James 4:13-17
Boasting About Tomorrow
Now listen, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money." Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, "If it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that." As it is, you boast and brag. All such boasting is evil. Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn't do it, sins.
A life can change in a blink of an eye. I could get on a plane this afternoon, fly to Miami, land safely only to get mowed down by the airport four-wheeler taking grandma to baggage claim. Wow, didn't see that coming.
James compares human life to a mist. Is he right? A mist is short lived. It rises in the morning and is gone by 9:30. Our lives are short as well, at least in comparison to the 200,000 years that humans have been walking around. A man who dies at 80 today has only lived .04% of the time that men have lived. That's misty. A mist is fragile--the sun knocks it down like a feather. Men are fragile. We would not be alive at all if God hadn't made the conditions on earth perfect for us. What if He didn't do that. Well, we would never have lived. A mist leaves no mark. It "vanishes" as James puts it. So do we. Recorded human history is only 5,000 years old. That means that we don't know a thing about anybody who lived during the first 150,000 years. So some guy, my ancestor maybe, who lived 100,000 years ago leaves not a single trace. The record of his thirty tough years breaking coconuts and hiding in the rocks vanished as soon as he did. And the same is true of the great majority of us. All our living and striving is forgotten as soon as our ashes return to ashes and our dust to dust.
James says that we ought to be talking about what God is going to do, not what we are going to do. We ought to boast in the Lord, not ourselves. So why do we usually do it the other way around? I can only speak for myself when I say that for the most part I am living to my own glory, not His. I think the life He has granted me is mine and the "money" I make results from my efforts. In my pride I boast of it, forgetting entirely that it is by His will that anything happens. Maybe that gives me comfort that even though I have to admit that I don't know what will happen tomorrow, I can still somehow control it. Not likely.
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