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”—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. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.
(James 4.13–17, ESV*)
The creator–creature distinction is implicit throughout James 4.13–17. As is common in wisdom literature, James rebukes human pride and presumptuousness. The remedy to this improper attitude is proper humility before God (see vv. 6, 10) and sober recognition of God’s sovereignty (v. 15). The imperative is that humans live in humble acknowledgement of their mortality and the tenuous nature of existence. Verse 14 is crucial: ‘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.’ By contrast, God is immortal and ultimately sovereign over all human and creaturely affairs. Nothing whatever can occur apart from the decree or permission of God.
What James is condemning is preoccupation with the temporal or transient (i.e. living primarily for the here and now), not planning or making provision for the future per se (see also Matt. 6.19–34). If I may employ a Johannine expression, ‘the pride of life‘ (1 Jn 2.16) that James speaks of leads humans to exclude consideration of God in their day-to-day affairs. Far from being a morally neutral area, humans living their lives for their own pleasures and pursuits without any thought of God is arrogant and evil (v. 16). Failure to humble oneself and acknowledge God and his sovereignty (not merely in abstraction, but in one’s personal life) is specifically the ‘sin of omission’ that James has in mind in verse 17.Note
* English Standard Version (2001–2016).
Addendum. The above piece was originally written on Saturday, 2 January 2016. It has only been very slightly revised as you see it now in its present form.
Latest revisions: 16 November 2016 (converted ‘cf.’s to ‘see’s in brackets); 17 February 2018 (converted five colons to full stops); altered one scriptural abbreviation (20 Nov. 2021); added note (16 Aug. 2023).
Latest revisions: 16 November 2016 (converted ‘cf.’s to ‘see’s in brackets); 17 February 2018 (converted five colons to full stops); altered one scriptural abbreviation (20 Nov. 2021); added note (16 Aug. 2023).
