and faithful effort to overcome it. A prayer offered falsely without a true heart cannot bring the genuine result sought but yields deception, as sowing cockle cannot produce wheat, and one alternating between flesh and formal profession of Spirit should not expect answer on the promise to ask and receive. Asking to know the ways of the Lord without a true heart is a prayer-lie on the lips reaping only self-deception and disappointment, and seeking a prayerful excuse to disobey His clearly spoken word brings displeasure rather than blessing. A father who prays for his children's conversion while his choices and example lead them toward worldliness, selfishness or frivolity mocks God, for he must work in harmony with his prayers toward godliness.
Excusing conduct, siding with wrongdoing, excusing children's rebellion or treating youthful wrong as a necessary phase does not cancel judgment. Even the young who sow to the flesh reap corruption, and youthful misconduct is not erased by growing older or reaching adulthood but must be answered for. Eli's sons illustrate the warning, for their sinful course ended in miserable deaths by the Philistines, and excusing gross immorality and siding with its doers sows to the flesh unto corruption and suffering.
God is not indifferent when people disregard His counsel, as Nadab and Abihu destroyed by fire for disobedience show. Holiday recreation and preparations should therefore honor God rather than be ruled by pride, vanity or desire to please the world. Those doing God's work must practice strict temperance, keep the whole being under God's protection and not tempt His Spirit, for consequences match sowing.
God cannot be fooled by mere wishing and so-called sincerity about a good time coming, and rewards and punishments soon come in the last days according to the eternal truths of His Word. Many who only sit and hope will be disappointed, for what a person sows determines what is reaped. People must therefore turn from watchmen and theories that withhold the message for the time, and search for themselves and follow Christ speaking through that Word to eternal inheritance beyond evil.
God is not mocked and cannot be deceived, and He does not mock His children. His promises are yes and amen in Christ, real and enduring, not phantom hopes, illusions, counterfeits or fables. He does not mock the discouraged sinner, for His appeals through the Spirit prove He truly wants return, and while the Spirit still bids turn the case is not hopeless. Nor can He be mocked by avoiding conviction of sin, for conviction does not make the sinner worse but reveals true condition and opens the way to the One who remedies every defect and washes away every sin.
Costly worship buildings, educational institutions and philanthropy do not compensate disobedience or make up for disloyalty. God's law and Sabbath remain unchanged requiring loyal faithful observance, delayed punishment does not mean evil goes unanswered, and true safety and happiness come from faithfulness and devotion while those who fear God fare well and the wicked do not. God cannot be fooled or trifled with over the Sabbath, for saying it makes no difference what day is kept is deceiving oneself. Trying to get Him to accept a different day instead of what He required mocks Him, since He blessed and sanctified the definite seventh day with sanctifying power and special blessing superior to every other day and gave no authority to any person, church or even apostles to sanctify another in its place. Those who try to do away with the Lord's Sabbath while professing to love Christ and await His coming deceive themselves, for following Jesus and readiness to meet Him require keeping the Father's commandments as Jesus did. Knowing His law but refusing obedience because inconvenient, especially in keeping the seventh day, brings consequences, and willingness to do right only when convenient does not excuse. Calling Sunday God's holy day without biblical proof does not make it so, and ministers whose confident teaching that Sunday is the Sabbath and use of the fourth commandment to support it, or who teach first-day observance under cover of Christianity in place of the seventh day, will reap that perversion though God desires them to learn now.
A young man's crime, ruined character and wasted life harvest ignoring instruction and choosing folly, for God's spiritual laws cannot be broken without consequence and belief that wrongdoing brings no spiritual disease or death mocks Him. Early disobedience beginning a course to crime and execution leaves sorrow for a wife and shame for a child, with penalty borne by parent and child, and those who mock admonition, reject advice, hate instruction and despise reproof suffer sorrows following rashness and disobedience. God cannot be mocked over sexual immorality, which brings judgment and requires personal and social purity. Excusing a young man's misconduct and lowering purity's standard sows a harvest of sorrow accountable before God's judgment, though society excuses the man and shames the woman, for His record will expose and right unjust judgments. Lusts of the eye and pride of life in sexual sin and luxurious living bring disease and death, and publications spreading songs and pictures making impurity acceptable sow vice that cannot produce a pure society. Cartoons, stories and songs jesting at marriage's sacredness plant seeds reaped in divorce courts and moral ruin, leading through jest and song to think disloyalty to the lifelong pledge not so bad until moral sentiment breaks down and the individual becomes sin's plaything.
God cannot be trifled with by partial obedience compromising His authority to gratify self. Lot's wife shows this, for though willing to obey in everything else she disobeyed in one little particular by looking back to gratify longing for children and home, reasoning God would not insist on so small a thing if she kept pressing on, and for that act was instantly destroyed as a monument of wrath for all ages, losing soul and body and all she coveted. Attempting to please God by obeying a different law or doing works other than those the gospel requires likewise mocks God and insults the Holy One of Israel. He requires walking in Christ's steps to a guileless state, and the requirement is attainable, so people must strive for complete victory, trust His promised help and not lower the standard or claim inability to obey, since that limits His power.
The warning not to be deceived rejects optimistic claims that the world is being converted while tolerated and respectable sins and scientific heresies taking the edge from the Gospel harden hearts against truth, with old-time piety and integrity rare and faith in the atonement wanting, so the mass within and without the church drift to doom and reap what they sow. This does not make Jesus Christ and the Gospel failures, for Christ is able to save to the uttermost all desiring salvation and to win souls from sin's wreck. God is not mocked by a character built on any foundation but Jesus Christ, for every other foundation will fail in the last-day storms. A foundation may seem almost as hard as rock, a thousand-year creed, a self-righteous character, hoary traditions of the fathers, something centuries old or lying very near the Rock, yet if not the very Living Rock itself the rain of error will loosen it and sweep it to destruction, and only building on the sure foundation laid in Zion, letting self be crushed on the Rock Christ Jesus, builds an eternal pure character.
Fixed Law of Harvest
The verse states an eternal, fixed, immutable, inescapable law of moral cause and effect, continually demonstrated in nature, where each kind of seed produces its own kind and is given its own body, as certain as gravitation and the orbits of planets and the earth turning on its axis. It cannot be evaded or mocked, and teachings that promise a different harvest, or a harvest without sowing, are deceptive. Deeds bring corresponding consequences for good or ill and follow the person to determine reward, in contrast with the possibility of atonement held by some.
Like produces like, and the harvest is of the same kind and character as the sowing but in far greater abundance and many times over, as a handful sown yields a bushel reaped and sowing wind yields whirlwind, spreading like wildfire because influence travels in every direction. An act becomes a habit, a habit character, and character destiny. Evil sown brings a far larger harvest of evil and good sown a far larger harvest of good that keeps increasing the farther it travels, so that eternity alone reveals the full good done; therefore no bad seed should be sown because it spreads, while good seed should be sown bountifully. A righteous God-loving life can influence others toward righteousness through succeeding generations unto eternal life, while an unrighteous life spreads corruption unto eternal death, though human choices can check righteousness and God works against sin for those seeking release, so sin and its influence are neither limitless nor eternal.
Unlike literal farming, where storm, drought, short seasons or other calamity can destroy the crop, this moral harvest never fails and holds no contingency, needing no watering or enriching of soil to produce corruption from flesh-sowing, which neither drought nor flood can stop. Delay, the prosperity of the dishonest, or apparent success in wrongdoing does not cancel it, for the harvest may ripen slowly and come soon or long afterward in God's time, with the seed reaching perfection above the earth. Secret fraud and deceptive business remain sinful even when undiscovered, because concealment deceives others but cheats the wrongdoer, since life's harvest is character determining destiny in this life and the life to come. No arbitrary interference will remove the dire results, leaving only the sower to blame, because nature and providence offer no forgiveness while revealed forgiveness comes only on conditions.
Sowing must come before reaping and without sowing there is no harvest; this lifetime is the sowing time and eternity the harvest time, the present limited season deciding the future, so people must watch what they sow, prepare now to reap life, and cannot rightly expect a different crop or complain of the result. The most common action of every day and hour sows seed for a great harvest extending into eternity, to be met again when graves give up their dead and the past gives up all it holds to witness for or against each person. The future is the consequence of the present, for time does not turn sin into virtue or create moral progress but reveals and intensifies existing tendencies; a better future comes not by waiting for easier circumstances but by confronting sin and leaving harmful companionships and temptations in settled penitence and trust, and by giving time, means and influence for God's work. Life yields thorns or flowers according to planting, with furrows watered with tears before the ripe harvest is gathered.
The law governs universally and eternally every responsible person and also companies, trusts, nations, governments, churches, families and cities, with no escape and with God's justice impartial. It applies independently across areas of life, so obeying health laws brings health even to the dishonest while neglecting health brings suffering even to the honest, and those sowing only for this world receive only this world's rewards because they have not sown for eternity. A church abandoning the Bible as its rule of faith, denying Christ's divinity and saving power, and turning to the state instead of the Holy Spirit cannot expect its course to end well whatever its wealth, education or charitable works, and churches neglecting warnings against covetousness while encouraging material gratification, luxury, fashion and pride bring fitting consequences on themselves.
Consequences are the natural harvest contained in the act, not arbitrary sentences imposed by decree, so no one can deceive God or destroy or escape the certain result, though people can deceive others for now about past lives. God permits and watches over the outcome and allows correction through suffering limited to what is needed to lead to change of course; when the wrong is recognized and repented of, Christ bears its consequences, but if not turned from, the intended blessing of correction is experienced as punishment. Present suffering is disciplinary and may be escaped, while final punishment is retributive and everlasting; present suffering does not justify or save for the future but demonstrates that sin brings evil and points to its final result, with sin moving toward death and its full end coming only when its course is complete. God in mercy leaves people to reap what they sow and gather fruit of self-plotting for gain and worldly greed, mingling His blessed bestowing with tare and thistle, to reveal His goodness and teach walking by faith in His way so as not to suffer again and again; repentance and surrender do not erase the past but God can build a new life from old experiences and turn their effects toward blessing.
The fixed law governs physical health and spiritual rest, where only what is sown is reaped. Satan denies it by suggesting good sowing will fail and evil sowing may escape, offering a shorter way of reaping without sowing through instant miraculous health apart from physical habits or moral condition; this evasion of sowing and reaping is evasion of obedience to divine law, and every apparent miracle of his aims to draw the mind from obedience, so the verse warns the elect to discern beneath miracles wearing truth's garb and hold to living principles rather than seeking manifestations. People should not ask for health while refusing God's laws of life and health and persisting in unhealthy habits, for neglect brings its consequences as sowing brings reaping.
Lasting good requires paying its price, and trying to gain by dishonest or sinful means ultimately brings ruin, with no exemption for the rich. Gain by fraud or sin is experienced even in this life as guilt, an accusing conscience and loss of peace, and failure is the fitting result of self-indulgence. Sin's apparent gains do not last, for what seems pleasant when sown may produce bitter destructive fruit, so every seeming advantage by compromise is really loss and a step backward; dishonest covetous schemes bring punishment even when the doer expects to keep the money and avoid capture, in disgrace, loss of family and home, imprisonment, suicide or ruined life.
