James 4:13-17 - Homiletics

The uncertainty of human plans and schemes.

Best illustrated by the parable of the rich fool, boasting of his "much goods" laid up for "many years" on the very night on which his soul was required of him. It is such a spirit as his that St. James denounces so sternly; not the careful forethought and providence which Holy Scripture never condemns, but the forming plans and designs without the slightest reference in word or thought to that overruling will on which all depends. It is not the mere looking forward that is forbidden, but the looking forward without the recollection that while "man proposes, God disposes." The whole of human history forms a comment on these verses. Alexander seized with mortal illness just at the moment when the world is at his feet; Arius " taken away" the very night before he was to be forced into communion with the Church; the statesman struck down by the knife of the assassin just when his country seems to need him most;—all these show the truth of the words which St. James had probably read, and which may well be compared with his own: "Our life shall pass away as a cloud, and shall be dispersed as a mist that is driven away with the beams of the sun, and overcome with the heat thereof" (Wis. 2:4). The vanity of human schemes is well shown by the old epitaph—

"The earth goeth on the earth glistening with gold;

The earth goeth from the earth not when it wold;

The earth buildeth on the earth castles and towers;"

But—

"The earth saith to the earth, 'These shall be ours.'"