Main Idea
Live like God, not you, is in control
Sermon Notes
Proverbs 23:4 -
Overview
Moo, Pillar New Testament Commentary
Second, the form of address in 4:13—“Now listen, you who say”—obviously parallels the introduction to 5:1–6: “Now listen, you rich people.” These paragraphs, James implies by this literary device, belong together. But the similarities are more than literary: both paragraphs rebuke the attitude of well-to-do people who arrogantly suppose that they can think and act without reference to God and to eternity. Arrogant selfishness is the problem in both paragraphs
Motyer, The Message of James
But there is also the sin of presumptuousness, which comes from a wrong understanding of ourselves in relation to our own lives and ambitions
We assure ourselves that time is on our side and at our disposal (today or tomorrow). We make our plans as if personal ability (and trade) and the profit motive (and get gain) were the only issues to take into account. We overlook frailty (a mist), and ignore the fact that even the small print of life is in the hands of a sovereign God (if the Lord wills). Yet we know better all the time (knows what is right), but self-confidence makes us boast, and all such boasting is evil and a sin against knowledge.
We speak to ourselves as if life were our right, as if our choice were the only deciding factor, as if we had in ourselves all that was needed to make a success of things, as if getting on, making money, doing well were life’s sole objective.
James is not trying to banish planning from our lives, but only that sort of self-sufficient, self-important planning that keeps God for Sunday but looks on Monday to Saturday as mine.
Our initial determination is to commit ourselves decisively to God’s side (7), to live in close fellowship with him (8a), to purge our lives and our hearts (8b), to come to the place of wholesale repentance (9) and so to humble ourselves before God. All this can be lost, however, if, once outside the doors of our private room, we take the reins of life into our own hands, we forget our ignorance, frailty and dependence and plan our day, our week and next year as if we were lords of earth and time, and there was no God in heaven. To be sure the words ‘If the Lord wills’ can be a protective superstition; but they can also be the sweetest and most comfortable reassurance to a humble and trustful spirit
In other words, when even in little, secret, almost unrecognized ways we forget how frail we are, and stop short of conscious dependence on our God, it is an element of the proud, boastful, vaunting human spirit, flaunting its supposed independence and self-sufficiency. As such it is evil (16)—and James offers no qualification of the word: he merely says evil, the word which other scriptures use of the devil, the ‘evil one’.
In fact, the whole idea of sinning by default has never been given more pointed expression. It is a principle which exposes the insufficiency of even our best accomplishments, and makes us realize that we are never more than unprofitable servants. ‘We may be able’, says C. L. Mitton, ‘to avoid committing forbidden evil; but who can ever seize positively every opportunity of doing good?’
Blomberg and Kamell, Zondervan Exegetical Commentary
This closing section of the letter’s body also returns to problems caused by the pursuit of wealth, at least in 4:13-5:6.
Despite formal parallels with 5:1-6, the present section really is not about wealth or poverty but about the temptations of autonomous planning more generally and thus a failure to take God’s will into account.
The arrogant boasting of 4:16 represents a central aspect of the earthly wisdom of 3:14-16.
Help for the 70 to 80 percent of the empire who lived not far from the subsistence level was conspicuously absent in their scheming.
The percentage of needy in America today may be noticeably smaller, but worldwide the suffering as a result of a lack of material resources remains staggering, and it is the wealthy West that has replaced Rome as the primary exploiter of the natural resources of poorer countries to sustain our ever-fattening consumer demands. Obesity is at an all-time high in the United States, while millions starve to death elsewhere.
An affluent culture turns our hearts towards fleeting satisfactions and away from God, while unprecedented prosperity has left our lives full but not necessarily fulfilled. Simon concludes that the problem is not that we’ve tried faith and found it wanting, but that we’ve tried mammon and found it addictive, and as a result find following Christ in convenient.
Verse 13
Moo, Pillar New Testament Commentary
We are reminded of a father forced to rebuke his children for behavior not in keeping with family values.