Each person makes life failure or victory by fixed law that cannot be denied, escaped or changed by ignorance and is plainly made known, since the planting is one's own living and habits binding with iron strength, proving imprisonment voluntary and self-willed. Yet even under that law there is hope, for Christ commands every yoke broken and is able to save fully those who come to Him, calling the captive to loose himself and hasten to blood-bought freedom instead of dying in the pit. Continued indulgence strengthens sin's hold, deepens aversion to God and leaves increasing enslavement, so indifference or hard-heartedness toward divine truth is the reaping of what was sown.
Transgression brings grief, sorrow, pain and woe to the sinner and those around, and suffering throughout the world testifies to sin's consequences. Wrongdoing does not bring the good its doers hope for, and trying to harm others for gain does not escape consequence, as the path of sin ends in shame and suffering illustrated by the prodigal's misery and ruin by strong drink. Harm by cruelty returns its sorrow upon its cause, raising how much will be charged to the one who caused glad hearts to be made sad.
Sowing sin while expecting future happiness is like sowing cockle and expecting wheat or barley, which cannot be. God permits consequences of disobedience to teach that perverted law brings destructive results unto decay and death, with earth's shakings showing it waxing old toward dissolution. Jacob's trouble followed his own wrongdoing, and acknowledging sin brought recognition of God's presence and help, for reaping cannot be avoided while sowing continues and the way to avoid it is to stop sowing.
The verse is a divine unchanging prophecy that cannot fail because God cannot be mocked or deceived; what is sown determines what is reaped, with flesh-sowing reaping corruption. Those heeding it become willing glad witnesses to His power, wisdom, goodness and love, while those refusing it still become unwilling witnesses by eating their own way's fruit and receiving sin's wages, witnessing even in unholy abasement until the final fulfillment before the great white throne when every knee bows and every tongue confesses. A person may now declare God and His Word false, prefer human theories and seem successful for a while, but sooner or later even a truthless life will to everlasting shame prove the infallible Word true; the privilege is to side with the Word now and bear willing witness in righteousness like Moses, Samuel, Elijah and Jesus rather than unwilling witness at last like Pharaoh, Saul, Ahab and Caiaphas. Persistent obstinacy and resistance to light produce increasing unbelief and hardness, as Pharaoh's each rejection made further rejection easier until left hardened, and denying Bible creation brings consequences in keeping with that rejection.
God's sowing-reaping law is unalterable as the Second Commandment throughout His universe, so temporary apparent change does not remove consequences while producing habits remain, as indulging foods provoking irritability keeps that disposition from permanent overcoming. Life is not governed by chance, and the religious world's alienation, coldness, backsliding and formality have a cause just as harvest follows sowing. Its words will not fail amid the rush for wealth and fame, for wealth and recognition do not give lasting satisfaction, which belongs to God's kingdom treasures; life is like a vineyard where reward is measured by labor and deeds, providence cannot be cheated, and wealth or honors undeserved without ability to use them wisely become harmful rather than true blessing, with good coming through patient effort in earning and using, not unearned gain or luck.
Harvest follows the kind of seed sown, with actions and the feelings and motives behind them shaping outcome, for people sow now and reap later and sinful living does not lead to obedience's reward, means and ends and causes and effects being inseparably linked. Present choices form character and determine destiny, so every choice brings a corresponding harvest reflecting its nature, guiding present choice to shape future harvest; choosing wealth, worldly ambitions or own desires while rejecting counsel leads to sorrow and death, while choosing God's way leads to life, pleasantness and peace. Sowing for present pleasure while ignoring the future leads to sorrow and loss, while wisely turning from worldly temptations even through grief and hardship leads to lasting joy; God sees the harvest contained in sowing to come in due time, as in Paris's rejection of God for worldly pleasures reaping spiritual weariness and death.
Harvest follows a life of sowing and cannot be undone or changed once sown, for truth sown brings fruitful harvest while sinful deeds bring sorrow and regret, and God's harvest comes at the end when every sowing is faithfully gathered and none escapes judgment. Indulging sin and worldly pleasure leads to a painful harvest of repentance, and delaying response makes return harder and more wearisome, while truth sent along grace's path yields rich harvest. Evil deeds do not earn good's reward and wrong actions produce plentiful evil, for seed planted without care will grow and be reaped by the sower, and wrongdoing must be faced again together with the evil caused in the world, warning against allowing youth to sow wild oats. Wrongdoing does not become right because good is hoped from it, though God may bring good despite human evil, and people do better doing only good; sowing obstinacy by stifling conviction, refusing evidence and resisting the Spirit sows unbelief and reaps unbelief, hardness, pride, stubbornness, prejudice and growing power to resist clearer light until mercy is exhausted and the Spirit finds no access, though God commends none in impenitence, destroys none, decrees none to ruin, but follows sinners with light, opportunities, appeals, warnings and compassion while hope remains, leaving responsibility on the sinner with neglected light measuring guilt. Those sowing evil will soon reap its harvest, with hosts of evil moving toward the death their course brings, and moral actions produce results unto failure or success as God renders to each according to deeds.
Good seeds bring fair harvest while worthless seeds bring weeds, and harvest will come some day and somewhere reflecting what was sown, for thoughts, actions and deeds are seeds whose later harvest matches them. Seeds of sorrow sown in troubled times can spread and bear fruit for years, while words of comfort sown in hardship ripen to good; worldliness planted in Christian life can grow and spread unto spiritual decline and apostasy. Good seed yields good fruit and harmful seed harmful results when harvest, the time of reward for sowing and labor, comes. God's cause-and-effect law applies to moral and spiritual life as surely as to nature, so people cannot sow evil in hearts and lives while expecting good, for good fruit requires sowing and cultivating good seed, whether wheat, health or righteousness, with correct sowing bringing inevitable fruit of holiness; kind matters more than amount, for strife and discord bring unavoidable harvest while love, kindness, goodwill, honesty, charity and righteousness bring sure reward, though delayed.
The fruits of right and wrong conduct and the testing of each person's work illustrate that people reap consequences of what they do. The wicked ultimately suffer consequences of their own way and are filled with results of their own devices, as opposing light in hatred and rebellion brings darkness, barrenness and death as its fruit. Wrongdoing brings sure return upon the wrongdoer though delayed, and the return may bring repeated harm, supporting the call to be just, true and right. What is planted is sure to come up in one's own path, so those carelessly or purposely making trouble for others will feel it themselves as one planting thorns is pricked walking barefoot; repeated resistance to evidence strengthens rebellion toward its reaping, with condemnation not only for past sins but for continuing defiance that pardon would have met had there been submission. Forgetting that harvest matches sowing leads Egyptward to a broken reed piercing the heart and humbling pride when walls are broken, with fire following quake moved by worldliness and wandering with wish as guide.
What people sow determines the following harvest of harm or blessing, pain or pleasure, for sowing thorns hurts fellow travelers while sowing love and mercy sweetens life, yielding tares or golden wheat. Cherishing hatred brings greater harm on self, family and others taking up the same spirit, to face at last overpowering glory; pursuing worldly pleasure should expect trouble rather than lasting satisfaction, as Solomon's wealth, influence and freedom to pursue pleasure did not bring good results. How others are treated may come back, warning against harsh judgment and gossip and urging help to lift the fallen and weak remembering like need may come; what a generation sows will be reaped with harvest scarcely commenced, and receiving good depends on doing good. Life yields thorns or flowers according to planting. Sin is like seed producing suffering after its own kind, for its pleasure is certainly followed by penalty, and no one can be sure harm affects only the sinner, for it may ripen in loved ones' lives. Sin brings sorrow as consequence, for those admitting sin cannot keep its sorrow out.
Present daily experience can be the harvest or echo of what was done yesterday, and recognizing this reveals God's dealings and character. Ending greed and changing a people must begin by sowing truth in one's own soul, with thinking and loving truth mastering greed and acting on truth leading others, done with love not hate. Some have misused the verse to teach self-reform and bearing one's own sin by learning to sow only what one is willing to reap, as part of a teaching contrasted with salvation by grace and regeneration by the Spirit, and applied to the claim of no remission except through growth attributed to Spiritualists. Children must learn from early infancy that they cannot escape consequences even by sorrow afterward.
Consequences are already present in the seed, so harvest can be seen in sowing and the end in the beginning, which Christ understands with dangers along the way, knowing how to guide toward good and turn harms to blessings; what is sown points ahead as seed contains promise of what will grow. Labor is God's honorable beneficial plan while idleness and the no-work idea come from Satan in opposition, so those shunning honest sweat now will reap corresponding extra sweating afterward, for God's sowing and reaping cannot be evaded in work. The sowing-reaping link is a sure blessing and assurance between seed-time and harvest-time, and a person's acts make or mar life's outcome, with careful sowing of heavenly things bringing rare harvest and with what is put into life shaping what is received, so aimless living yields nothing while steady persistent purpose through effort and taken or made opportunities brings fitting reward. What a person does determines what is received, a cause-and-effect principle also applied to theosophical karma affecting a later incarnation, and to what is sown being reaped like a matching harvest, a universal principle also identified in Japanese Buddhism though applied differently by sects.
Sowing to the Flesh
Sowing to the flesh is following the desires and inclinations of the natural fallen heart against the Spirit, gratifying fleshly desires and worldly comfort and living for self and present pleasure whatever the profession, instead of self-denial and cross-bearing and implicit obedience as a soldier of Jesus Christ who is not his own and who endures hardness without planning for selfish convenience. It is thinking only of pleasure and convenience and sowing to pride, vanity and ambition, living by uncontrolled desires apart from the Spirit of God, and giving way to corrupt desires of fallen human nature including lust for animal flesh though not limited to meat. The flesh lusts against the Spirit and the carnal mind is enmity against God and not subject to His law, and its works are adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revelings and such like, ending in darkness and ruin and death. Sowing to the flesh therefore ends in darkness while sowing to the Spirit brings light and righteousness and guidance, and it includes excess in eating and drinking and idolatry that brings captivity as Israel reaped to the full by becoming captives to an idolatrous nation.
He who sows to the flesh reaps corruption, decay, loss and death, which is the wages of sin, for the present is sowing time and the future state is reaping time and the wicked reap corruption not an incorruptible condition. That doom is death and destruction and the second death, not being kept alive forever in torment, for sinners who served sin for wages will certainly be paid their due. Using worldly goods only for self instead of acting with God's glory in view is sowing to the flesh, including spending on tobacco and other indulgences instead of self-denial and supporting family and God's cause. Indulging appetite through excess in eating and drinking, through tobacco use with spiritual as well as physical consequences, and through preference for flesh foods that defile the body and gradually dull discernment of truth, is sowing to the flesh bringing corruption in body and soul and requiring earnest reform in diet and habits by grace.
