Sowing and Reaping

Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.—Galatians 6:7.

1. It is one of the characteristics of St. Paul that he enforces the commonest duties by the highest motives. When he urges the Corinthians to make a contribution for the poor saints at Jerusalem, he drives home his appeal by these words: “For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might become rich.” When he vindicates himself from the accusation of fanaticism which his enemies had made against him, he says: “Whether we be beside ourselves, it is to God: or whether we be sober, it is for your cause. For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead; and that he died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them, and rose again.” His habit thus was to run up the separate actions of his life to great principles, by which they were dominated, and in accordance with which they were regulated. The poet has reminded us that in the material universe,

That very law which moulds a tear,

And bids it trickle from its source,

That law preserves the earth a sphere,

And guides the planets in their course.

And much in the same way the Apostle shows that the great fact of our redemption by Jesus Christ should affect the little things of our benevolence and our manner of speech as really as the great things of our life at the crucial and decisive turning points in our history. The background of his life was the cross of Christ, and from that every action, whether to human view important or the reverse, drew its inspiration and acquired its momentum.

Accordingly we are not surprised to find that the words of the text stand in immediate connexion with the command that ministers of the gospel should be liberally supported by those whom they instruct. That is a commonplace duty, but it is lifted by St. Paul into eternal importance, when he links it on, as here, directly and immediately to the doctrine of retribution; for then we are reminded that in the way in which we deal with it we must sow either to the flesh or to the spirit, and reap either corruption or everlasting life.

2. The principle on which this warning rests is stated in terms that give it universal application: Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. This is in fact the postulate of all moral responsibility. It asserts the continuity of personal existence, the connexion of cause and effect in human character. It makes man the master of his own destiny. It declares that his future depends upon his present choice, and is in truth its evolution and consummation. The twofold lot of “corruption” or “life eternal” is in every case no more, and no less, than the proper harvest of the kind of sowing practised here and now. The use made of our seed-time determines exactly, and with a moral certainty greater even than that which rules in the natural field, what kind of fruitage our immortality will render.

We scatter seeds with careless hand,

And dream we ne’er shall see them more:

But for a thousand years

Their fruit appears

In weeds that mar the land,

Or healthful store.

The deeds we do, the words we say,—

Into still air they seem to fleet,

We count them ever past;

But they shall last,

In the dread judgment they

And we shall meet.1 [Note: Keble, Lyra Innocentium, 115.]

3. While the text is fitted to awaken the careless, we must not forget that it is equally fitted to cheer and encourage the fainthearted. This, indeed, seems to have been its original purpose. St. Paul was writing to the members of the household of the faith, and was calling them to Christian service. And to encourage these Galatian Christians to labour earnestly, he tells them that their labour cannot be in vain. Their spiritual work is a sowing, and by the eternal law of the universe it must be followed by a reaping. For in the spiritual world, laws are as inevitable and unalterable as in the natural world. Caprice has no more a place in the one than in the other. “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” Just as surely as he who sows to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption, so he who sows to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.

We have thus, first of all, to understand the law of the harvest—“Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap”; and then we have to receive a warning, which is at the same time a strong encouragement—“Be not deceived; God is not mocked.”

I

The Law of the Harvest

“Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”

1. Our present life is the seed-time of an eternal harvest. Each recurring year presents a mirror of human existence. The analogy is a commonplace of the world’s poetry. The spring is in every land a picture of youth—its morning freshness and innocence, its laughing sunshine, its opening blossoms, its bright and buoyant energy; and, alas, oftentimes its cold winds and nipping frosts and early sudden blight! Summer images a vigorous manhood, with all the powers in action and the pulses of life beating at full swing; when the dreams of youth are worked out in sober, waking earnest; when manly strength is tested and matured under the heat of mid-day toil, and character is disciplined, and success or failure in life’s battle must be determined. Then follows mellow autumn, season of shortening days and slackening steps and gathering snows; season too of ripe experience, of chastened thought and feeling, of widened influence and clustering honours. And the story ends in the silence and winter of the grave! Ends? Nay, that is a new beginning! This whole round of earthly vicissitude is but a single spring-time. It is the mere childhood of man’s existence, the threshold of the vast house of life.

