13Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.” 14Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. 15Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.”
In some ways, James reads like the book of Proverbs, with a succession of pithy or concise truisms. Yet, these are not isolated or standalone statements of wisdom but follow a theme. Our passage today follows the previous verses that assert that God is the Judge and we must submit to His law, not putting ourselves above it as though we are judges of the law. James now expands this to all of life. Implied here is that so much of life has to do with economics, engaging in various business or commercial activities in order to sustain life.
We need to submit to God in normal daily activities, even in our business engagements. This includes recognizing His sovereign will in our lives. Any plans we have for the future are entirely contingent upon things beyond our control. James goes for the most obvious of these: we may die before executing our plans for anything. We are completely dependent upon God. Our next breath could be our last. This sentence could be the last that I ever . . .
So we must recognize this and remind ourselves of our daily dependence on God and His control over our lives. So James gives the practical prescription: adjust our language when we speak of our plans. “If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.” We replace the “this or that” with the specifics of our plans. Of course, the precise wording is not what James commands. But we might say, “I am planning to take my trip next month, Lord willing.” Some people, when they write of their plans, append the characters “D.V.” which is an abbreviation of the Latin phrase, “deo volente,” which translated means, “God willing.” A simple discipline of reminding ourselves and others that all of our plans for the future are conditioned on God’s permission and guidance.
Undergirding this is the recognition of our limited, finite humanity. We are created beings, and we seriously err when we fail to realize that compared to God, we are like a vapor that is here today and gone tomorrow, and life continues on without us. We arrogate to ourselves divine sovereignty when we leave Him out of our plans, as though He is not involved or that our plans depend only on us. Better that we acknowledge God, simply and humbly, reminding ourselves as we go through life that God can override everything we do at any time.
Lord, I accept that You may override my plans for tomorrow. I am just a vapor.
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