Everyone born again has flesh and Spirit striving and may sow to either with harvest according to the sowing, for sowing to the flesh feeds the carnal mind with food and exercise while sowing to the Spirit starves it by refusal and feeds the spiritual mind unto strengthening in the inner man. The carnal mind must be overcome and destroyed or the person will not be saved, and those who trust in Christ will be saved from bringing destruction on themselves by rejecting God's way. Choosing disobedience and sowing to the flesh connects a person to Satan, father of lies and author of corruption and source of death, reaping alienation from the life of God and being without hope and without God in the world. If that connection is continued it ends in certain consumption root and branch with all refuse in the fires of Gehenna prepared for the devil and his angels, when the dross of sin is burned out and evil hosts reap what they sowed while God brings forth a remnant to live and reign forever. A life spent largely in smoking and drinking that ends with the record that he accomplished nothing illustrates this sowing with a harvest not to be envied.
Evil desires sown in the heart produce evil fruit, for what is cherished within produces corresponding deeds and while the disposition remains confession of deeds alone cannot overcome sin. Yielding to sin brings the ruin that grows from sinful choices. The verse is therefore God's faithful warning to save people from sowing to the flesh and reaping corruption, death and exclusion from the kingdom, for no one can deceive God or call darkness light and change its outcome. Because humanity sowed the seeds of sin it reaps death. The degraded belittled condition of the intemperate without God and without hope is the harvest of their own course, though God willed not their loss and gave His Son to save from misery and they too often refuse and choose sin, a contrast set forth between destructive intoxicants and better outcomes.
Sowing to righteousness brings strength, security, life and prosperity, while sowing to flesh, falsehood, lust, greed and corrupt principles brings corruption, decay, crime, destruction and death, a law applying to societies so that widespread political and business corruption is harvest of corrupt practices and selfish covetousness produces misery and death while unselfish giving bears blessing. Thoughts, words and actions are seeds, so sowing to the flesh brings corruption and grief while sowing to the Spirit brings everlasting life, calling believers to walk in the light and give themselves wholly to God's service. The reaping is twofold, flesh sowing reaping corruption and Spirit sowing reaping everlasting life, displayed in Old Testament history rewarding unpurchasable fidelity, rectitude and civic uprightness as in Moses, Joshua, Hezekiah and Nehemiah and bringing ruin for greed and corrupt scheming for office. Sin's effects come as natural harvest without arbitrary mark, and young people must not suppose they can indulge worldly desires and later avoid consequences, for turning to God brings visible blessing though traces may remain like a scar.
Sowing to the Spirit
Receiving the seed of God's Word is sowing to the Spirit, to righteousness and to life, while refusing it leaves openness to sin and its harvest of death. Yielding the life with Christ develops the life He has placed within, for human beings are seeds with freedom, and keeping life for self leaves it alone but giving it up in the likeness of Christ's death leads to resurrection and glory. Sowing to the flesh ends in darkness, while sowing to the Spirit brings light from God's righteousness and guidance for the path ahead on the straight narrow road. Those who sow to the flesh reap corruption, while those who sow to the Spirit reap incorruptible, immortal life, and empty profession cannot alter that eternal consequence. The harvest is God's work, for His love and Spirit sustain the life truly yielded to Him, and the seed already contains the kind of harvest it will produce, picturing growth in grace and growth of God's kingdom in human hearts. Cultivating Christian character through good works and sowing seeds of truth brings what was sown in the world to come, where work begun on earth reaches completion in the higher life lasting forever, with self-denial and self-sacrifice outweighed by eternal reward.
Sowing to the Spirit is acting with God's glory in view, rendering obedience to Christ, bringing all possible good into life to glorify God and be a blessing to humanity. It is love, truth, kindness, forbearance and other good deeds in place of vulgar words, actions and thoughts, and unselfish benevolence in place of selfish motives and deeds, with certain fruit following kind of motive. Sowing faith and obedience reaps faith and power for future obedience, and seeking to be a blessing to others brings God's blessing in return. Mercy sown in this life will be reaped in glory. The principle applies to using worldly goods not only for self and to supporting those who teach the Word.
The verse is Infinite Love pleading with people now not to be deceived about the law of harvest. Like produces like as a certain spiritual law, which is ground of confidence and assurance and hope to one seeking salvation from sin and eternal death, for well-doing is sowing in the spiritual world and the harvest is sure to be of the same kind. He who sows to his own flesh reaps corruption pertaining to the flesh, which in the last analysis is death, but he who sows to the Spirit receives from the Spirit life everlasting and unending. Therefore believers must not grow weary in well-doing, because in due season they will reap if they do not faint, doing good to all especially fellow believers whenever they have opportunity. This warning applies during probation and calls Christians to keep advancing rather than repeating the foundation of conversion, for work will be tested against a perfect standard.
Sowing and reaping to flesh or Spirit stands among practical duties of Christian life with bearing one another's burdens, sharing in all good things, and doing good to all especially the household of faith. Its place in the last chapter of Galatians means it comes only after deliverance from this present evil world, standing fast in liberty wherewith Christ makes free, liberty by love to serve one another, and being filled with the Spirit with all His fruit shining in life. Without deliverance from sin, sonship of God, liberty in Christ, and receiving the Spirit as themselves the more practical things of Christianity, the other works can never be seen at all, and no one can sow to the Spirit and do these practical things without first having the Christian life itself as a practical thing.
The sowing takes place in this life but the harvest comes beyond it, realized at Christ's coming and the resurrection at the last trump when mortal bodies are made alive. The righteous rise incorruptible to life and glory, completing the moral separation from the ungodly begun in regeneration, while the wicked rise in corruption to damnation and the second death with no continuance, not to live forever. Final destiny corresponds to life lived, with those who have done good raised to life and those who have done evil raised to condemnation. Faithful sowing yields harvest of good fruit then, including sowing seeds of present truth through loyal deeds and labor for others before too late, bringing rest, deliverance from sin and sorrow, and an eternal weight of glory.
God's mercy provides what is needed for life and godliness and means to be sanctified now, but it does not make His word false or remove the harvest of a life spent in sin. God offers pardon for the past, salvation from guilt through Christ, cleansing through His blood, renewal through the Holy Spirit, guidance through His word, and deliverance through love and grace, yet actions have consequences that cannot simply be erased. Mercy offers pardon but does not cancel the law that thoughts, acts and deeds produce corresponding harvest whether good or worthless. God removes guilt of confessed sin immediately, but consequences may continue for a time as correction, and removing them may require persevering effort and fruits worthy of repentance, for faith, another's righteousness or later repentance cannot prevent bodily effects of violating physical and mental laws though forgiveness may be granted for the soul.
Planting Christ the living Seed shows Christ in words and deeds and yields Him as harvest, reaped day by day in joy or sorrow and fully when the King appears, while sowing seeds of death, pain and woe cannot produce life. Professing to follow Christ while indulging known sin does not secure entrance to God's kingdom, for those who belong to Christ crucify the flesh with its passions and desires. Sharing the saints' promised rest requires living for it through self-sacrifice, cheerful obedience and faithful devotion to God, for outcome follows life chosen, with living for flesh bringing corruption and living for Spirit bringing everlasting life.
Every day is sowing time and people cannot avoid choosing what kind of seed to sow, reaping in kind, with harvest in eternity and each life record kept in heaven during probation. God is not deceived into judging anyone otherwise than true character shows, and those who sow to the Spirit bring forth the Spirit's fruits in this life and share eternal life in God's kingdom. Daily choices and spiritual life determine eternal reaping, calling for continued growing and overcoming through faith rather than yielding to sin. Good works and Christian character developed through service bring harvest in the life to come, with work begun on earth completed in eternal life.
Spiritual harvest follows kind of seed, for evil thoughts, sinful desires and passions lead to death, while cherishing holy desires, receiving God's Word and living by it lead to joy, strength, peace and eternal life. The harvest is certain though scant when worldly interests, cares or riches hinder growth, and abundant in receptive responsive hearts, for sowing tares or thorns and briars of human nature cannot produce roses of immortal life. Choices and actions determine receipt, with flesh sowing bringing corruption and Spirit sowing bringing everlasting life, and God cannot be deceived or treated with contempt about life lived. Deeds of purity and love lead toward lasting life while evil deeds leave scars and bring misery, and earthly pleasure cannot prevent coming judgment. Using talents and opportunities for serving others and commending truth through holy life yields fruit, rewarded at Christ's coming and day of reckoning according to work, and sins of omission are serious while spiritual renewal gives power for faithful work whose full fruition is glorious immortality.
Blessings received and experiences gained through prayer must be put into practical use not set aside, and continued faithfulness in doing God's bidding leads to abundant future blessing and victory. Good works are seeds whose harvest is reaped in the life to come, and those who use abilities for good develop Christian character through service, with kindness and self-denial blessing others while shaping the giver and even secret acts having results that cannot remain hidden. Sowing to righteousness brings harvest of mercy, but as with seedtime and harvest the good result may not be visible at once, so people should do God's will and wait confidently for outcome without growing weary, for they will reap in due season if they do not give up.
Judgment and Final Reaping
The sowing is everything a person does, says, and thinks each day, including every idle word and every evil and impure thought, and the reaping is the fixed destiny for glory or despair decided from the angels' record kept in the courts of heaven before the Father's throne. Thoughts are understood and chronicled with care, purposes, plans, work, character, secret sins and vile motives are weighed in the eternal balance, and profession counts for nothing while character alone has precious value. Life is not an empty bubble for gay fancies, vainglory and display but a real and earnest planting given for a purpose, whose present sowing returns in the eternal harvest as eternal blessing or eternal loss at last. Deeds and words like seeds do not simply disappear but appear later as harmful or wholesome fruit, and they will meet the sower in the judgment, shaping the joy or fear of which the coming life is made and filling the future atmosphere with sunshine or with shade. The tissue of the life to be is woven with colors of one's own choosing, and in the field of destiny each one receives the harvest of what was planted, deciding destiny by actions each day with no repeal of the sentence passed when the Judge is revealed in the clouds of heaven.
The verse requires a future judgment in which reward and punishment are measured to fit the deeds done in the body, reaping exactly what was sown, so punishment cannot justly begin at death. If people went to reward at death, one murderer dying two thousand years before another would suffer two thousand years longer for the same sin, which would be unequal and unjust even to the worst sinners and to the best saints, and contrary to the character of God. Judgment after death determines the future from the person's past choices rather than imposing a penalty to make the dead obey, and future punishment is both consecutive and retributive, continuing this life so that the wicked's punishment corresponds to what they did here. At the final judgment, when the dead are raised and all stand before God, those consequences are revealed, and the time to respond to the Spirit and receive pardon is while the door of mercy remains open, before the day of hope has passed.
