"Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit"—yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that." As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin."
Arrogant presumption. And yet how common such an assumption is. I have a number of guaranties in life. However, I have no guaranty as to how long my life will last (beyond knowing that it will last as long as God wills). To presume to know what I will do tomorrow or even to presume that I will be around to do something is an assumption that is not based on sure footing. And beyond that, it's just plain wrong to do; it is boasting. The knowledge that God is in control should manifest itself in my avoiding presumptuous statements.
Verse seventeen is well known and widely applied, legitimately I believe. The significance of its placement here, however, was initially unclear to me. But then it occurred to me, how many people know these verses about not saying "tomorrow I will do such-n-such," and yet they make the statement all the time? If I know it's right not to make such a statement, making the statement is a sin. So also are all similar statements or thoughts based on the mindset of that statement.
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