Read on its own, Galatians 6:7 sounds like karma: “for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” The likeness is real but thin. Classical karma is an impersonal law of cause and effect that runs across many lifetimes, with no one judging and no one forgiving. Paul’s sentence sits inside a letter about grace. It names a God who sees. It plays out in one life followed by judgment. And the same letter insists that no one earns standing with God by deeds. The Bible’s harvest image is not karma.
The two ideas share a picture, seed and harvest. They part ways on who stands behind the harvest and whether a debt can ever be forgiven. Seeing that requires reading the verse where Paul put it, and being exact about what karma claims.
What karma claims before anyone borrows it
Abdu Murray, a former Muslim who became a Christian after a nine-year study of the claims of Islam and Christianity, starts by separating classical karma from the version most Americans use. In Hinduism and Buddhism, he explains, karma belongs to samsara, the cycle of death and rebirth. Good deeds in this life work out as a higher station or better fortune in the next. Bad deeds work out as a lower one. Drawing on the Dalai Lama’s own definition, Murray stresses that this causality is understood as a natural process rather than a divine one. In his words: “There’s just no judgment in karma.” A hard next life is not a sentence handed down. It is simply what follows, the way a dropped stone falls. “It just happens,” Murray says.
Two features follow. First, karma needs reincarnation. Murray calls karma rootless without it, because the law settles accounts across lifetimes, and one life is not long enough to settle them. Second, in its home traditions the cycle is something to get out of. “Karma is a cycle to be escaped from,” Murray says. “It’s not desired at all. It’s meant to end.” In Hinduism the goal is to work off karma until one becomes one with Brahman, the impersonal absolute. In classical Buddhism the goal is to be extinguished. Western pop spirituality turns this upside down. “But in Western spirituality, it’s almost like a prize,” he observes, a chance to imagine you were a queen or a warrior in some earlier life.
Murray adds a fair qualification. Hinduism is adaptable, and over time a devotional strand, bhakti, developed in which a worshiper may ask a chosen god for grace and mercy in dealing with bad karma. He calls this a later development and says karma is still largely an operation of law. Any honest comparison has to keep that in view. The question is whether the karmic law itself contains a judge who can forgive. In its classical form it does not.
Lisa Fields names the gap in plain terms: “That’s very different from sowing and reaping.” She also points to the habit that makes the confusion easy. People treat karma as moment-to-moment payback, so a rude driver getting a flat tire a mile later counts as karma. The classical doctrine Murray describes has little to do with that.
Reading Galatians 6 where Paul put it
The verse comes near the end of a letter to churches in Galatia that are being pressed to add the works of the law to faith in Christ. Read it with its neighbor:
Be not deceived; 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; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.
That is Galatians 6:7-8, and several small details in it work against a karmic reading.
Start with the first clause. The warning is that God is not mocked. Paul rests the harvest on someone who cannot be fooled. A natural law cannot be mocked, because no one is there to mock. The harvest is grounded in God’s own attention to how people live.
Next, look at the two fields. Paul contrasts sowing to the flesh with sowing to the Spirit. In Galatians those are more than labels for bad and good behavior. In the previous chapter Paul lists the works of the flesh and then the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:19-23). Fruit is what a living tree yields. The harvest of everlasting life comes “of the Spirit,” so God’s own Spirit is the one who produces it. That turns a self-powered account of merit on its head.
Then notice what the harvest is: corruption on one side, life everlasting on the other. Interpreters read this in two main ways. Many take it as pointing to final judgment and eternal life. Others stress that Paul also means consequences already under way, since a life given to the flesh decays now as well as later. On either reading the harvest sits within God’s purposes and God’s timing, and verse 9 says so outright: “And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.” Due season belongs to someone. The line is a promise meant to keep tired believers going.
The verses on either side
Galatians 6 opens with a command about failure: “Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted” (Galatians 6:1). The community told it will reap what it sows is first told to restore people who have fallen. Then comes verse 2: “Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.” A karmic system gives no reason to carry anyone’s load, since each being works off its own account. Paul assumes that in the church, consequences are met with restoration and shared weight.
Some readers see the sowing image as growing out of verse 6, where those who are taught share good things with their teachers. Others read verses 7-10 as a summary of the whole letter’s appeal. Either way, the passage ends in verse 10 with doing good to all people, especially fellow believers. The image serves a call to generous, patient life together.
The letter then closes on the cross: “But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world” (Galatians 6:14). Whatever sowing and reaping means, Paul’s boast does not lie in his own good harvest.
Why the rest of Galatians rules karma out
Galatians 6:7 is not a stray proverb. It comes at the end of a sustained argument that people are not made right with God by what they do. “Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ” (Galatians 2:16). A few verses later Paul draws the conclusion: “I do not frustrate the grace of God: for if righteousness come by the law, then Christ is dead in vain” (Galatians 2:21).
