James 4:14

James 4:14. Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. You are ignorant of what shall happen to you; your health and lives are not at your own disposal. Compare the similar thought in Proverbs: ‘Boast not thyself of tomorrow; for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth' (Proverbs 27:1).

For what is your life? It is even a vapour. The best manuscripts read, ‘Ye are even a vapour;' and this is a more lively and graphic form of expression. Ye are a mere vapour; a smoke, or an exhalation from the ground.

that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. A metaphor peculiar to St. James in the Scriptures; and, as has been well remarked, there is hardly a finer image in any author of the uncertainty, the brevity, and the vanity of human life. We are but as a smoke which is only seen to vanish; a vapour which rises from the ground at dawn, and disappears long before noon-day. A somewhat similar image is employed in the Book of Wisdom: ‘Our names shall be forgotten in time, and no man shall have our works in remembrance, and our life shall pass away as the trace of 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). Elsewhere in Scripture the brevity of human life is compared to a shadow that declineth, or to the fading of the flowers. Such is the vanity of life; we appear as a flash, and then are swallowed up in darkness.