God’s Plans (James 4:13-17)

James 4:13–17 ESV

13 Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— 14 yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. 15 Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” 16 As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. 17 So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.

Planning and stewardship

Arrogant planning ignores God’s providence

The Letter of James A. Arrogant Planning Ignores God’s Providence (4:13–17)

James is not rebuking these merchants for their plans or even for their desire to make a profit. He rebukes them rather for the this-worldly self-confidence that they exhibit in pursuing these goals—a danger, it must be said, to which businesspeople are particularly susceptible. And we should guard here against another kind of misinterpretation: the idea that James is forbidding Christians from all forms of planning or of concern for the future. Taking out life insurance and saving for retirement, for instance, are not condemned by James; these may very well be a form of wise stewardship. What James rebukes here, as v. 16 will make clear, is any kind of planning for the future that stems from human arrogance in our ability to determine the course of future events.

The Letter of James A. Arrogant Planning Ignores God’s Providence (4:13–17)

human life is insubstantial and transitory, here one minute and gone the next. Illness, accidental death, or the return of Christ could cut short our lives just as quickly as the morning sun dissipates the mist or as a shift in wind direction blows away smoke.

The Letter of James A. Arrogant Planning Ignores God’s Providence (4:13–17)

Jesus himself exhibited the same submission to the Lord’s will at the great crisis of his own life in Gethsemane. However, as Calvin pertinently observes, Jesus, Paul, and the other apostles do not always state this condition when they plan for the future. What was important is not the verbalization but that “they had it as a principle fixed in their minds, that they would do nothing without the permission of God

He has urged us to take the Lord into consideration in all our planning. We therefore have no excuse in this matter: we know what we are to do. To fail now to do it, James wants to make clear, is sin

Douglas J. Moo, The Letter of James, The Pillar New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI; Leicester, England: Eerdmans; Apollos, 2000), 208.