Monday, April 27, 2020

If the Lord wills...

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 get gain”; whereas you do not know about tomorrow. 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 shall live and we shall do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. (James 4:13-16 RSV)
.... The text’s message is one of transience, that any human relying on permanence or predictability is making a fundamental error. Everything depends on God, day by day and minute by minute. If that has not been a central lesson for us in the West, that is because we have come to believe in foundations that we now see were not actually that firm. Other parts of the world that have always been accustomed to poverty and epidemic have always been more conscious of that frailty and transience, and the sense of dependence that arises from it. ....

So uncertain is life that James warns against even saying that you are planning to do something or to travel somewhere, because you do not know if you will live to do it. Any such plans must be accompanied by the provisional phrase “If God wills.” ....

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