Does the Bible say what goes around comes around?

The Book of Proverbs refers to the government of God here below, on the principle that, "Whatsoever a man sows, that shall he also reap" (Gal. 6:7). This is true of saint or sinner. Grace saves the vilest, but the government of God is over all. It is on the principle that if a man squanders his money, or his time, or his health, he will reap the fruit of his ways in the loss of these things, etc. The grace of God in salvation never sets aside these principles of His dealings with men; nor does this marvellous grace alter the fact that every man reaps the fruits of his ways under God's government. A true Christian may do something for want of discretion, and want of hearkening to Wisdom's words, which he may have to repent of all his days.

"Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein: and he that rolleth a stone, it will return upon him". The object in these cases is of course to do harm to another. But "whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." Haman built a gallows for Mordecai, and was himself hanged upon it (Esther 5:14; 7:10). Jezebel in cunning cruelty had Naboth murdered; but the poor deluded woman was little prepared herself to be thrown from a window, trampled by horses, and eaten by dogs (1 Kings 21; 2 Kings 9:30-37).

All this is deeply solemn. Grace pardons; yes, freely, fully and eternally pardons; but what is sown must be reaped. A man may be sent by his master to sow a field with wheat, and through ignorance, dullness, or gross inattention, he sows some noxious weed. His master hears of the mistake, and, in the exercise of his grace, he pardons it — pardons it freely and fully. What then? Will the gracious pardon change the nature of the crop? Assuredly not; and hence, in due time, when golden ears should cover the field, the servant sees it covered with noxious weeds. Does the sight of the weeds make him doubt his master's grace? By no means. As the master's grace did not alter the nature of the crop, neither does the nature of the crop alter the master's grace and pardon flowing therefrom. The two things are perfectly distinct; nor would the principle be infringed even though the master were, by the application of extraordinary skill, to extract from the weed a drug more valuable than the wheat itself. It would still hold good that "whatsoever a man sows, that shall he also reap."

This will illustrate, in a feeble way, the difference between grace and government. The passage just quoted from the sixth of Galatians is a brief but most comprehensive statement of the great governmental principle — principle of the gravest and most practical nature — a principle of the widest application. "Whatsoever a man sows." It matters not who he is: as is your sowing, so will be your reaping. Grace pardons; nay, more, it may make you higher and happier than ever; but if you sow weeds in spring, you will not reap wheat in harvest. This is as plain as it is practical. It is illustrated and enforced both by Scripture and experience.

What must have been the feelings of that wicked warrior, Adoni-bezek, when he said, “Threescore and ten kings, having their thumbs and their great toes cut off, gathered their meat under my table: as I have done, so God has requited me. And they brought him to Jerusalem, and there be died” (Judges 1:7). Note, when Adoni-bezek went through the ordeal of having his thumbs and his great toes cut off, thereby being greatly crippled, he ascribed what had happened to him to God, “God has requited me.” The boomerang, that he had often flung at others, had hit himself. This is ever so.

And how true it is what our Lord says: "For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you." This is a law, from which the believer cannot escape. A law like that other one in Galatians, "Be not deceived: God is not mocked; for whatever a man shall sow, that shall he reap." Many a one has found out the swift working of this law, "With what measure you mete, it shall be measured to you." Many will have yet to learn by sad experiences and much heartache that the execution of this law is never slow. The word was quickly spoken which censured a brother's motives, which belittled him (to lift up the self of the accuser), but it will not take very long, and some one will step up with the same measure and the same judgment and do the same to us. Nothing is so detrimental to spirituality than a habitual censoriousness.