What men sow, they reap, is not a cheque to be cashed here below, when and how we please, but a word of faith, which cannot be severed from the hope which rests in God, the righteous Judge of heaven and earth. The text points to another, a perfect world; it says: The harvest comes, but whether as a blessing or a curse, for salvation or perdition, that is the great question for us all.1 [Note: J. E. B. Mayor.]

2. The text tells us that all our life long we are employed in sowing the seeds of that harvest which we must eventually reap. Our actions do not expire with their performance, nor our words with their utterance, nor our thoughts with the thinking of them. Each of these is a seed sown, and will bear fruit after its kind. Each of them survives in us, after it seems to be past and gone, and when it is perhaps forgotten, in the impress which it has left upon us, or in the habits and tendencies which it has strengthened and confirmed. It is a matter of experience that every after-period of life is affected more or less by the conduct of every earlier period, manhood by youth, and old age by manhood. “The child is father of the man.” Such as we now are, we are as the offspring of the past, the practical result or the living embodiment of the days and years during which we have been occupied—it may be without much thought about it—in acquiring or developing the qualities that now distinguish us. And the like process still continues. We are sowing, from day to day, the seeds of that character which will cleave to us in after life, and which, if the same course of action be adhered to, will follow us beyond the grave, and go with us to the judgment.

We cannot teach art as an abstract skill or power. It is the result of a certain ethical state in the nation and at full period of the national growth that efflorescence of its ethical state will infallibly be produced: be it bad or good, we can no more teach nor shape it than we streak our orchard blossom with strange colours or infuse into its fruit a juice it has not drawn out of the sap. And, farther, such seed of art as we sow, such also must we reap; that which is born of lasciviousness begets lasciviousness, that which is shed from folly will spring up into folly, and that which is sown of truth bear fruit of truth, according to the ground it is cast on, some thirtyfold, some sixty, some an hundred.1 [Note: Ruskin, Relation of Ethics to Arts, § 5 (Works, xix. 166).]

The story of Adam Bede is a tragedy arising from the inexorable consequences of human deeds. It will be remembered that it was Charles Bray who first set George Eliot meditating on the law of consequences. Sara Hennell had thought much about it too. She wrote in Christianity and Infidelity: “When the law of moral consequences is recognized as fixed and absolute, the hope to escape from it would be as great madness as to resist the law of gravitation.” George Eliot’s best known expression of this law is in Romola: “Our deeds are like our children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Nay children may be strangled, but deeds never: they have an indestructible life both in and out of our own consciousness.” This is the old Buddhist doctrine of Karma. St. Paul had put it still more briefly: “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” This law was not fatal to St. Paul, because he believed in regeneration. George Eliot followed Charles Bray. For him, the responsible person was he who, recognizing the inexorable consequences, governed himself accordingly. Nemesis was George Eliot’s watchword, but in her handling of this law she approached to the Greek Fate rather than to St. Paul. It is this Fate that makes much of the extraordinary impressiveness of Adam Bede. Arthur Donnithorne’s sin brought its retribution of terrible suffering not only to himself, but to Hetty, to Adam, to the Poysers. “There’s a sort of wrong that can never be made up for,” are the words wrung from him after bitter experience.2 [Note: C. Gardner, The Inner Life of George Eliot, 117.]

3. The harvest corresponds in kind to the sowing. Each seed produces its own kind, because God has so ordained. That which we reap from off the fields of nature is always of the same species as that which we have sown. No sane man, even if he should be the most unquestioning believer in the transmutation of species, would expect a crop of valuable grain from an inclosure which he had sown with tares; and every husbandman when he plants his corn does so in the confidence that, according to the uniformity of nature’s operations, he will have a harvest of the same. He has no manner of doubt about it. There may be sometimes a question in his mind during a long drought as to whether he shall have a larger or smaller crop, possibly even as to whether he shall have a crop at all; but he knows that if he have any crop it will be of the same kind as that which he has planted. On the plane of material nature, then, every one understands, admits and acts upon this principle as an absolute law admitting of no exception—“Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”

Our Lord endorses this principle in his Beatitudes. He affirms that the soul’s reward matches the soul’s effort and expectation. If we hunger and thirst after righteousness, we shall be satisfied with righteousness, and with nothing lower. We reap that which we sow the seed of, and not any other kind of grain. There are some Christians who repine and grow despondent because they do not find themselves reaping a harvest which they have no right to look for. If you hunger and thirst after riches or renown, rather than after righteousness, you may win them on the same terms. If you devote yourself, body and soul, to becoming a successful man rather than a good man, you may probably succeed; only it is not possible to achieve both aims at once.

Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he reap. Mind you, he shall not only see it grow and see it ripen, but he shall reap. And everything you sow shall grow, and you, and you only, shall most certainly reap. Be sure your sin will find you out. It won’t perhaps be found out. But, I say, it will find you out. It will grow and grow and eat out your life. It will run you to earth a doomed man. For the end of these things is Death. And you will reap in many directions. You may not know the seed or the ground you sow, but sow and you will reap. Men know thistles from oats. You sow and sow, and then you hope God will forgive and your page be clean. I answer you, Nay. Sow thistles, and thistles will come up. Sow oats, and thistles will not come up, oats will come up. “Sow thistles,” you say, “and then sow good oats, and thus clear the thistles.” No, the harvest will be thistles and oats.1 [Note: The Life of Henry Drummond, 477.]

One story connected with this time Mr. Erskine used to tell. It was of the Rev. William Dow, a good man, who was minister of a parish in the south of Scotland, but who for siding with the views of Mr. Campbell of Row was called to stand his trial before the General Assembly. On the Sunday immediately before he went to Edinburgh for his trial, being quite sure what fate awaited him, he thus addressed his country congregation:—“You all know that to-morrow I leave this to go to Edinburgh, and to stand my trial before the General Assembly. And the result I know will be that I shall be turned out of my parish, and that this is the last time I shall address you as your minister. This you all know. But there is one thing about myself which you do not know, but which I will tell you. When I first came here to be your minister I found difficulty in obtaining a house in the parish to live in. There was but one house in the parish I could have that was suitable, and that belonged to a poor widow. I went and offered a higher rent for her house than she paid. She was dispossessed, and I got the house. I put that poor woman out of her house then, and I hold it to be a righteous thing in God to put me out of my parish now.”1 [Note: Principal Shairp, in Letters of Thomas Erskine, ii. 362.]

There are loyal hearts, there are spirits brave,

There are souls that are pure and true;

Then give to the world the best you have,

And the best shall come back to you.

Give love, and love to your heart will flow,

A strength in your utmost need;

Have faith, and a score of hearts will show

Their faith in your word and deed.

For life is the mirror of king and slave,

’Tis just what you are and do;

Then give to the world the best you have,

And the best will come back to you.2 [Note: Madeline S. Bridges.]

4. The harvest is always an increase of the sowing. The crop is a multiplication of the seed. From the seed of the flesh the ripened result is corruption, which is flesh in its most revolting state. From the seed of the Spirit the full ear is life everlasting, which is eternal holiness with its concomitant of endless happiness. We plant a single grain, we pluck a full ear; we sow in handfuls, we reap in bosomfuls; we scatter bushels, but we gather in rich granary stores. The remorse of earth is but the germ of the despair of hell. The holiness of the present is only the bud from which will blossom that vision of God which is the full-flowered beatitude of heaven.

This stern law of reaping as we sow has a gracious and gospel aspect in respect to the abundance of the harvest, whether natural or spiritual. Our Lord insists especially upon this. He says that the seed which fell upon good ground bore fruit, “some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold.” May we not suppose that He had been counting the grains in a wheat ear, and saw in this the beneficence of the law of growth, and a prophecy of nature as to the growth of His Kingdom? This natural multiplication goes far beyond what we should have expected. It is increase after the Divine measure, rather than the human. Our Lord sees another example of this in the mustard plant, which grows from one of the tiniest of seeds, but within the year mounts up into quite a branchy bush, the biggest of the garden herbs of Palestine, and affords rest and shelter for the birds.

This teaching is confirmed by our experience of life. We are all tempted to despise the small crosses, the small openings for kindness and self-sacrifice the day brings us, and the petty duties and burdens which fill up our humdrum existence. When we meet these faithfully and nobly, we have our reward on a grander scale than we could have expected. Burdens grow to wings, crosses to crowns, faithful endurance to triumph; and from each discharge of duty we acquire the power to meet the next with efficiency. “We see dimly in the present what is small and what is great,” as Lowell says. We are blinded by the illusions of life, and take the great for the small, because it is not the big. Our small victories in the face of temptation are won over obstacles and spiritual enemies of the highest rank, and are won to the shaping of our characters, the strengthening of our wills, the purification of our vision, the increase of our faith and joy. Professor William James suggests that to do each day of life some one thing which we know we ought to do, but which we do not want to do, would have the result of making us wiser and braver men, and more fit for great things if these fell to our share.