Each person receives a consequence corresponding to what was done and to the master served, as blossom follows seed, with the nature and measure of reward determined by the nature of the service, and choosing righteousness leading to heaven and eternal joy. The suffering and duration preceding the wicked's final destruction may be proportioned to differing degrees of guilt and deserts, though exactly how this just proportion is carried out is not specified, and punishment can differ in degree even if death or destruction is its final result. Lasting influence must be fully measured, and everyone will find the fruits of what was sown and receive what is his own, fully paying for evil done to others and giving account before God. For the man behind the bar, planting is robbing the man or boy across the bar of decency, thrift, honesty, innocence, manhood and every opportunity in life by drink, leaving him ragged, unkempt, poverty-stricken and degraded, and harvesting is bearing the shame for that ruin and paying every farthing of that heavy debt.
Probation ends at death and no later work can change the outcome, for choices and character formed in this life determine eternal destiny. Time is the only season of probation and what is sown now is reaped hereafter in eternity, deciding whether one is in a state of nature or grace, justification or condemnation, a child of God or a child of Satan, an object of divine favor or wrath, and whether to ascend to heaven among the ransomed or sink irretrievably. If the flesh is not overcome and destroyed the person will not be saved, and turning from sin and overcoming the flesh leads to restored favor and salvation in the day of the Lord Jesus, not at death. The deathbed is too near the harvest to begin sowing then, so judgment and reward depend on actions in life, not feelings at death, and a moment can be seed-sowing whose harvest is death, while no length of worldly pleasure guarantees happiness beyond it. The last day is the time of reaping that tests and reveals the character formed through present choices, not a time to create a new character or seek grace whose opportunity has passed.
God holds every person to the harvest of his own planting and will call him to render account according to deeds as probationary time closes, with the specific closing work to overcome sins, bring forth the peaceable fruits of righteousness, and acknowledge allegiance to the righteous government of Heaven. He cannot be mocked by postponing devotion while spending life on worldly ambition and sinful pleasure, for a way of living shapes the end of life and death or Christ's advent will reveal the error of neglecting God. Mercy is offered today and postponing response until tomorrow risks losing it forever, since no one is promised another day and no one can count on a last-minute warning or opportunity to prepare. Half-way work in repentance and reform with lingering confession, half-hearted undoing of wrong, and dodging of hard places sows untrustworthiness and reaps being passed by when grand opportunities for service are given to others, leaving chagrin, defeat, bitterness and a lesser place. Giving life's energies to Satan's service and then offering self to God only when strength fails dishonors Him and will not stand, and hope must not rest on sick-bed repentance which may not be granted, so the call is to seek the Lord now while body is strong and mind clear.
The harvest at the end of the world will reveal what each person has sown, whether wheat or tares, with sowing to the flesh bringing corruption and sowing to the Spirit bringing everlasting life. Good is not the natural fruit of evil, and this inexorable law applies both to individuals and to the world as a whole, so those who choose selfishness and sin meet the fate of the sin chosen, utter negation of being. Earth's final harvest bestows upon every soul the fruit of his own reaping, so that those who follow righteousness receive eternal life and immortality while those who choose selfishness deprive themselves of life. When sentence is pronounced in God's court day this reaping vindicates His wisdom, justice and love, leaves no charge of injustice or unwisdom against Him, and leaves no ever-burning hell to mar His universe because all have had their choice, with evil forces and their followers reaping destruction when sin is burned out of the world.
Sin brings death not because God takes pleasure in the sinner's death or acts from vindictive wrath, but because those who reject God identify themselves with sin and perish when sin is destroyed by His presence. Sin earns death as its proper wages, so the sinner receives what is deserved as the inevitable end of continuing on sin's path, each sinner bringing about his own destruction. Selfishness and a wicked way cut a person off from God, the source of life, light and power, and bring death, yet God does not arbitrarily separate people from Himself but calls them to turn and live. When people reject truth and Spirit and identify with sin, sin works out in them and ends in death, as the seven last plagues give people what they have chosen, and the wicked reap destruction as inevitable fruit of their own sowing, not everlasting torment imposed by God.
At Christ's coming those who cling to sin reap destruction while those who receive God's way reap life, for God cannot be mocked and choices produce their fitting outcome. The response made to God's final call has lasting consequences, so the warning must be heeded before the opportunity for salvation closes. God is not to be trifled with and will certainly execute what He has said, with not one jot or tittle failing, and it will be dreadful for those on whom Christ's day comes unawares with sudden destruction, while watching, expecting Christ daily and obeying all commands is the only safe ground.
Young people must not turn a deaf ear to the promise of coming again while hoping for long years of gaiety and pleasure, for brightest plans formed without consulting the Maker may be defeated at any moment and fondly cherished hopes blasted long before fruition. Such neglect ends in the lament of failure or that the harvest is past, the summer ended, and we are not saved, yet there is no need for such failure. Each should bring whatever talent God has lent and work with a will, for harvest time is waning and a place in the many mansions is being prepared for all the faithful. A person's actions determine the harvest, with the wicked facing destruction while those who fear God receive the promised reward, and the hosts of evil soon receiving the harvest of their sin.
The verse calls for wise belief and living because choices have consequences leading either toward destruction or toward inheriting the kingdom prepared by God. Every person faces an inevitable harvest of death or life carrying serious responsibility, and daily choices either lay up treasure in heaven or store up wrath for the day of judgment. Those who live for worldly pleasure or gain rather than Christ face a poor harvest when entering eternity, for worldly gains cannot make up for loss of the soul, and even those who hear the final call of mercy and begin the Christian struggle may fail to reach the promised land if they turn back. People are not doomed by fate, for God sets life and death before them, holds them responsible for their choice, and His invitation to be saved is genuine.
Under the gospel each person is accountable for his or her own conduct and receives according to it, rather than bearing the fathers' sins. Continuing in sin and breaking God's law brings sin's wages, the second death, applied especially to breaking the fourth commandment and teaching others to do so, for God cannot be mocked or deceived. Sin has a final result according to what is sown, with the harvest bringing the fitting consequence of a person's choices.
In rejecting God's means of correction a person is allowed to reap that rejection's results, and persistent refusal to repent leaves no hope of salvation. After mercy's final plea is rejected sin reaps destruction, and those who laugh at warnings will later mourn when consequences come. Unrepented sin will bring suffering and death, and those who resist light and loving appeals receive unmingled wrath untempered by mercy, with response to the Spirit's convictions determining whether they share eternal life. Sowing obstinacy by stifling conviction, refusing evidence and resisting the Spirit sows unbelief and reaps unbelief, hardness of heart, pride, stubbornness, prejudice and growing power to resist clearer light. Each rejection of increasing light brings increased resistance and indifference until mercy is exhausted and the person is given up to unbelief, yet God commends no one in impenitence, destroys no one and decrees no one to ruin, but follows sinners with light, opportunities, appeals, warnings and compassion while hope remains, so responsibility rests on the sinner and neglected light becomes guilt incurred. Egypt's repeated rejection of warnings in the plagues leading to final judgment on its firstborn shows that persisting in contempt of warnings faces consequences.
Those who turn from God and ally with sin bring destruction on themselves and lose their place through their own choice, for no one can deceive or defy God and escape the outcome. Those who oppose counsel make the good law their adversary and perish with the sin chosen, with calamities and destruction following the perverted good law, not because the law is evil. Those who refuse the call are left outside the purpose to save and gather all things, and by rejecting salvation through Jesus' atoning sacrifice and spurning the Spirit of grace the ungodly cannot stand in the judgment or share the righteous place.
Claiming to love truth while neglecting duty, wasting abilities, pursuing wealth, remaining spiritually complacent or clinging to harmful habits cannot leave people safe in the judgment and time of trouble, for God cannot be mocked or deceived. Millions trusting false hopes and theories will be disappointed, and those who use God-given abilities to spread moral ruin and corruption sow seeds whose harvest they will not want to reap. Persisting in selfishness, sin and rebellion cannot bring God's peace and rest while disregarding warnings and precepts, for sin may briefly numb or disguise consequences but ultimately brings misery, troubled conscience and fear by inexorable law. Those who reject truth and take pleasure in unrighteousness face ruin as a delayed consequence becoming clear too late.
The two Sauls prove that disobedience leads to failure while obedience leads to faith's victory, showing human choices have eternal consequences. Blaming sin on first parents while continuing disobedience still brings the harvest of one's own choices, so people should turn toward things of life and live so that death points to everlasting hope. Harvest follows sowing by universal righteous fact, not arbitrary decree, so no one can deceive God or destroy or escape the certain result, though others can be deceived for now about past lives. What each truly is will be known by every neighbor when the King comes, and hoping in deception brings manifold deception at last, while sowing vice brings its fearful entail of corruption and sowing to the Spirit brings life everlasting. At the day of judgment the wicked wish to avoid reaping what was sown but cannot hide guilt or evade delayed vengeance.
Sinful choices such as lying to hide wrongdoing produce an evil harvest where one lie calls for others until heart and character are shaped by falsehood. Grace can forgive sin and reach beyond its consequences, but receiving it requires sincerely renouncing the sin and confessing honestly, when God washes it away and gives victory. Each must reap what was sown in mercy, so withholding mercy lessens mercy received while deeds of mercy are met with mercy, warning against harsh condemnation since each must answer for the chosen course of life. A life of merciful giving brings a harvest of glory.
Effects begin when sinful action begins though the full result comes later, with present suffering as disciplinary consequence that may be escaped, while final punishment is retributive and everlasting. Suffering now does not justify or save but demonstrates sin's evil and points to its final result. Service for God and others sown now is reaped at the Judgment, and coming rest in the kingdom will be sweeter because of toil and suffering endured. Cause and effect govern the soul's great interests including immortality and retribution, disregarded when God's Spirit is absent. A day of reckoning will come because God is just, and people and forces will face consequences of what they have done, with God's word of judgment overtaking sinners so none escape by moving away.
Nations and Historical Fulfillments
Nations as well as individuals reap exactly what they sow, for the law of harvest governs peoples and churches no less than single men. Sowing hatred and war brings a harvest of hatred and war that becomes the end of the worldly nations, and sowing weapons and military training sows the means and spirit of war whose harvest is war. The hatred and distrust sown by war do not produce lasting peace but bring future conflict, and even a time of seeming calm leads on toward Armageddon and the world's last great war. War cannot be eliminated from national life by armaments but only by removing the desire to fight from individual hearts, since naval and military training encourages that desire. The church likewise reaps the consequences of what it has sown, and its conduct shapes outcomes such as that between Spain and the Vatican.
France sowed infidelity to the core, both open unbelief and the worse hypocrisy of a professed church departed from the living Word, no longer studying it closely or letting it guide life, keeping outward bishops and priests and divine service with no inner work of grace on the heart except for an unnoticed minority. With that condition came selfish greed that gathered the wealth of the country into the hands of a few lords of Church and State spent in luxury while the people groaned under the burden, and the revolution followed as the sure result. France sowed the seeds of revolution toward the close of the last century and reaped a most terrible harvest, and the reaping lasted on through a whole century of turmoil from which she had still not recovered, seen in turbulent disorder and revolutionary demonstrations. She had rejected calls to reform and cast away the means of salvation, so she reaped destructive retribution and divine judgment in the French Revolution. Choosing human authority in place of God produces reaction against that system, as seen in the infidel revolution after the period of Catholic triumph.