Thus, although the world be a ruin before God, and although it is too evident that Satan is the restless worker of all evil here below, which is brought before us in the plainest manner in this book, God who is above it all, and who seems to take no part in it, carries on His gracious ways, and this to convert and deliver those who have been wretched, vile, and rebellious. It is not that retributive government to which man's heart would constantly limit God, but a government of souls while the world goes on in pride. Man likes to see people punished when they deserve it. It is natural to the heart. There is something in our nature which, when one is not actually suffering or dreading it, likes to find some (shall I say good or bad?) reason why another should be punished if he does suffer. This was at work in the three friends. But the book of Job is intended to show that they were all wrong in their application of this truth. Not that there will not be perfect retribution when the time comes for it, by the only One capable of carrying it out; but that it is only partial now. Christ alone will act perfectly in it by-and-by; but the time awaits His coming. There will be no adequate retributive government till the Lord Jesus takes the reins. He Himself was in this world the greatest of sufferers, as we know; and so the saints were sufferers before Christ, and still more since Christ. At any rate, the grace now displayed is such that God counts it a privilege given us to suffer for His sake; so that we surely ought to be able to bless God for it in a way that Job and no other could, because we have Christ fully revealed. Job did not know why his gracious Master gave him up to such tremendous and reiterated trouble. He had to learn why, and to learn it slowly and painfully, but blessedly at the end. We begin where he ended. Having in Christ the true light of God, we have not only His perfect love, but that there goes on a kind of divine government quite different from retribution; that there is a gracious dealing of God for the good of souls, and connected with it a moral government, unheeded by the world, which, spite of all appearances to the contrary, never fails. It is not a government consisting in what is public, or what natural men can judge of. It is none the less God dealing with souls, and to all that bow to His word and to Himself ineffable blessing. The discipline may be painful, not to say that it must be. What blessing can there be without it in our nature and in this world? The cross tells what it cost the Lord Himself to make our blessing a righteous thing; the manifestation of the same truth in the highest and deepest way. Where is there a single joy for us, once dead in sins but now saved by grace, that had not its root in the sorrows and sufferings of Him who bore our judgment? And so it is for those that learn what sin is in the presence of God.

The oldest of Job's three friends had answered the first argument. Eliphaz was a wise, eloquent, and pious man, and his first speech is perhaps, the best of the speeches of the friends, (none of the speeches were equal to Job's either in form or contents, not to mention those of Elihu and Jehovah's own). In this speech Eliphaz takes trouble to show Job that everyone on the earth reaps what he sows. "Even as I have seen, they that plough iniquity and sow mischief reap the same" (Job 4:8). All he says is true in principle but in Job's case false. Although right in itself it is wrong in its connection, for often the wicked become old in sin, and the good in the strength of their youth are cut off. The ungodly often live in plenty while the god-fearing have to do without the common necessities of life. Eliphaz and his two friends drew false conclusions, just as it often happens nowadays. According to his opinion, Job's sufferings proved that his former righteousness was only malicious hypocrisy. He describes with great eloquence a dream, in which a spirit was revealed to him, in order to show Job that the reason of his suffering was to be found in his own folly. Job had expected, and rightly too, more understanding for, and deeper sympathy with, his sufferings. He says "For him that is fainting kindness is meet from his friend," and soon after "Return, I pray you, let there be no wrong; yea, return again, my righteousness shall be in it" (Job 6:14, 29). He cannot admit that he deserved such a trial. The words of his friends are now harder to bear than the sufferings of his tortured body. The death of his children and the loss of his goods were terrible blows; the sickness with which Satan had visited him was of the most trying and horrible kind, but both the silence and the speeches of his friends were as the innumerable poisonous arrows which pierced his soul. In these three men Satan had found unconscious but all the more efficient tools. Instead of really comforting Job they brought him to despair. Instead of reminding him that the goodness of God endures for ever, and that the reason of his ways although hidden for a time, would in the end be revealed as glorious, they accused the poor man, first in their hearts, then openly, of the grossest crimes, simply because they could not account for his sufferings in any other way. Who then can still be surprised that Job became vexed and wished that God might destroy him? (Job 6:9). He saw deeper than his friends and recognised the dealings of God more clearly than they did. For this reason they received at the end a sharper rebuke from God than he did. His mistake consisted in taking for granted it was God who tormented him, and in his presumption in calling God to account. And yet in his bitterest speeches we find gleams of light which break out as rays of hope in the darkest night, and cause him to see from afar God's salvation out of all his troubles. Thus his sad speech ends with a request to God Himself and not to his friends, and he already admits that he needs forgiveness for his transgressions, and pardon for his misdeeds (Job 7:20-21).

