James 4:15
James 4:13-17 (see also Matthew 6:10)
Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.” Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.” But as it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil. Therefore, to one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, to him it is sin.
Calvinist, William MacDonald: “God should be consulted in all our plans, and they should be made in His will. We should live and speak in the realization that our destinies are in His control. We should say, ‘If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that.’ Thus, in the book of Acts, we find the Apostle Paul saying, ‘I will return again to you, God willing’ (18:21), and in 1 Corinthians 4:19 he wrote, ‘I will come again to you shortly, if the Lord wills.’ Sometimes Christians employ the letters ‘D.V.’ to express this sense of dependence on God. These letters are the initials of two Latin words, Deo volente, meaning God willing.” (Believer’s Bible Commentary, p.2238, emphasis mine)
In other words, conduct yourself with an awareness of God, in terms that your time on earth is in His hands, and to fulfill His desires for your life. For instance, Acts 16:6-10 states: “They passed through the Phrygian and Galatian region, having been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia; and after they came to Mysia, they were trying to go into Bithynia, and the Spirit of Jesus did not permit them; and passing by Mysia, they came down to Troas. A vision appeared to Paul in the night: a man of Macedonia was standing and appealing to him, and saying, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’ When he had seen the vision, immediately we sought to go into Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.” This shows how attentive Christians should be of the will and work of God in our lives.
A few more verses also speak to this concept:
Jeremiah 10:23: “I know, O LORD, that a man’s way is not in himself, nor is it in a man who walks to direct his steps.”
Proverbs 16:9: “The mind of man plans his way, but the LORD directs his steps.”
Romans 8:28: “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.”
Again, this shows God’s providential control over the lives of men, but it does not necessarily mean that life is a script in which all mankind plays out his part in a divine play. That’s what the deterministic variety of Calvinists infer, but that’s not what the passage is saying. Determinists simply proof-text it that way.
John Calvin: “James means to arouse those who take no respect for the providence of God from their unconcern, who take charge of the whole course of a year when they have no power over one single minute: they promise themselves a profit far off, and scarcely possess the ground beneath their feet.” (Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries: Matthew, Mark and Luke Vol. III, and James and Jude, pp.303-304)
Sounds fine, but here is what John Calvin really means by “the providence of God”:
John Calvin: “We also note that we should consider the creation of the world so that we may realize that everything is subject to God and ruled by his will and that when the world has done what it may, nothing happens other than what God decrees.” (Acts: Calvin, The Crossway Classic Commentaries, p.66, emphasis mine)
And there you have it. Here is what Calvinists add in their statement of faith:
The Calvinistic, Westminster Confession of Faith: “God, from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass: yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures; nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established.” (Westminster Confession of Faith, III. Of God’s Eternal Decree, emphasis mine)
Calvinist, R.C. Sproul: “This statement refers to God’s eternal and immutable decretive will. It applies to everything that happens. Does this mean that everything that happens is the will of God? Yes.” (What is Reformed Theology?, p.172, emphasis mine)
That’s Calvinistic determinism on display. But it is not the way that the Bible speaks on the matter. Jesus states: “If anyone is willing to do His will, he will know of the teaching, whether it is of God or whether I speak from Myself.” (John 7:17) That naturally implies that some, indeed most, of the Jews where unwilling to do God’s will, and hence were not coming to His Son. However, Calvinists have constructed a way out of this by creating a dichotomy between an alleged revealed will vs. secret will.
Laurence Vance: “The idea that man must always do God’s will is a cornerstone of Calvinism. If God’s will is what he has decreed and is therefore always done, then no one (including the Apostle Paul) should ever be concerned about whether God’s will is being carried out or not--it could never not be carried out. The idea that God cannot will what never takes place is another foundational principle of Calvinism.” (The Other Side of Calvinism, pp.482-483, emphasis mine)
Yet, we are to pray that God’s will be done on earth, something that Determinism makes meaningless.
Matthew 6:10: “‘Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.’”
Determinism says that it is already being done, and yet Jesus instructs us to pray for it to come, and it will come, on the day when God’s will is done on earth as it is already being done in Heaven right now. However, deterministic Calvinists look around the world and see God’s will being done in every detail, including every ill thought, word and deed. Often Calvinists will defend this by adding a permissive will to their decretive will, but that’s double-talk since the two are mutually exclusive, given that permission is a matter of allowing one possible thing over another, when yet Determinism has room for only one thing, staged in advance. It’s like saying that author, J.R.R Tolkien, merely permitted Sauron to do evil, when he scripted the book, Lord of the Rings.