Russia's lawlessness and terror are the harvest of seeds of religious intolerance, sedition and anarchy, showing that judgments follow when a nation overturns religious and civil freedom. Her defeats, revolt and naval disasters are the harvest of centuries of wrongdoing, and her hope lies in humbling herself before God and those she has wronged and vigorously doing what is right. She was reaping tyranny, oppression and ignorance imposed by both state and church, a double tyranny now reaped in awful revolution sweeping the empire with burning and pillaging and killing.
Spain sowed corrupt seed when she established the Inquisition, crushed the Reformation, prohibited investigation and freedom of speech, took the Bible from the laity, and made the people servants of the priests in Spain and in her American possessions. She reaped national decadence, paralysis and death, taking four hundred years to gather the last fruits from the seed she had sown, with her colonial branches dropping off one by one until her humility, weakness and poverty became as conspicuous as her former arrogance, power and wealth.
America cannot depart from the principles that gave it life and adopt those associated with the Dark Ages yet expect good to come of that course, for God's law cannot be mocked. The nation's tolerance and practice of lynching sowed defiance of law, so it shared responsibility for the lawless violence it condemned. Its injustice toward Indigenous peoples and its treatment of enslaved Africans bring bitter fruits under God's justice. The sick and disabled soldiers, discharged men, army prisoners, and 300 dead bodies including smallpox victims brought back from Manila are the harvest of sowing imperial war in the Philippines.
Israel sowed idolatry in spite of all entreaty, so God willed their chastisement and delivered up the city, and the Assyrians otherwise powerless against Israel carried them captive about thirty years later. Having chosen idolatry, Israel reaped it to the full by becoming captives to an idolatrous nation. Israel's persistent distortion of truth and misplaced confidence in human effort brought the experience of those consequences, which served to turn them back to faith in God and hope in the promised Seed. Israel rejected God as king and chose a system opposed to Him, so they suffered the fruits of their own choice, yet God did not stop loving them while they reaped those consequences. Jerusalem's destruction by Babylon was the harvest of its course despite false prophets' optimistic predictions, and Jeremiah's warnings proved true. They had been loading the cloud for years by disobedience and by rejecting the Son of God and choosing Barabbas instead of Christ, so when Titus the Roman took the city and the vessel was shivered in pieces and over a million were slaughtered and the dead were buried till there was no place to bury, they felt to the end the cruelty of the Barabbas they chose. God's mercy waits long and gives opportunity to be redeemed from evil ways, but His word is true and sooner or later destruction awaits the hardened and impenitent.
Babylon and Belshazzar reaped the result of their oppression, tyranny, fraud, licentiousness and injustice, and God's justice is impartial and those consequences cannot be escaped. Babylon's gradual fall is the sure result of its selfishness, expressed in self-glorification, self-indulgence and proud self-exaltation, rather than an arbitrary decree. Nations reap the consequences of what they sow in that their wars and efforts to rule the earth against God's purpose lead to destruction, for no earthly empire has a lasting right to rule and God's kingdom alone will fill the earth and endure.
Oppression of enslaved people sowed seed harvested in the Civil War, while concentration of wealth and oppression sow conditions that bring a destructive harvest. The wealthy sow seeds of discontent through wasteful extravagance displayed amid growing poverty, and this can lead to violence and social upheaval. The seed has been sown and the harvest is now appearing in social conditions surrounding wealthy men, Socialists and labor organizers, with reaping about to begin. The generation's repeated denunciation of the rich together with rich men's extravagant conduct sows seed whose harvest approaches in widespread revolutionary unrest and violence. Spreading discontent will not remain without consequences but will help bring about revolution. Sowing greed for gain, restraint of competition, limiting production, shutting down works, cutting wage earners, oppressing labor and making living wages impossible through trusts and monopolies sows seeds of hatred and unrest, and the coming harvest can only be bitter fruit, revenge, panic and revolution. One man taking $400,000,000 while 20,000 workers receive $350,000,000 for thirty years illustrates the sowing that brings that reckoning.
Sowing the evil of church-and-state union brings a certain and unfailing harvest of evil to nations. The union will bring despotism to the republic, worldliness to the church, and ruin to both. Every nation that starts on union of Church and State by placing religious dogmas in organic or statute law chooses ruin of both even when advocates would not choose it, for the sowing looks good but its fruit is ruin proved by what was written in blood and fire and flame over so-called Christian countries during the Dark Ages between the sixth and eighteenth centuries. That same sowing is now repeated in efforts like requiring Scripture instruction in State schools and recognition of God in a national constitution, which if yielded to will turn to persecution of the innocent and force others to persecute to maintain national dignity. Attempts to enforce religious duties through the state sow a harvest of the same kind, reproducing the harms and absurdities of earlier generations. Coercive Sunday-closing laws sow principles that like those that produced the Dark Ages will bring their own harmful harvest. Religious legislation that appears beneficial is seed that will inevitably produce an evil crop, including persecution, anarchy and national disaster.
Teaching or compelling disregard for God's law brings the fruit of that conduct, and a nation that refuses to obey God's law will perish. Those who sow lawlessness will reap anarchy and violence, and the claim that Christ abolished the Ten Commandments fosters the violations it rejects even when the teacher does not intend or encourage those acts. Railroads compelling Sabbath desecration thereby foster defiance of law, and the resulting social disorder is the fruit of that sowing. Disrespect, irreverence and disobedience toward God and His law produce disrespect for parental and governmental authority, leading to disorder, treason, anarchy and destruction, and these consequences surely come though not intended or expected when the wrongdoing begins. Those who promote disregard for God's law and disloyalty to God sow lawlessness and will reap a bitter harvest whether they triumph or are defeated. Teaching lawlessness brings a harvest of crime, murder and anarchy, and hatred against the commandments reaps increase of crime and wrecked civilization.
Solomon's sins planted evil whose abundant harvest brought suffering, sorrow and bitterness across generations, and wickedness produces further wickedness whose fruit adds to consequences even when sin is forgiven and the sinner ultimately receives the righteous reward. Doing wrong never pays because wrongdoing brings calamity and sorrow back upon the wrongdoer in the very kind of evil caused to others. Jacob's deception toward Esau and his father brought more than fifty years of sorrow distinctly traceable to his own acts, including deceit suffered in return and lasting misery in family relations over the loss of Joseph, ending only when he found Joseph in Egypt. David's wicked conduct toward Uriah brought retribution through all the rest of his life, principally in his own family in the history of Amnon and Tamar, the rebellion and unnatural crimes of Absalom, and the rebellion and death of Adonijah. Jacob's deception brought him years of hardship and grief, and neither time nor repentance could turn the wrong he had done into good. David reaped bitterly after his sin involving Uriah when judgment came through evil arising within his own household as his wives were taken publicly, and Absalom also reaped the result of his wickedness soon afterward. The unrepentant will be caught and destroyed by the sin they have committed, just as Haman died on the gallows he had prepared for Mordecai.
Jacob reaped deception after deceiving, Isaac's willingness to leave matters with the Lord was followed by blessing and the Philistines' submission, and Joseph's pride was humbled through two years in an Egyptian prison. God in His providential dealing lets every sin bring its own punishment so sinners surely reap its fruitage sooner or later, as proved by following the career of Abraham and the two generations following him in Genesis 12 to 27. The Jewish rulers' continued resistance to light and repeated refusal to repent prepared them to reap the ruin their choices had sown. Israel was given 490 years after the Babylonian captivity to learn from consequences, and the nation's demand for the crucifixion of Jesus brought its wrongdoing to its full measure, so God declared desolate the earthly house where He had set the symbol of His government.
A father's approval and example of moderate drinking helped lead his son to alcoholism, and the father later reaped sorrow and shame as he watched his son suffer and die. Words and actions take root and bring a harvest sometimes after years, as illustrated also by Jacob reaping deception from his sons, David reaping shame and death within his family, and Saul of Tarsus reaping persecution, chains and imprisonment even after becoming an apostle. A mother who chose to marry a man known to drink heavily and to come from a family marked by drunkenness sowed that choice and reaped sons with an inherited appetite for strong drink and lasting sorrow, which later repentance and prayer do not undo. Mrs. Peebles's choice to leave the farm for the hotel led to ruin, loss and grief as fruit of what she had sown. Leopold of Belgium's cruel, merciless rule in the Kongo, impoverishing and maiming the natives and using wealth taken from them to corrupt governments and officials, was vicious sowing, and his incurable gangrene and necrosis of the bones of the heel was its harvest. Traders cheating Indians with rum likewise reaped death.
The human race sowed the seed of spiritism at its beginning, and that seed has continued to grow for six thousand years until its harvest of fully developed abundant fruit, which may be checked for a time but returns and bears its crop. The Sunday-closing movement cannot escape what it sets in motion, for its promised harmlessness is false: it already causes harm to innocent godly people and greater harm to its supporters, and its evil consequences will continue. What the world sows determines what it reaps, for like produces like, and the world's widespread folly, self-love and wilful living have grown into terror, hatred, shame and crime foretelling a troubled harvest with war clouds and hate-driven hosts gathering toward the end of time. For centuries the world has sown seeds of sin and immorality to the winds, and now it reaps the whirlwind in terrible epidemics sweeping the world that modern science is totally unable to cope with.
The harvest is of the same character as the seed sown, so the wealthy men of the country by the corrupting fraud and oppression seen in San Francisco and just as much in other large cities are sowing a sowing still being done that will surely reap a fruitage of violence, training for a conflict of violence that will pale the bravest hearts. The worsening tensions and industrial disputes between organized labor and consolidated capital are seeds of a fearful harvest soon to come in keeping with what Scripture records about the last days. Selling body and soul from love of money plants a crop ripening toward punishment, for greed makes men callous to shame and drives boodle, bribery and corrupt control of public power, and that evil sowing grows into a harvest requiring God to put in the sharp sickle of retributive justice. What men sow in the desire to get money in fabulous amounts they will reap, as in sowing to elect men to state and city office in order to bribe them to do their bidding, and the reaping is a fearful harvest of graft just before the world in the perilous last days.
People reap the consequences of what they do, and those who break the law including influential people who disregard its demands will face a harvest of their own lawlessness, for all will reap transgressing God's law. The destruction and loss suffered by the rich in calamities are presented as the harvest of what they had done. A society that promotes the nude for public display sows to the flesh and will reap corruption, with such moral consequences inevitable for people and nations. Causes produce corresponding results, and history of nations and individuals shows that rejecting God's principles and transgressing His law, the law of life and being, brings deterioration, ruin and death. Biblical history records actual events of men and nations in their relations with God and each other to show this principle working out and the result of rejecting truth, and those histories stand as prophecies of the same principles and similar circumstances yet to rise. Continued sin brings corruption and destruction, while turning from sin to righteousness and accepting God's grace in Jesus Christ brings healing, life and peace, so Jerusalem's doom was not irrevocable and Protestantism and America likewise may avoid ruin through this change in course.
