Henry Krabbendam - James - World Evangelical Alliance

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for a little while and then vanishes. (15) Instead you ought to
say, “If the Lord wills, then we shall live and do this or that.”
(16) But now you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is
evil. (17) Therefore whoever knows to do good and does not do
it, to him it is sin.
Once again the architecture of James is called in question at this point. This
section presents “a transition without connection” (Grosheide, 1955, 399).
Once again, nothing could be further from the truth. In this section James
deals with a second element in the range of personal ethics. Anyone who
takes the “cultural mandate,” which requires humans to take dominion, seriously,
will make plans for the future. Well, in this context it soon becomes
evident that there is planning and “planning!”
(1) Injunction against Presumption (4:13)
Quite bluntly James states that planning without consideration of the providence
of God is highly presumptuous (Ps. 49:11; Prov. 16:1; 27:1; Is. 56:12).
“Now listen,” “Come now!” or “Get with it!” (age nun) is indicative of an
“idiomatic and emphatic” (Keddie, 146), if not “brusque and insistent address”
(Nystrom, 250)! “You do not just ‘forget’ about God, at any time, under
any circumstances!” The address is designed to arrest attention (Tasker,
101; Burdick, 197). Notice particularly how James presents the example of
businessmen in their comings and their goings. Apparently business travel
was a common occurrence (Acts 18:2, 18; Rom. 16:13). What James has in
mind are merchants in the possibly international import-export industry, who
always seem to be on the road, in contrast to the local shopkeepers and retailers
on the one hand, and the big time landowners and farmers, who are called
on the carpet in James 5:1ff, on the other (See PHDavids, 171, for the distinction
between the mobile merchant class and the more sedentary landlord
class). With the singular (“Get with it!”) he addresses each individual businessman.
With the plural (“we,” “us,” “you,” and “your”) he indicates that
there is plenty of company (Zodhiates, III, 13). His addressees aim to travel
with specified plans to specified places, at a specified point in time, and for a
specified length of time to conduct a specified business. The three conjunctions,
“and will spend a year there and will engage in business and will make
a profit” show their meticulous planning, their singleminded determination,
as well their obvious and blatant pride. They appear to be Christians (with
Keddie, 146; Moo, 2000, 201), rather than “hypothetical persons who have a
hypothetical attitude about a hypothetical trip” (Brosend, 126-127), and at
least members of the Christian community, who in a very vivid fashion are
introduced as speaking for themselves (... we ... us ...) and in a possibly even
more telling fashion are addressed directly (... you ... your ...). “On paper,