Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to James · About this commentary
If the Lord Wills
James 4:13-17
13 Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow let’s go into this city and spend a year there, trade, and make a profit.” · WEB
The business plan quoted here contains nothing wrong, which is what makes the correction so searching.
Verse 13 quotes a sentence and lets it stand for a moment. Today or tomorrow we will go to such a city, spend a year, trade, and make a profit. Five elements — timing, destination, duration, activity, outcome — and every one is reasonable. Nothing dishonest is described, and no one is harmed.
Verse 14 introduces the omission with a fact rather than a rebuke: you do not know what tomorrow will bring. Then the question, and then an answer given in a single image. You are a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes — the breath on a cold morning, visible and gone. The letter used a different image for the same point earlier, the flower withered by one hot morning James 1:10–11, and both are drawn from ordinary sight rather than from philosophy.
Verse 15 supplies the correction, and it is smaller than expected. If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that. The plan is not canceled. The traveling, the trading and the profit all survive; what changes is a clause acknowledging who holds the year.
Verse 16 names what was actually wrong — you boast in your arrogance — so the fault was never the planning but the certainty.
And verse 17 states a principle wider than its paragraph: to know the good and not do it is sin. In a letter about hearing without doing, that sentence is the whole argument reduced to eleven words.
settled What this mark means