Rome experiences the consequences of its own high-handed actions in that the hierarchy's operations helped bring about the election of a Jewish mayor in the heart of the papacy. When people reject God's ways and turn the earth from its entrusted purpose to selfish use, God may withdraw His rejected Spirit and let them experience those consequences, and the resulting harm to the earth is part of the fruit of their sowing. Allowing worldliness and treating sinful practices as harmless sows bad seed and brings a bad spiritual harvest, including few people joining the church on confession. Because a community disregarded God's warning and followed practices it had been told to shun, it suffered physically, mentally and spiritually and could not pass God's blessing on to others.
Home Health and Character
Health follows sowing and reaping through the blood and the machinery of the body, for clean habits and natural foods reap health while unclean, stimulating, poorly cooked and irregular food, tea, coffee, beer, tobacco and gluttony reap impure blood, disease and death, and remedies or denial do not remove the consequences. God cannot be tricked and His law of cause and effect in the body works as fixedly as gravitation whether believed or not, so mistreating the digestive organs harvests the sure result in the organism, and eating to satisfy drunken craving and filling the stomach with bulk without regard to fitness is sowing to the flesh whose harvest is corruption. Like gravitation this cause-and-effect law cannot be escaped or reversed by taking a pill, and deliberately living so as to sow impure blood reaps impure blood that becomes an agent of death to every part instead of a messenger of life. God allows pursuit of harmful choices such as unwholesome food and tea, coffee, beer and tobacco, but those choices bring harm to health and other consequences just as sowing leads to harvest.
Violating the laws of health brings penalty including disease and untimely end even when harm is not immediate, for self-deception supposes disregard can go without consequence. Obedience to physical and spiritual laws sows conditions for well-being while transgression sows disease and harm, though effects may be delayed while inherited health and resistance provide a reserve that can be squandered over time. Violating the laws of life harms mind and body and can reach beyond the actor to children and later generations through hereditary evils, as with tobacco and other stimulants damaging the user and burdening the family. Health is a harvest that comes through planting good seed and allowing time to grow, not through stimulants that briefly relieve and are followed by worse decline, and recovery begins with understanding and obeying definite bodily laws. Temperance, self-denial and sound principles of health brought greater vigor and sustained usefulness through a long life, as seen in John Wesley.
Eating to drunken craving, highly spiced foods creating thirst, perverted appetites leading boys to tobacco then alcohol, and stimulants sowing the drink habit show temperance reform must begin at the table with simple tastes. Highly spiced foods create the thirst that causes drunkenness, so working for temperance while such cooking continues at home sows in sons the drunkenness reform seeks to remove, and treating only outward results is useless like picking leaves while roots grow again. Feeding a boy irritating indigestible foods sows craving that can lead toward cigarettes and alcohol, and a mother who does this helps create the habits she hopes Providence will prevent. Wrong habits of life, especially improper food and pampered appetite, can lead to stimulant use and ultimately to the crime and misery of intemperance, so parents should keep harmful influences from the home and teach simple tastes. A mother who perverts children's appetites sows seeds that may drive boys toward tobacco then alcohol, leaving them enslaved with ruined health and dishonored lives even when she intends temperance. Drinking brings ruin to property, work, reason, family and life, pictured as sowing fields with wild oats and thistles, and drinking with other harmful practices sows moral decline, vice and crime affecting both actors and offspring.
Sickness may be corrective harvest from violating nature's laws, permitted by God and not always instantly healed lest cause and effect be despised. God does not heal promptly every time asked, because instant healing would make people careless about cause and effect and toward His laws, while pain and sickness help straight thinking and respect for law. Breaking natural law is as much sin as breaking moral law, and persevering in planting seeds of disease reaps a bountiful harvest of disease, yet God holds no grudge but is grieved at self-injury through lack of knowledge, and cooperates to secure health as soon as right sowing begins. Prayer should seek healing of cause as well as effect, removing wrong habits and disposition, for genuine faith is joined to obedience and reaping is in God's hands always for the best. Ill health is not necessarily accident but natural result of violating nature's laws, preventable by correct eating and drinking, pure air and suitable mental and physical exercise even amid germs, though some suffer parents' debts. Satan tempts to sow seeds of ill health but is not its cause; prolonged transgression weakens mental, moral and physical resistance which he may then exploit. This does not forbid immediate healing in answer to prayer of faith or by divine promise, as shown by the healing of the disabled man at Bethesda.
Youth is sowing time shaping whole life and destiny, when choice between sin and righteousness while character is unformed blesses or blights the future. To sow is to choose amid schools and colleges where sport and folly, shunning good and joining evil, are open as with Samson; to reap is to receive the match, gratifying the flesh bringing corruption and ruin while sowing to the Spirit brings life everlasting. Youthful indulgence is not harmless nor escapable by growing older, for wrongdoing including youthful indulgence, ambition, dishonesty, hardness, suspicion and greed produces corresponding harvest at every age. Young men given to dissipation already suffer without waiting for age, in weakened body and mind, degraded morals and premature death. Choices and habits formed in childhood and youth bring enlarged consequences in maturity, petulance growing into bad temper, idleness into unreliability, neglect of duty and pursuit of pleasure into dissipation and ruin.
Calling reckless conduct wild oats does not excuse it, for youthful wrong can take deep root beyond later undoing. A handful sown yields a bushel reaped with increase, evil sowing yielding far worse harvest as sowing wind yields whirlwind, so young men scoffingly excusing sin as wild oats will certainly reap those oats. Every action is sowing bringing its own kind, evil deeds not earning good's reward but plentiful evil, and seed planted will grow without care so the young cannot safely be allowed to sow wild oats but must face wrongdoing again with the evil caused. A life sowing sin can become deeply rooted leaving little time and strength for better choices, and later efforts do not necessarily undo damage, so turn early rather than presume time to mend. Youthful indulgence in lust, drunkenness, drugs, tobacco, gambling and other destructive pleasures can root deeply bringing ruined health and character, addiction, crime, imprisonment, broken family hopes and even death, which later goodness cannot simply erase and which may bring regret in age and condemnation at judgment. Allowing a boy to indulge in wrongdoing even excused as wild oats brings its consequences, and parents excusing drinking and harmful conduct forget painful results.
Parents reap in children what they plant through example, instruction, books, associations and government. Indulging children to their harm produces sorrow and difficulty, while wise faithful training brings lasting good. Mothers sowing carelessness and neglect by shirking duties reap bitterness, and responsibility remains even when others carry those duties. Neglecting to guide children toward Christ risks a harvest where they do not follow parents in righteousness, and giving little effort to guiding reaps little while sowing to the Spirit reaps everlasting life. Teaching children to prize idleness and despise honest work sows seeds that can grow into moral ruin including crime and sexual exploitation unless grace saves from the full harvest. Patient training, giving daughters responsibility and money of their own, consulting them and exemplifying noble womanhood are seeds that can bring loving service and respect.
Mothers modeling pride, fashion and display reap it abundantly in children. Teaching children to prize dress and fashion plants vanity that later bears sad harvest, and sowing pride by example reaps plentiful harvest with no failure in the crop. Teaching pursuit of outward display plants habits and values shaping growth, so errors later deplored are harvest of those lessons. Indulging food whims trains fixed distaste, deceiving a child plants lying that may return in the child's own lying, and tormenting animals or a lame hen sows mercilessness later turned on parents. Allowing a child to torment animals sows misery for child and parent, for unchecked cruelty later brought sorrow and disgrace on families, and neglecting to teach mercy while molding is in hand leaves children growing more merciless until parents have none to blame but themselves.
Answering a child's questions plants adult character, as cherry stones dropped in youth become trees in age. A fair truthful answer respecting desire to learn plants good seed, while snubbing, ignoring or misleading with false impressions plants bad seed, and even slight impression today can grow into a rule of life twenty years later, while a parent wounded by ingratitude bleeds from thorns of own planting. Parents' prayers, counsel and watchfulness may seem unfruitful at first but effects appear later, for holy impressions in childhood seldom disappear in adulthood. Seeds of truth planted in childhood and nurtured in youth generally produce righteousness, while failing to sow good seed likely produces thorns. What a mother sows in the child's heart she reaps in old age, death and eternity, faithful sowing reaping loving care, tender burial, sweetest memory, and at the opening of God's gates eternal life for children and a star-gemmed crown for the mother presenting them to the Master. Gentle words and care plant seeds whose effects may lie dormant long before springing to life when conditions are right, and seeds of sacred knowledge in tender receptive minds may lie dormant before developing into good life.
Choosing companions, business and marriage unions against God sows bitter harvest of ruined souls and obstruction. Forming friendships and matrimonial and business unions with those who cannot elevate and who oppose God, walking contrary to wise arrangements to follow unsanctified heart ruled by passion and impulse instead of God's voice, surely reaps obstructions to serving God, ruined souls, dead aspirations, being without hope and without God, held in Satan's net by circumstances, and possible loss of soul. Character and choices brought into marriage shape the home, purity and unselfishness reaping joy and beautiful possibilities while selfishness and impurity yield weeds. Choosing chiefly for money, appearance or passion can lead to regret, while seeking God's guidance leads toward sound marriage and avoids need for divorce. Disobeying parents to marry a drinking gambling laborer brought loss of home to gambling, abandonment, poverty, dying and care of a small child; to speak the verse to refuse forgiveness and leave her to die is cruel and must not stand, for Christians must forgive, relent and welcome the erring home. Cruelty to animals sows cruelty toward people and dulls finer sensibilities, for which God calls to account, and cruelty sown in one generation may be repaid in the next as the way parents treat elders and raise children shapes how children later treat them.
Thoughts, words, looks and deeds are seeds; evil thoughts become acts, acts habits, habits character to destiny. Evil thoughts produce evil acts, acts become habits, continued habits shape character headed for destruction, as grain produces its own kind. Harboring evil purpose trains mind wrongly even when outward act is restrained, and that training will find expression in other wrong ways or time, so even one bad thought is dangerous. Thoughts, words and deeds reveal what is sown and express heart character, calling for self-examination and life according with the gospel, whether sowing to flesh unto corruption or to Spirit unto everlasting life. God is not deceived by profession, but knows whether heart is wholly devoted or given to worldly things; life not corresponding with profession shows faith dead, while sincere seekers live accordingly with good works even in food and dress for God's service not indulgence. Vulgar words, actions and thoughts sow to flesh unto corruption, while love, truth, kindness, forbearance and good deeds sow to Spirit unto everlasting life, with harvest in due season for those not weary in doing good especially to fellow believers.
Reading sows reaping, for books and papers chosen are seeds whose effects appear in future. Widespread demand for novels rather than religious books points to future harvest of tares, since every kind produces its own kind. Putting corrupt stories of robbers, murder, suicide and daring wickedness into the mind plants seed bringing in due time natural certain harvest of admiring wicked adventure, robbery, violence, threats, self-destruction and punishment, working even in the young and in children of well-to-do and ministerial homes. Feeding mind on degrading trivial material cannot produce sound strong character, but corruption, and scenes of crime and vice sow evil in youth that maturing can lead to ruin. Youth is time to sow good seed including by good books developing character, and the Word sown in the home including through temperance bears intended fruit protecting from drunkenness.