In this Psalm 73, we get an illustration of how far a saint may get away from God, and how infidel a mind may become when the eye is allowed to rest upon things visible, and if we judge of him by the way things seem to be ordered upon earth, we will get into darkness, become greatly perplexed, and be in danger of attributing unrighteousness to God. The Psalmist sees the wicked prospering, full of pride and violence, exempted from the hardships and afflictions which are the portion of the people of God, while all the day long he is plagued, and chastened every morning, and in his bewilderment he says he has purified his heart in vain. He is like Job, whom Elihu charged with going in company with workers of iniquity and walking with wicked men, for he had said that it did not profit a man to delight himself in God, he might just as well have been a sinner. Elihu’s answer to him is this: he asks him who it does profit—“if thou sinnest, what doest thou against Him?” “If thou be righteous, what givest thou Him?” “Thy wickedness may hurt a man as thou art, and thy righteousness may profit the son of man” (Job 35:6-8). Though a man may cause his neighbour to suffer through his sin, or cause him to benefit by his righteousness, the chief sufferer on account of sin is the one who commits it, and the one who gains most from righteousness is the one who practices it. But in this world this is not easily seen, for the ways of God in His government are not traceable. Christ has been rejected from earth, and in this world what is of God is in motion. If we judge God by what we see taking place around us here below, we will be found on the verge of justifying the wicked, speaking against God, and offending against the generation of His children. And to find out God and follow Him in His path through the world, so as to come to an understanding of all that which is so bewildering, is more than we are up to; we will have to confess, “When I thought to know this it was too painful for me.”

We reap what we sow; but thank God, that does not mean to the full extent of what we sow. No; for it is our Father, who "without respect of persons judgeth according to every man's work;" and thus there is no exacting of penalty, as will be the case for those who have despised His grace.

He enters now upon the subject, which this opens, of divine government, a thing which is not, as we know, in the slightest contradiction with divine grace. These are things which are sometimes put as if in some sense contrary to one another; but, on the other hand, the government of God for us is expressly a Father's government, while it is, none the less, that of One who, without respect of persons, judgeth according to every man's work. This is, of course, a thing of the present, not of the future. The future judgment, whether with regard to saint or sinner, is in the hands of Christ. "God hath committed all judgment to Him because He is the Son of Man," but there is a government which is, none the less, the government of grace, because it is one absolutely intolerant of evil. We may repeat again that the toleration of evil is never grace. It would be a perversion of the very thought of grace to imagine this. "Be not deceived," he says, therefore, "God is not mocked, for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap, for he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption and he that soweth to the Spirit, shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting." These are principles of absolute necessity. Nothing can alter them. If a man sows a certain seed, he knows, or he should know, that he can get of that seed nothing but what is proper to it. If a man sows to his flesh, he sows, in fact, the corruption which he reaps. The very principle of self-will which must, of necessity, be in it, is a principle which is essentially that of sin. Every form of sin will come under this, and God may allow, in fact, such seed to come to harvest, in order that we may recognize its character, as we otherwise would not do. In the opposite way to that of the man who, bearing good seed, goes forth even weeping, but returns with joy, a man in this way may sow his seed rejoicing, but it will be the return that will be sorrowful. It does not follow that God cannot come in and deliver us from what would otherwise be the necessary fruit of such sowing, if only there be the true self-judgment of it in the soul; for to a Christian, the reaping of it is but in order to self-judgment, and if we will judge it first, there may be no need of reaping at all. Judge it first or last we surely must, or the thing will develop for what it is and be manifest, not to ourselves alone it may be, but to others also. On the other hand, "He that soweth to the Spirit, shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting." Blessed and wonderful reaping! The life is looked at here, of course, in its practical character, in its fruits and activities. The life itself, the life which produces this, is no matter of reaping at all, it is what we must have to be Christians. Nevertheless, we can reap it as a practical thing, and the witness of it is that, even though reaped here upon earth, it is something which has eternity in it. All that which in us here is the fruit of the divine work has necessarily its link with eternity. It is for eternity that we are preparing. There is not even just that sharp division between the present and the future for us which we are apt so to imagine. It is eternity that God has before Him, it is the things eternal with which we are conversant day by day. It is eternity, therefore, that imprints its character upon the present. It is the life everlasting which we live practically now, and let us not then, says the apostle, be "weary in well doing, for in due season we shall reap if we faint not." The path is through a world of trial, and therefore, though in itself all well doing has its own delight, yet the opposition to it from the world through which we pass will surely give us need of such an encouragement as this. "As we have, therefore, opportunity, let us do good unto all men, but especially," he adds, "unto them who are of the household of faith." This ends very much the practical test which he has been making of the two principles which we have seen in opposition all the way through the epistle. All the way through it is a controversy, and one from which we need not expect to escape while we are here. God's principles lead into conflict, and, alas, not merely with the men of the world, but, it may be, as here, with the children of God themselves.