Jerry Sittser wrote in his book “the Will of God as a Way of Life:”
“It is astonishing to consider what the Bible says and does not say about the will of God. It is positively loquacious** concerning what God wants us to do today; it is virtually mum about what God has in store for us tomorrow. Take the Book of James, which warns us to exercise restraint and avoid presumption when we think about the future because we never can be sure what the future holds.
Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there doing business and making money.” Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wishes, 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. (***James 4:13-17)
James is clearly concerned about believers who were confident that they knew God’s will for tomorrow, which gave them a false sense of security, They thought they knew what tomorrow would bring—prosperity, in their case. James calls it pure presumption. None of us, he writes, can have certainty tomorrow, except the certainty that we will face surprises, hardships, and even death. All knowledge of the future is conditional. “If the Lord wishes” should be attached to every plan we make. But we do know what we should do in the present, which in James’s minds far more important anyway. Instead of being presumptuous about the future, we should be attentive to God’s will in the present. ~Jerry Sittser, the Will of God as a Way of Life Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2000, 2004, 29-30
** presumptuous New Revised Standard Version of the Bible
*** Bible – New Revised Standard Version
*(Posts with a preamble asterisk are for a more general audience, and not specific to teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.)