Here are people, says James, who are deliberate and self-confident planners. They decide where they will go, when they will go, and how long they will stay.39 Moreover, they are quite sure about the outcome of all these plans: they will make money. The picture James paints here would be familiar to his first-century readers. This period was marked by growing commercial activity, and especially in the Hellenistic cities of Palestine (such as those in the Decapolis). Jews were especially active in these ventures; many had left Palestine to settle in cities throughout the Mediterranean world in pursuit of financial gain. And, of course, the picture is equally familiar to us in the modern world. Modes of transportation and distances have changed, but the “bottom line” has not.
However, we need to guard against a misinterpretation at this point. It would be terribly tempting (and some interpreters have succumbed to the temptation) to find here a rebuke of those who are out to make a profit at all. The economic system we call capitalism, in other words, might be the real target of James’s polemic. But, whatever we might think about the compatibility of Christianity and the profit motive of capitalism, it would be wrong to find any critique here. As the following verses make clear, 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.
Blomberg and Kamell, Zondervan Exegetical Commentary
This verse does introduce, however, the concept that wealth allows people an independence from God that can be dangerous for their spiritual state, and James wishes to convict people about this arrogant autonomy.
They are the people who plan their lives, their futures, without thought of God and his plans or sovereignty.
The consistent use of the future tense…shows a confidence that these plans will be carried out. There is no conditional clause to mitigate the certainty these planners exhibit. They intend to travel and stay in a foreign city in a time when travel was not always safe, and they expect to do profitable business there.
The problem James has with such an attitude does not stem from the fact that these business people are following a ‘secular’ vocation...What galls our author is that such an attitude reflects a proud complacency that suggests a ‘this-worldly planning’ and a blatant desire to become rich. It is not their occupation, but their attitude, that has become secular.
Verse 14
Moo, Pillar New Testament Commentary
James is asking, in effect: How can you, being the kind of creatures that you are, presume to dictate the course of future events? The fragility of human life and the consequent uncertainty of all human plans is the main point of the verse.
The transitory nature of life that James reminds us of here is a recurring biblical theme. Proverbs 27:1 warns: “Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring forth.” Job 7:7, 9, 16 and Ps. 39:5–6 describe life as a “breath.” But, as is so often the case, especially close to James’s teaching are some words of Jesus. In Luke 12:15, he warns the crowds about covetousness and reminds them that “a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” In a brief parable, he illustrated his point with a rich man who, like James’s merchants, made definite plans for acquiring more goods, but who was prevented from executing his plans by his death (Luke 12:16–20). This passage contains several themes that James utilizes both here and in 5:1–6, and it is quite possible that it has furnished the stimulus for his own exhortations
Blomberg and Kamell, Zondervan Exegetical Commentary
Mist or vapor formed a natural analogy for the ephemeral in the dry Palestinian climate, in which water droplets in the air formed from condensation near the sea but then quickly disappeared. Mist was a prevalent OT metaphor for the transitory, drawn from the world of nature (along with others like grass, shadow, cloud, and smoke).
Verse 15
Moo, Pillar New Testament Commentary
Thus, James takes a common expression of general religious sentiment and “baptizes” it in the service of his distinctive biblical vision of a biblical worldview of history and its sovereign ruler.
James thus makes the continuance of life itself contingent on the will of the Lord. But he also, in light of v. 13, reminds us that our plans must also be subject to the same condition. This Paul did, as he frequently expressed his submission to the Lord’s will in his plans for missionary work (Acts 18:21; Rom. 1:10; 1 Cor. 4:19; 16:7; cf. Heb. 6:3). And, more significant yet for James’s background, 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. James attributes no magical significance to the words themselves. “If the Lord wills” can become nothing more than a glib formula without any real meaning. James, rather, wants us to adopt the attitude expressed by the words as a fixed perspective from which to view all of life. This perspective should add an element of contingency to all our planning—“if the Lord allows this to happen.” But it should also force us to evaluate our planning from a biblical ethical perspective—“if this kind of plan is in accordance with the Lord’s will expressed in Scripture for his people.”