Hast thou, dear brother, toiled through many years

And seen no fruits, though thou hast freely sown

Thy life in labour and with watchful tears

Watered the soil yet none the richer grown?

Remember that the reaping is God’s own,

And He can gather even of doubts and fears;

We only plough and plant our little field—

He is our harvest, and His Love the yield.

Be sure no kindly word or work may fail

To leave a blessing, if we know it not

And our poor efforts often err and ail,

While nothing that we do is without spot;

Christ stands Yoke-fellow, in the lowliest lot;

He is the light, and prayers at last prevail;

And, should thy service seem a wasted part,

It still shall blossom in some happier heart.

Not ours to finish tasks or seek the sight

Of precious increase and the praise of man,

But just to scatter seed in nature’s night

And leave with God the issue of His plan;

He will complete what He in Grace began,

And order even thine errors all aright.

Thou wert well paid, whatever clouds do come,

If thou hast helped one wandering sinner Home.1 [Note: F. W. Orde Warde.]

II

The Folly of Self-Deception

“Be not deceived; God is not mocked.”

The word for “mocked” implies the most unseemly and insulting gesture. When is God thus mocked? God is mocked when we pretend to be His, while we cut our being in two and give the better half to Satan; when we draw nigh unto Him with our lips while our hearts are far from Him; when we say, “I go, sir,” and go not; when we try to combine the vile pleasure of sin with the perfect allegiance which God requires; when we say “Lord, Lord,” and do evil continually.

1. The danger of deception is very real. For one thing the interval between the sowing and the reaping is much longer than in the natural world, and the connexion between them is not clearly seen. Think of a child that has been foolishly brought up. No effort is made to train its will to obedience, to instil into its mind a reverence for God, and a love for the high things of the soul. There is a certain pleasure in giving the little one its own way. Thus the evil seeds have been sown. The child becomes a man. Years lie between the sowing and the reaping. Only then may it be that the harvest of pain and shame comes home which brings the grey head with sorrow to the grave. The interval is so long that the connexion between the sorrow and the foolish training is not recognized, and parents wonder why their children are so stubborn, self-willed, and ungrateful. They do not see that they are the victims of their own folly. Twenty years ago they sowed the seeds of which they now reap the bitter harvest. They have deceived themselves, but God is not mocked.

Napoleon had the faculty, when he chose, of creating a fool’s paradise for himself. In the Russian campaign he had, for example, ordered his marshals to operate with armies which had ceased to exist. When they remonstrated he simply replied, “Why rob me of my calm?” When the Allies invaded France he professed to rely greatly on the army of Marshal Macdonald. “Would you like,” said the Marshal to Beugnot, “to review my army? It will not take you long. It consists of myself and my chief of the staff. Our supplies are four straw chairs and a plank table.” Again, during the campaign of 1814 the Emperor was detailing his plans to Marmont. Marmont was to do this and that with his corps of ten thousand men. At each repetition of this figure Marmont interrupted to say that he had only three. Yet Napoleon persisted to the end: “Marmont with his ten thousand men.” But the strangest instance of this is detailed by Meneval, who tells us that when the Emperor added up numbers of his soldiers he always added them up wrong, and always swelled the total. So at St. Helena he really, we think, brought himself to believe that he would be released when Lord Holland became Prime Minister, or when Princess Charlotte ascended the throne.1 [Note: Lord Rosebery, Napoleon: The Last Phase, 113.]

2. Long before we gather into our arms the final harvest, we are receiving according to what we have done, whether it be good or evil. In the end we shall still be as we have been, only in more perfect measure. “He that is unjust, let him be unjust still; and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still: and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still: and he that is holy, let him be holy still.” Let us not imagine that the principles of moral order will be different in the end from what they were at the beginning—God is always judging us as He will judge us at the last. The end is not yet. The harvest still tarries. The cornstalk is not matured, nor the full grain shown in the ear. But we are making our future every hour, and with many of us the crop is fast ripening into the eternal day.