If sowing and reaping meant that each person must balance a moral ledger by deeds, Paul would be undoing his own letter in its last chapter. The coherent reading is the plain one. Grace is the ground of a person’s standing with God, and the harvest image describes the direction of a life that either follows the Spirit or resists Him. Murray makes a similar contrast. Biblical sowing and reaping includes consequence, he says, but “it’s not just an operation of law, it actually is very infused with morality as well.” It carries real judgment and real reward, from someone who cares what is sown. Ephesians 2:8-10 sets out the same order in one breath: saved by grace through faith as God’s gift, not by works, and then created in Christ for good works. The sowing matters, but the field itself is a gift.
The Bible’s own warning against karmic thinking
Scripture does more than differ from karma. It critiques the habit of reading every misfortune as payback.
The sowing image appears much earlier, in Job. Eliphaz tells the suffering Job: “Even as I have seen, they that plow iniquity, and sow wickedness, reap the same” (Job 4:8). The logic is tidy. Job is suffering, so Job must have sown something bad. At the end of the book God rejects that reading of Job’s life: “My wrath is kindled against thee, and against thy two friends: for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath” (Job 42:7). The sowing principle itself stands. Its use as a key to a particular person’s pain is what God condemns.
Jesus meets the same instinct in John 9. His disciples see a man born blind and ask: “Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answers: “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him” (John 9:2-3). The question assumes that suffering from birth must trace back to someone’s deeds. Jesus refuses the premise.
So the Bible’s sowing sayings state real patterns of moral consequence, and they read best as wise principles rather than a guarantee about each outcome in a given week. Murray notes that one Hindu teacher used karma to clear God of responsibility for suffering: if misfortune is only the result of prior deeds, God did not cause it. Scripture takes neither route. It does not make suffering an impersonal debt the sufferer earned, and it does not remove God from the story.
The strongest objection: a judge who repays deeds
A thoughtful skeptic can press the point. The Bible says God “will render to every man according to his deeds” (Romans 2:6). Isn’t that karma with a judge added? If consequences follow deeds either way, why does it matter whether a law or a person delivers them?
The objection is fair, because the Bible does teach judgment according to works. It never shrinks the moral weight of what people do. Two differences remain, and they go to the root.
The first is that a judge can show mercy and a law cannot. Mercy is a decision made by someone with the standing to make it. An impersonal process has no one to decide. That is why Murray’s caveat about devotional Hinduism matters. Where grace shows up in that tradition, it comes through a god people turn to, while the karmic law itself simply operates.
The second is that the Bible does not picture mercy as a judge looking the other way. Murray holds to penal substitution, the view that Jesus stood in his place and was judged for his sin. He argues that the Trinity keeps this from being a fiction: because the Son shares the Father’s divine nature while being a distinct person, the cross is a real payment and not money moved from one pocket to the other. Christians describe the atonement in more than one way, but the point here holds across them. The God who judges is also the God who pays. Karma has no category for the one who keeps the account taking the cost on himself.
Scripture also sets a different timeline. “And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment” (Hebrews 9:27). One life, then judgment. Without many lifetimes, classical karma has nowhere to operate.
Why the two keep getting blended
Murray traces the blend to a half-remembered Bible verse, the folk saying about what goes around coming around, and karma picked up from celebrity spirituality. “We’ve misunderstood both and created sort of a Frankenstein’s monster of a spirituality,” he says. Part of the pull, in his view, is that Christianity gets cast as the same old faith while the Eastern import seems ancient and new at once.
The blend fails most clearly on the question of why anyone does good. Under karma, good deeds are payment toward a better next life, or toward escape from the wheel. Murray puts the Christian alternative this way: “we don’t do things in order to get saved. We do things because we are saved.” He presses it directly against karma: “And so it’s not to prevent bad karma in the next life that we do good deeds. It is simply in gratitude to the God who has saved us.”
That is where Galatians 6 lands once its context is restored. God is not mocked, so the harvest is real. But the harvest has a Lord, and that Lord has already paid what his people owed. A law can only collect. A Lord can forgive, and Paul’s letter rests on the claim that he has.
Quick answers
- Is “what goes around comes around” in the Bible? No. It is a folk saying. Murray suggests it gets mixed up with both the biblical sowing image and karma.
- Do Christians believe in reincarnation? No. Hebrews 9:27 describes one death followed by judgment, which leaves classical karma with nowhere to work.
- Does any form of Hinduism speak of grace? Murray notes that devotional Hinduism, bhakti, developed a practice of asking a chosen god for grace and mercy, though he calls it a later development from the classical idea.
- If something bad happens to me, is God paying me back? Scripture warns against that reading. God rebuked Job’s friends for it, and Jesus rejected it in John 9.
- Does Galatians 6:7 promise that giving money brings money back? No. The verse contrasts sowing to the flesh with sowing to the Spirit, and its harvest is corruption or everlasting life.