Why Death Cannot Erase What We Sow
There is a law in this world that no one can defy, a quiet and unyielding one: we reap what we sow. Plant soybeans and you get soybeans; plant red beans and you get red beans. However desperately you may wish it, red beans will not rise where soybeans went into the ground. Nature is unmoved by our excuses and our feelings. It simply offers back, honestly, the face of the seed it was given.
Human life does not stand outside this great providence. A life that sows goodness bears the fruit of goodness, and a life that sows evil finds evil’s shadow following close behind. This is more than moral advice. It is a strict and invisible order that governs the world, a law of living inscribed on the field of time. Truth leaves no room for contradiction, and so this order holds to one principle alone: each of us receives according to what we have done.
We live inside that law every day. We wake, we eat, we meet people, we go to work, and none of it simply dissolves into the air. Some of the results can be seen and some cannot, but what is unseen is not therefore absent. Each day’s choices leave that day’s mark, and the marks gather into a month, then a year. Work hard for a month and you are rightly paid for it. If you labor and nothing comes back, you will go to court if you must to hold someone to account, because human nature itself knows that where there is a cause, an effect must follow.
So a year goes by, and what remains is a year’s worth of living. The face in my mirror today is no accident. It was formed, layer by layer, from every choice I have made and every thing I have done. Fifty years of living leave fifty years of weight; a life of ninety years bears ninety years of fruit.
As death draws near, time grows denser and sharper.
What if I had only one day left? Only one hour? That hour would be a distillation of everything I have lived since birth. In our final moment we do not suddenly become someone else. We merely arrive at the far edge of who we have always been.
Cut the time finer still. Ten minutes before death. One minute. Then the last ten seconds, nine, eight… Right up to the final second before the last breath leaves us, we go on faithfully adding to the sum of our lives. Even a single thought, a single word, falls as a cause upon the field of life.
And then, once the breath is finally gone, what happens? Do all those fiercely accumulated traces and results vanish at a stroke?
If they did, this world would be a broken place, filled with the strangest of contradictions, for no cause can exist without its effect. Consider the record of a life spent sowing goodness and following the truth, or of a life lived hard in the dark, sowing greed. To say that one event, the death of the body, could reduce all of it to zero in an instant is to deny the order of the universe itself. There is no law in this world by which a result simply returns to nothing.
It is exactly here that the spiritual world becomes an unshakable necessity. Though the body perishes, the results we have gathered over a lifetime need somewhere to go. There must be a place where that vast record of causes is preserved whole, without evaporating, and where it comes at last to its final fruit.
That is why the Bible declares so plainly in 1 Corinthians 15:44: “It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body.” Just as the physical body and the physical realm are real in this visible, material world, so in the unseen world beyond there must stand, in perfect symmetry, a spiritual realm and a spiritual body, shaped by what the flesh has done. All the causes we set in motion in this body in this life are received in full after death, in the spirit world, in a spiritual body that most closely resembles the one we wore.
In this intricate spiritual world, there is One alone who looks upon the results of every human life, and that One is God. From the smallest seed in nature to the eternal reckoning of the human soul, God is the Lawgiver who holds this universe in an order without contradiction, and all creation bears witness to it.
Every one of us is planting something every day. And when we pass through life’s last second and stand at last before the door of eternity, we will face the final result of all we have sown, under the sovereignty of God.
Death is not the end. It is not the moment the seed disappears but the beginning of an eternal season, when the true result is at last revealed. Remembering the solemn order of that law and the sovereignty of God, I return today to the field of my life, the one God has laid out for me, and quietly plant one more seed of goodness.
Thank you for reading.
If these essays help you see the world a little differently, you can support my writing with a cup of coffee.
Every cup helps keep JALBOZA growing—one story at a time.
☕ Buy me a coffee