Every evil thought or deed has sentence against it speedily executed in the character. One cannot do a mean thing or think a base thought without becoming like the thing he thinks or does. The worm takes on the colour of the leaf upon which it feeds. Every vile thought leaves its trail of slime behind, leaves the mind filthier for even its momentary presence. Every bad act of a man’s life makes it easier for him evermore to do the bad. A miser not only scrapes his fingers to the bone in raking together his money, he hardens his heart to the core. “What is put into the strong box,” it is truly said, “is taken out of the man.” He who cheats, is cheating himself worse than all others. The thief steals from himself; the liar turns himself into a living lie; the profligate is his own victim. The man who attempts to injure his neighbour, only succeeds in injuring himself. The wrong that he does his own soul is ten times more severe and lasting than any evil he can inflict on others. “No man,” says Burke, “ever had a point of pride that was not injurious to him”; and St. Bernard wrote: “Nothing can work me damage except myself; the harm that I sustain I carry about with me, and never am a real sufferer but by my own fault.”

In this God’s-world, with its wild-whirling eddies, and mad foam-oceans, where men and nations perish as if without law, and judgment for an unjustly thing is sternly delayed, dost thou think that there is therefore no justice? It is what the fool hath said in his heart. It is what the wise, in all times, were wise because they denied, and knew forever not to be. I tell thee again, there is nothing else but justice. One strong thing I find here below: the just thing, the true thing. For it is the right and noble alone that will have victory in this struggle; the rest is wholly an obstruction, a postponement and fearful imperilment of the victory. Towards an eternal centre of right and nobleness, and of that only, is all this confusion tending. We already know whither it is all tending; what will have victory, what will have none!1 [Note: Carlyle, Past and Present, bk. i. ch. ii.]

Before commencing his campaign, he called on two ancient intimates, Lord Heddon and his distant cousin Darley Absworthy, both Members of Parliament, useful men, though gouty, who had sown in their time a fine crop of wild oats, and advocated the advantage of doing so seeing that they did not fancy themselves the worse for it. He found one with an imbecile son, and the other with consumptive daughters. “So much,” he wrote in his Notebook, “for the Wild Oats theory!”2 [Note: George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel.]

3. The text has been commonly interpreted as solely a warning to the profligate. Yet the context shows that the words were intended rather as a solemn encouragement to the faithful. The Apostle is writing not to terrify evildoers, but to cheer those good men who else might grow weary of sowing the good seed. And he invokes this profound and awful truth as an exceeding great and precious promise for all the dejected and disconsolate people of God. Christians in some respects are peculiarly apt to be deceived. The illusions of life can dazzle and perplex the wisest children of this world. But those who strive to walk by faith are doubly vexed by the falsehood of appearances. From the nature of the case, their goal and their recompense must lie out of sight. The fair fruit of their labour hardly ripens in our earthly climate, and even the bravest workers will faint and grow weary because after long husbandry they can discern hardly a trace of the blade and the ear.

“Be not deceived; God is not mocked.” We may lose heart and hope, but His will never wavers. We seem vanquished, but His dominion ruleth over all. Though we be faithless He abideth faithful; He cannot deny Himself. Whoever else is cheated and betrayed, there is no such thing as failure in the counsels of God. Our schemes and our works miscarry, but “the fabric of God’s holy Kingdom is slowly rising, while He patiently, but certainly, fulfils His purposes.” The universe shall not disappoint its Creator and Redeemer at last.

While Zinzendorf was still a lad at school, he united his companions in a guild, which he called “The Order of the Grain of Mustard Seed,” and of which the badge was a ring with this motto, “No man liveth unto himself.” It was very little of course that these boys could do to help others. But they planted a seed, and the seedling grew into the great Moravian Missionary Brotherhood, with branches extending throughout the world. And so with all other great efforts. They must have a beginning; they must have a seed. And if only the seed is there, sown in good ground, it will, like the seed of our Lord’s parable, bring forth fruit, some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirty-fold, for our reaping in the after-days.1 [Note: G. Milligan, Lamps and Pitchers, 151.]

What matter if I stand alone?

I wait with joy the coming years;

My heart shall reap where it has sown,

And garner up its fruit of tears.

The waters know their own, and draw

The brook that springs in yonder height,

So flows the good with equal law

Unto the soul of pure delight.

The stars come nightly to the sky:

The tidal wave unto the sea;

Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high,

Can keep my own away from me.2 [Note: John Burroughs.]

Sowing and Reaping

Literature

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