Doubt, skepticism and unbelief sown in speech multiply into deeper unbelief and infidelity in children and hearers. Doubt and skepticism encouraged and expressed take root and produce deeper unbelief, the life becoming continuing witness against the sower. Words of unbelief strengthen tendency to doubt and plant doubt in others, just as wheat or thistle seed produces matching harvest. Doubt planted in children's minds by parents questioning God's commands bears infidelity by immutable law. Sowing unbelief brings unbelief, pride brings pride, stubbornness brings stubbornness, for each day's attitudes are seeds requiring steadfastness in faith and God's word. Doubt and discouragement produce same-kind harvest, so sow words of faith, hope and light, and years sowing disbelief and skepticism about God's Word and disregard for eternal law harvest loss of interest in religious things and declining attendance.
Little sins and seemingly small errors can change life's course and destiny, just as small kindnesses and duties help shape the future. Even little sins and faults bring discord, sorrow, discontent and dimming of God's countenance, weaving life and destiny to be reaped. A cherished sin like seed in fertile soil even if small produces abundant harmful harvest, perverting right sense, lowering principles and bringing destruction unless cast out and given to Christ for His righteousness. Indulging bad habit like sowing seed produces crop of harmful results as thistles grow from seeds in heart, and choices and habits repeatedly practiced shape character so even small routine actions have lasting effects. Sin affects the soul in later years.
Choices and influence sown in others bring corresponding results, warning against leading anyone in the wrong way. Choices and influence planted in others warn against leading astray, for people continually sow good or evil in own hearts and others' hearts through conduct. Example plants seeds others copy growing into good or harmful character and actions, so examine planting. Corrupting manners and morals of the rising generation by principle or practice brings terrible harvest of woe so terrible it were better never to have been born. Teachers planting false ideas in young minds must face consequences, a pupil secretly sowing evil can spread bad traits through many before noticed, and teacher's actions and discipline leave moral impressions whether moral instruction is intended or not.
One who knowingly eats thirst-producing food cannot presume God will prevent thirst or remove consequences, even while seeking rescue from the drink habit. A church supporting and operating a liquor saloon will later reap the harm it sows, just as crop follows seed, as with profitable sale of beer and ale harming the mining community and bringing shame and distress to family. Turning from God and misusing entrusted abilities brings sure result, and great light and blessings do not protect the disobedient when not received, for there is no mockery of God without consequences. Medical treatment cannot undo this law or guarantee erasure of sin's consequences, as syphilis may break out again after apparent cure, and sowing idle words, sin while conscience sleeps, broken promises, hatred, strife, tares and weeds reaps toil and pain with no garnered sheaves but withered leaves from wasted life.
Feeding children impoverished, stimulating and irritating food can bring bodily irritation and disorder affecting the brain. God grants choice to do evil even to self-destruction without hindering, but sowing will be reaped, as when unwholesome food, tea, coffee, beer and tobacco clog the liver and ruin digestion and nerves. Habits such as excessive unbalanced diet can bring disease, and patients cannot expect doctors to cure resulting illness while continuing those habits. When people depart from God's instruction an unwelcome harvest follows wrong choices, and God faithfully warns of consequences before too late.
As with seed and harvest, thoughts and words as well as actions produce results, so right sowing brings good fruit while folly and vice bring sin, crime and regret. Choices made in youth can affect a whole life, good and evil growing together for a time before harvest, and faithful sowing yields lasting reward. Sow seeds of better deeds and thoughts while life remains, linking present choices with later reaping. Choices and habits formed in youth can shape a whole life and wrong patterns may root deeply hard to undo, with reaping in God's time and way ultimately at final judgment when saints are gathered and wicked receive doom. Youthful thoughts and actions form habits and shape character, so godlessness, frivolity, dishonesty and other wrong choices bring increase of harm in later years and continue guiding after school, while bad habits as heart thistles plant seed springing into larger crop of same weeds with every indulgence. Young people left to decide and learn from results reap kind sown.
The law applies to pleasure or pain, good or harm, and deeds follow like a shadow. In relationships love begets love, and those wishing to be loved must make themselves lovable, while striving for wealth at health's cost has consequences and living for love can yield more beautiful life. Sowing loving thoughts brings good words, and kind words bring love and sympathy, so the good find pathway strewn with flowers springing behind footsteps as result of own kindness. A fretful hostile manner tends to meet hostility while being helpful, generous and true tends to bring kindness, as echo returns sound. Thoughts, words, deeds and choices are seeds whether open or unseen, in weakness or strength, meekness or anger, so kind words and deeds bring sweet harvest while selfish gain and harmful choices bring dark harvest, even idleness leaving sad result, certain though delayed. Life is a field giving back what is put in, yielding thorns or flowers, and none gathers ripe golden grain without sower's work and tears. Evil words bring harm to speaker's soul and others and weaken influence, and those injuring others with words and actions, often from envy and jealousy, will be required to account and experience suffering caused, for every wrong is recorded. Sowing discord brings later regret, as when a wife gossips about her husband.
As seed determines crop, living shapes becoming, so kindness and forgiveness shape habits and character while hatred and falsehood lead toward despair, yet Christ's redemption can heal, cleanse and turn sorrow to joy. Pleasantness, cheerful honesty, helpful speech and joy in work are seeds shaping a girl's character and later life, though she is not responsible for inherited disposition but for acquired disposition. What is sown today produces harvest for good or ill in this life and eternity, for even a look, word or act shapes character and may influence another soul toward eternal loss or blessedness, sowing to flesh bringing corruption and to Spirit eternal life. Words and deeds whether kind or harsh leave lasting influence and do not perish, calling for will to make influence good, and a life sowing kindness brings blessings temporal and spiritual in later years. Thoughts and deeds bear seed of what follows, so an hour's worth is judged by later fruit. Planting hate brings hate, while planting love brings love, and love sowing with toil is tried and purified on earth with harvest in heaven.
Choices at every age keep growing toward harvest, for work relying on Christ for His glory leads to hope of immortal reward while vain pursuits produce tares warning of doom, and reaping day comes when each seed yields its harvest. Joy given to others returns to the giver, while educating the soul in doubt and questioning God's dealings produces more doubt, especially when faith and confidence are essential, and sowing to flesh leads to corruption. What is sown determines what is reaped, so success is not accidental but results from steady well-directed effort, and for youth education developing body and mind is part of sowing for success through daily reading and completing work. Words are seeds reaped later, for careless filthy speech can lodge in a child's mind and bear sinful conduct even after seeming forgotten, with judgment revealing full result and responsibility, and private speech can undermine public example; speaking sows and hearing reaps. People reap consequences of sowing, for reckless conduct produces bad habits, harmful companions, corrupt tastes, disease, crime, death, remorse and sorrow, while good resolutions and noble conduct grow better character, and drunkenness cannot simply be left behind for lasting damage may remain though partly healed.
Applied to life's course, deeds and choices over years produce harvest to consider in old age, for careless living and neglected opportunities leave inability to know what might have been accomplished, and life's evening takes character from preceding day. All daily sow countless good and evil seeds in words, looks, actions, thoughts and passions, falling everywhere and some growing even when sower is dead, so weak humans need God and angels to guard furrows lest sin spoil the land, with certain reaping either sin and sorrow or glorious eternal harvest with rest. Every moment including hearing, reading and thinking provides seed to scatter through influence, so choose good to sow like flowers rather than nettles, for harvest reveals living. Thoughts, words and influences gathered and spread produce corresponding harvest, even small seeds having power, with full result known when life is finished. Even small daily defeats like neglecting prayer can weaken faith, leave children without spiritual help, and spread through influence on neighbors and friends into eternity. Words and deeds do not disappear though passing from sight or memory but continue influencing for good or ill, including unconscious influence planting seeds that later bring glory to God, so heart must be shaped by love to stand in judgment.
Everyone continually sows through thoughts, words and deeds in all places and states, even with idle hands, and sure harvest matches sowing from pleasant, gentle, noble deeds to dark harvest of hate and sad harvest of idleness whose weeds cannot soon be rooted out. What is taken in and chosen to spread has consequences, for what is gathered from each moment and from hearing, reading and thinking becomes seed sown, and harvest reveals gathering and sowing. In raising children irritable speech, angry looks and harsh rejection plant bitter harvest, while patient selfless care shaped by Christ's example brings mature children gladdening parents in old age. Sin's sowing can bring weakness, crime and disease upon children and later descendants by heredity without God arbitrarily imputing parents' guilt, each answering for own conduct, yet grace can work mighty miracles when descendants turn rightly to God. Physical excess such as heavy drinking may seem unpunished in the practitioner yet penalty can fall on later generations, and widespread drinking of earlier generations produced lasting intemperance and physical and mental disorders in later ones. Like begets like and harvest accords with sowing, children in measure reproducing parental traits welcomed or deplored, raising whether release exists from unenviable inheritance.
Thoughts are the sowing and life is the reaping, so a person realizes the settled vision of the heart rather than idle wish. One gravitates toward what is secretly loved most, receives exact results of thoughts, earns no more and no less, and falls, remains or rises with thoughts, vision and ideal, becoming as small as controlling desire and as great as dominant aspiration. Thoughts allowed to root produce actions and consequences, good bearing good and bad bearing bad, for circumstances reveal rather than create character, and the path toward vice or virtue grows from fostered desires. Seeds of virtue bear virtuous results and the Word sown in heart can transform a person in one generation to reflect the Lord's image, while effects of sinful heredity may extend through generations and virtuous life tends to repair those effects. A good harvest from words and instruction depends on choosing seed well and planting wisely, since excessive words heaped over it can crush its life and prevent fruit.
Those who sow evil habits may carry the harvest throughout life in a damaged body, wavering will, impaired intellect and weakened spiritual power, even if they reform, so addressing evil early matters and parents can shape habits toward good. Dwelling on illness may worsen it while meeting it cheerfully can support improvement, and even when physical defects remain a person can cultivate a loving nature and bear them happily. Apparent progress in expanding dry territory and passing prohibition laws does not mean the alcohol evil is overcome when consumption continues to rise, so the underlying cause must be eradicated or apparent advance will bring terrible recoil. Children who treat an aging parent with ingratitude and resentment should expect their own children to treat them likewise when they grow old and frail. Rewarding a child with money for goodness or service can plant selfishness and covetousness, while encouraging loving unselfish service in imitation of Jesus can lead the child to become a blessing to others, for outcomes follow pattern planted and shape eternal destinies.
