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Context No. 2000 of 4322 · James

Context · Reflection

James 4:11-17: in context

11Don’t speak against one another, brothers. He who speaks against a brother and judges his brother, speaks against the law and judges the law. But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge. 12Only one is the lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge another? 13Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow let’s go into this city and spend a year there, trade, and make a profit.” 14Yet you don’t know what your life will be like tomorrow. For what is your life? For you are a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. 15For you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will both live, and do this or that.” 16But now you glory in your boasting. All such boasting is evil. 17To him therefore who knows to do good and doesn’t do it, to him it is sin.

James turns to those confident about their plans: come now, you who say, today or tomorrow we will go into this city, spend a year there, trade, and make a profit. And he checks their confidence with a sobering reminder: you do not know what tomorrow will bring; for what is your life? You are a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, he says, you ought to say, if the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.

James is not condemning planning; he is condemning the presumption of planning as though we controlled the future. The people he describes lay out their plans with confident certainty, this city, this year, this profit, as though tomorrow were theirs to command and the outcome assured. And James reminds them of two things they had forgotten: that they do not know what tomorrow holds, and that their very life is a vapor, brief and uncertain, here for a moment and gone. The presumption is in speaking of the future as though we held it, when in truth we hold neither tomorrow nor the next breath. And James gives the alternative: to hold our plans humbly, under God, saying, if the Lord wills. This is not a superstitious formula but a posture of the heart: a recognition that our times are in God's hands, that our plans depend on his will, that we do not command the future but receive it from him. To say, if the Lord wills, is to make our plans while acknowledging that their fulfillment rests with God, not with us. This searches the way we hold our own plans. We make them, as we should; but do we hold them with the humble recognition that James urges, submitting them to God's will, aware that we do not command tomorrow? Or do we presume, planning as though the future were ours, our life secure, the outcome assured, forgetting that we are a vapor and that our times are in God's hands? The right posture is not to stop planning but to plan humbly, holding our plans open before God, saying in our hearts, if the Lord wills. This frees us as much as it humbles us: for if our plans rest in God's hands and not our own, then we need not clutch them anxiously, but can hold them open, trusting that what he wills is good. Do not boast about tomorrow, the proverb says, for you do not know what a day may bring. Our life is a vapor, and our times are in God's hands; and the wise hold their plans humbly, under his will, rather than presuming on a future they do not command.

Do I make my plans presuming on the future as though tomorrow were mine and my life secure, forgetting that I am a vapor and do not command the next day, or can I hold my plans humbly under God, saying in my heart, if the Lord wills, submitting them to him whose hands hold my times, and so plan without either presuming or clutching anxiously?

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