Blomberg and Kamell, Zondervan Exegetical Commentary
This expression should be interpreted neither as a pious addendum to be repeated mindlessly nor as an expression of fatalism that excuses us from taking responsibility for our actions. Rather, it ought to convict our hearts of God’s sovereignty in every area of our lives even as we seek to please him by following his will as best as we can discern it.
The verb ‘we will live’ shows that we should not take even living for granted, because our very lives depend on God’s grace for their continuance.
It is important to stress that the proper attitude FJames enjoins does not exclude planning; instead it demands that one submit to God’s will during and after one’s planning, “recognizing both human finiteness and divine sovereignty”.
Verse 16
Moo, Pillar New Testament Commentary
Taken by itself, the quotation that James places on the lips of the merchants in v. 13 could appear quite unobjectionable. Indeed, one could find many places in Scripture where prophets and apostles state their plans in very similar terms. But the problem, as James now makes clear, is the attitude underlying this planning.
Some such qualification is probably necessary since the verb “boast” (kauchaomai) need not have a negative connotation. This verb is distinctively Pauline in the NT; Paul uses it thirty times, and James twice (see also 1:9). It combines the ideas of “put confidence in” and “rejoice in,” with the slightly archaic “boast” still probably the best single English equivalent. The point of importance here is that “boasting” is not itself a negative activity or attitude: the question is what it is that one is boasting in (see the notes on 1:9).
The only other occurrence of the Greek word for “arrogance” in the NT might indicate that this interpretation is moving in the right direction: “For everything in the world—the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does—comes not from the Father but from the world.” It is this “pride of life,” this arrogant sense of self-sufficiency so characteristic of the world, that James condemns in this passage. All such boasting is evil, James concludes.
People not only leave God out of account in planning their lives; they brag about it as well, proclaiming in effect their autonomy and independence from the Lord. On the view we have taken of this paragraph, we must remember, James is rebuking not people of the world but Christians. He warns, therefore, of the tendency of the world to “press us into its mold” by leading us, perhaps very subtly, to begin assuming that we control the duration and direction of our lives. Such an attitude is simply inconsistent with a Christian worldview in which there is a God who sovereignly directs the course of human affairs.
Blomberg and Kamell, Zondervan Exegetical Commentary
James roundly condemns this attitude, arguing that when people boast about their own autonomy, they sin. We should note that he does not say that all boasting is sin, but rather that this specific type of boasting in one’s independence is sin. The NT teaches us in numerous places the things about which we can boast: Christ’s death, our own weakness, God’s strength, and the like.
These traders are more concerned with physical wealth and their own plans than with humility before God.
Verse 17
Moo, Pillar New Testament Commentary
The teaching about “sins of omission” in this verse appears to be rather awkwardly added to the end of this paragraph. Most commentators, in fact, think that the content of the verse was a traditional saying that James has added at this point.
She notes that Prov. 3:27–28 prohibits any delay in doing good to a neighbor—and in the Septuagint this prohibition is grounded in the consideration that “you do not know what the next day will bring forth.”
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. We cannot take refuge in the plea that we have done nothing positively wrong.
The servant in Jesus’ parable who fails to use the money he was entrusted with (Luke 19:11–27); the people who fail to care for the outcasts of society (Matt. 25:31–46)—they are condemned for what they failed to do. Another teaching of Jesus reminds us very forcibly of James’s words here: “That servant who knows his master’s will and does not get ready or does not do what his master wants will be beaten with many blows” (Luke 12:47)
Blomberg and Kamell, Zondervan Exegetical Commentary
The concept of “doing the good” was a familiar OT concept of practicing the law and fits well with a Jewish-Christian audience.
If we do not acknowledge God in all that we do and say, and particularly with our material possessions, we fail to live our faith and commit sin instead.