Using a gifted mind to chase pleasure, fan passion and drive melancholy away brings gloom at life's close, while virtue and useful service bring a different close. A man receives what he plants and cannot escape by hoping or striving otherwise, chasing pleasure where it is not found and indulging to keep spirits up bringing gloom, unhappiness and painful review, unlike useful service. In child training a child should experience natural consequences of misdeeds rather than arbitrary punishment to learn from result, and harm inflicted can fittingly return as correction, as when a boy doused in icy water felt the pain he caused. The heart requires early thorough planting of pure heavenly thoughts and removal of harmful influences, with harvest as reward of faithfulness and right conduct. Hypnotism may temporarily change behavior but weakens will and resistance and leaves the soul more vulnerable to evil, bringing fearful harvest even when used with good motives. A person's own actions determine character formed, and another's words cannot injure it unless own conduct gives cause. A mother reaps honor or dishonor in the world's verdict according to her son's conduct, whether just or unjust. A young person reaps according to treatment of mother, with neglect and hurt bringing sorrow and kindness bringing comfort and peace, urging kindness before too late while mother lives. People reap according to sowing in Bible reading, with hasty reading yielding little retention and inaccurate quotation and careful unhurried reading yielding understanding and remembrance. Neglecting strangers can lead to experiencing loneliness and neglect oneself, while tender care brings peace and blessing. Turning sacred melodies into dancing tunes brings eventual harvest unless forsaken, though immediate harm may be avoided.
Gospel Work and Giving
What is done for God is seed sown now that brings an eternal harvest of saved people in His kingdom rather than earthly wealth, multiplied as those reached lead others to Christ, and though sown in faith and watered with tears with long waiting before fruit appears, as in family prayer and Bible study, it yields sure joyful fruit, seen in twenty deciding in one colony and in growth on Norfolk Island and in Chinchow and China, by denying self to distribute tracts of pure truth while praying for the Spirit to carry truth home to readers unto a crown of rejoicing and the overcomer's rest and reward for those who rally, work, watch and pray.
The harvest is guaranteed by God though not at once, so discouragement over slow visible results is unwarranted.
Giving follows the same rule that harvest matches sowing: generous cheerful giving and scattering truth reap abundance while sparing withholding reaps sparingly, and God who cannot be deceived by pretended service knows when means are withheld to spend on self-desire, calling those taught spiritual things to share material good with teachers and to support missions and the cause of truth rather than hoard, with the final realization at the end of the world when the Lord of the harvest comes lest little effort grieve over a small crop.
Giving freely to the needy and scattering truth bring abundant repayment from God.
Use of money is sowing that decides eternal harvest: sacrificing to sustain God's cause and faithfully trading entrusted talents lays treasure in heaven to be met with satisfaction, while hoarding property unused for God amounts to nothing in the burning day and ends in loss and sad regret for energies bent worldly, requiring more faith, nearness of the cause to the heart, awakening to duty, and wise appropriation of much or little as unto the Lord.
Vain excuses for neglecting His requirements will not stand at judgment, for faith without self-denial and active work to save others does not save, and the plea that charity begins at home will not avail the covetous rich who refuse the worthy poor, widow and fatherless, the house of the Lord and the spread of truth, since God sees hiding places and men are known by fruits, and those professing to prepare for a better country yet refusing to sell, give alms and send goods on before must hasten to send treasure on that they may follow after.
Profession contradicted by covetousness cannot deceive God, for liberality belongs with faith, love and prayer, covetousness bars heaven, and the early church's sharing teaches abundant giving while Ananias and Sapphira and Achan stand as striking examples to study, though not as a rule that God deals identically with every covetous person.
What is given in service is truly kept: withholding a God-given talent by refusing use for others loses it, while freely giving time, talent and means builds future reward, enlarges capacity to give, and remains possessed through faithful use even when results are unseen.
Labor brings results and earnest faithful work produces victories, for mental and physical powers strengthen by use while indolence and ignorance sow their own crop, and a short life doing much outweighs a long one doing little, since life is measured by doing rather than length.
Seed sown in the heart as affection, truth and love, carefully cultivated through hardship with hope and faith, shows good fruit and great gain from God, and faithful sowing of right seed with persevering stand for right brings outcome in God's time even in weakness, as in Miss Worthen reaping a free year of schooling for gathering subscribers with further kingdom fruit hoped from spreading truth, and in school members taking a stand for Christ, baptism and joining the church.
Christians are therefore called to keep sowing faithfully and patiently trusting harvest will come, and one success calls for fresh sowing on a higher plane for what is still ungained.
Sowing love, faith, truth, honor, kindness and pity returns in kind: smiles and good cheer bring the same, love begets love and is returned by brethren, enemies and even domestic animals each after its nature, while harshness, bitterness, unkindness, slander and curses return to trouble the giver, and joy shared brings greater joy whereas grief caused brings sorrow.
Giving one's best enriches and its good lies in the giving, even when sowing seems fruitless, while withholding impoverishes, and care yields beauty.
Idleness and selfish inaction sow no good seed and yield no harvest but weeds, pain and withered leaves instead of golden sheaves, as in the fig tree bearing only leaves and the life that scattered nothing, answered no call to work in the vineyard, spoke not of the Saviour's love and prepared not for life's end.
Sowing must come before reaping, so daily work from morning light till evening, cheerfully taking the nearest duty instead of standing still or gazing to the far future, with honest sweat by evening, must precede rest at last as labor's prize and wages from the Master at His coming with approval of good and faithful, and those idle now sowing no kindness will have no sheaves when probation ends, while remaining time used in weeping toil for the Master ends in welcome to heaven and rejoicing with sheaves.
Joys reaped hereafter come only from what is sown today in giving, loving cheer, kindness, smiles to lonely lives, grander birth to truth, deeper worth to faith and food to hungering souls, not from intending much next year or in the afterwhile, for idle dreams do not count and each must ask what was sown, built, given, spoken and fed today.
God's retribution is as eternal as justice, sure though sins are hidden and judgment delayed, returning suffering, deceit, oppression and harm upon the wrongdoer when pay-day comes.
For the rich with power and opportunity this means grave responsibility to deal justly, love mercy and care for fellow men unto blessing, but oppressing or despising the poor and needy while reveling in luxury and wealth reaps anger, misery, vengeance and upheaval when the lean, hungry, hunted, driven and despairing from mine and mill, factory and sweatshop, tenement and slum rise with armies from among them, and wealth cannot bribe the crowd nor power intimidate God the Judge, as seen when kindness like Mrs. Alton's spared her husband while exploiters faced wrath, and selfish injustice toward the poor robs both giver and poor of good and life's sweetest pleasures whereas just dealing brings happiness to both.
Societies likewise reap what they sow: New York's intemperance, gambling and corrupt publications spread dishonesty, irreligion and impurity whose moral harvest appeared and cannot be escaped or hid from God, as a law of nature.
Public education glorifying battle and violence reaps war rather than peace, as in the trouble in the Transvaal.
Destroying birds for feathers may bring increase of insects they once controlled, a judgment from human acts.
The Chicago theater fire warns that God's love does not set aside His established laws and purposes nor allow lightness without consequence.
The verse belongs with Matthew 5-7, Romans 6-8 and 12, Galatians 5-6, Ephesians 4-6, James 2-3, Peter and 1 John in teaching holiness as the design of all grace and providence, for life is seed-time and eternity harvest, judgment following death, harvest matching kind, and character formed here fixing how persons remain.
Idleness and vice bring barrenness and cannot yield respected happy age, while diligent use of means of grace, earnest redeeming of time, and sowing for righteousness, God and heaven yield spiritual growth and joyful future harvest, with the year's harvest revealing earlier sowing and calling for regular examination of what the past prepares, since future glory unfolds from present grace and none reaches glory without first receiving grace in Christ.
Evil imparted returns upon the doer to teach tenderness: Jacob's deceitful course made hard Haran experience necessary, and whoever condemns or discourages is brought over the same ground to feel what others suffered from lack of sympathy, which God in love decreed to make hardness hated and open the heart for Jesus, turning curse to blessing.
Present suffering as past planting explains seeming unfairness, as in tramps' broken homes, hearts, poverty, homelessness and wrecked bodies reaped from former sowing, seen plainly as life closes and eternity opens, driving many in despair to self-destruction, yet the way to change harvest is to change sowing.
Reasons for grief now unknown will be learned sometime somewhere in the future harvest, giving ground to hope and believe while weary, tearful, weak and impatient, asking God for patience, faith, strength to work on, courage, hope and submission.
Sowing truth brings truth while sowing falsehood brings emptiness, requiring upright sound conscience, rejection of hollow words and deeds, and filling each hour with what lasts and buying up moments, because the life above when this life is past is ripe fruit of the life below, and to live well is to live long with all else thrown away, sowing love unto pure fruit, peace unto bright harvest, and brightness even on hard barren ground unto a harvest home of light.
Refusing the light of the third angel's message and its reforms leads to darkness, for God cannot be mocked and each reaps what is sown, calling for self-examination whether in harmony with it.
Professed believers must surrender self and possessions to God, giving cheerfully and ready to sacrifice even principal, for conduct reveals the heart and has consequences, and His purposes cannot be thwarted nor His favor gained except in His appointed way.
What is sown is reaped manyfold, as the farmer expects far more than planted, because influence spreads every way: evil spreads like wildfire to a far larger evil harvest, and good spreads far and wide as truth passed from one to friends and neighbors keeps increasing till eternity alone reveals the full good, so no bad seed should be sown and good seed sown bountifully to reap bountifully.
Faithfulness in present time and opportunity, including cheerful generous giving, prepares abundant kingdom harvest to be revealed in the coming day, sowing to the Spirit bringing everlasting life and sowing to the flesh corruption, while withholding can lead to poverty, and church fundraising schemes planting selfishness in takers or beholders will reap matching seed.
Work for Jesus is never wasted and no well-doing seed is lost, for God loves workers and keeps His harvest promise unto a crown and a home above for faithful early sowers, so even when sky is dark and toil costly they take courage and serve on without turning aside, strength renewed daily, trusting Christ's favor to return in kind what was sown, with even small faithful service amid weakness or doubt later bearing benevolence and love.
Sowing lotteries, chances, church fairs and kindred doubtful methods to raise church money plants gambling by example in boys and young men, reaping bountifully gamblers, saloon keepers and hardened irreligious youth, with sons of good people growing to fifteen or twenty unconverted, unmoved by revival, refusing prayer from gambling Christians and using good men's error as excuse to reject the gift, so even well-meant sowing brings ruin and its profit is loss.
Obedient daily thanksgiving reaps its blessings, to be known by those obeying the rule each day.
Gospel sowing must be faithful without demanding immediate results or endlessly repeating one unreceived subject, first addressing heart needs like covetousness, malice or anger with the Word before seed can take root, trusting God for harvest in proper time.
Sowing seeds of love in given working time reaps result to lay as golden store at Jesus' feet.
Seed cast into the ground, literally and spiritually, illustrates trust that God will multiply at harvest, and those sowing for God must faithfully return to Him what is His.
Further points
A person reaps what is sown. Belief in this principle bears on daily life. That belief can inspire right doing. Just as belief in a holy, just, and merciful God bears on conduct and character.