Galatians 6:8 Commentary and Bible Study

The whole matter can be summed up in terms of sowing and reaping. By God’s grace even our earthly possessions may become spiritual seed, sown on earth but producing a harvest in heaven. On the other hand they may also be sown to the flesh and produce nothing more than a harvest of corruption: limited earthly rewards which cannot escape the universal rule that all belonging to this cursed world must decay and perish. How we sow – whether to the flesh or to the Spirit – will be determined by the mind that each one of us possesses, and that mind has either been renewed by the Spirit or is still dead in sin. In one sense the very same things are sown in both cases whether to the flesh or to the Spirit, for the seed represents goods, wealth, opportunities, and all that we possess in this life. In another sense the seed that is sown is very different, for we could be said to sow kindness, gentleness, love, goodness, mercy and truth to the Spirit, but to sow selfishness, cruelty, greed, deceit, and violence to the flesh. This sowing and reaping applies to every part of our lives and not just to supporting those who teach. We see Scripture’s very strong link between our works in this world and what we reap in the future. Is there then a causal connection between our future state and how we live here on earth? Certainly those who sow to the flesh will receive a punishment that is measured in terms of strict justice: they will be punished in proportion to their knowledge. But we cannot say that heaven is earned by our sowing to the Spirit. Heaven is a free gift and cannot be earned, for we always lack the perfect righteousness which alone qualifies a person to enter into God’s presence, and it is always the case that Christ alone earns that blessing for us. There will be rewards in heaven, and those rewards will take into account our works on earth, so that in the day God ushers his children into heaven we will see a clear connection between how we sowed on earth and how we reap in heaven, and yet those rewards are rewards of grace, rewards which strictly speaking we do not deserve. They were mixed with too much sin to earn any reward. Our good works are accepted only because they have been washed clean from a mass of accompanying sins that would otherwise disqualify them.