Yes. Almost word for word.
Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows.
Galatians 6:7 (NIV)
This one is in the book, which makes it a different job from most of the sentences in this series. The question is not whether Paul wrote it, but who he was pointing it at, and the answer is not the person you had in mind when you last said it.
Verse six is about paying your teacher
Nevertheless, the one who receives instruction in the word should share all good things with their instructor.
Galatians 6:6 (NIV)
Paul writes that one line above God cannot be mocked. He has been telling the Galatians to carry each other’s burdens and to restore a man caught in a fault gently, watching themselves while they do it. Then he says to pay the person who teaches you. Then, without a break, comes the sowing.
The first thing a reader in Galatia would have heard in that sentence is money. Do not imagine you can take the teaching and keep the wallet shut, because God is not fooled by that arrangement.
Commentators divide here. Some read verse seven as looking back to the teacher, others as the opening of verse eight and its flesh and Spirit. Either way there is no break in the text, and verse nine says what it says.
Paul’s other harvest verse is a fundraising letter
He uses the same image elsewhere with no ambiguity about the subject at all, and Corinth gets it twice.
Remember this: Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously.
2 Corinthians 9:6 (NIV)
That sits in the middle of two chapters about a collection Paul was gathering for poor believers in Jerusalem, and he is writing to a church that had promised money a year earlier and not yet sent it.
A third place is closer still. Writing to the same city earlier he asks whether, having sown spiritual things among them, it is a great thing if he reaps their carnal things, which is verse six’s question with the harvest already attached. In both places where Paul uses the image and nobody argues about the subject, the subject is money. The one time it means something else, in the resurrection chapter, the seed is a body in the ground.
He is working carefully in this paragraph
It is worth knowing how closely Paul is writing here, because Paul is not tossing off a proverb he half remembers.
Five verses above the sowing he says to bear one another’s burdens, and three verses after that he says every man shall bear his own burden. In English those look like a contradiction printed almost on top of itself. In Greek they are two different nouns. Verse two has baros, which is simply a weight, and Paul has to tell them to share it. Verse five has phortion, which the lexicons gloss as a load nobody can shift to anybody else, the pack you were issued and cannot hand over.
Same verb in both, two nouns, and the King James gives you burden twice. A man choosing between those two words in one short paragraph is paying attention when he gets to verse seven.
The threatening version has two homes
The version we actually use, said quietly after the door closes, has a real biblical home, and it is not Galatians.
For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind: it hath no stalk: the bud shall yield no meal: if so be it yield, the strangers shall swallow it up.
Hosea 8:7 (KJV)
Hosea says that about a nation that had made its own kings and its own idols. Look at the harvest he describes: no stalk, no grain in the bud, and whatever does come up gets eaten by strangers. That is the sentence people mean when they say a man will reap what he sows, and Hosea does keep calling that nation home all through the book.
The other home is closer still to the words. They that plow iniquity, and sow wickedness, reap the same, says Job 4:8, just after asking who ever perished being innocent. The speaker is Eliphaz, and the Lord tells him by name at the end of the book that he has not spoken what is right. The version we use about other people is in the Bible almost word for word, in the mouth of the man who was getting it wrong.
Opening the chapter to arm myself
I opened this chapter to arm myself. Somebody had behaved badly, and I wanted the verse, and I knew roughly where it lived.
I got as far as verse six and it was about money, which was no use to me. I kept going to verse seven, which was the one I came for, and I couldn’t lift it out without the line above it. Then I read two more verses and the passage took the weapon out of my hand entirely.
What Paul does with it at verse nine
Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.
Galatians 6:9 (NIV)
Let us. Paul puts himself in it. The people he is addressing have been doing good for a long time with nothing much to show for it, and what he tells them is that the crop is late rather than cancelled.
That turns the whole image around. In our mouths the sentence is about a debt another person is going to pay. In his, it is about a harvest we are waiting on, and the temptation he names is not vengeance but exhaustion.
Verse eight is still there
Verse eight is the proof that none of this makes the passage soft.
Whoever sows to please their flesh, from the flesh will reap destruction; whoever sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life.
Galatians 6:8 (NIV)
Destruction is a real word and Paul means it. He hands it to the reader, though, about the reader. Sow to please yourself and you will harvest what that grows. The verse has never once been aimed, in its own context, at a third party who is not in the room.
Which is the same trouble that judge not keeps having, in reverse. That one gets used to stop a conversation. This one gets used to close one, at a safe distance, behind a back.
The man I opened the chapter about has still behaved badly. Galatians 6 had nothing to tell me about him; what it told me was that I was tired, which is the thing Paul warns about here. A field is never as finished as it looks.