We had a great plan last Friday. Beth and I would meet our daughter and her newlywed husband, who had been borrowing one of our cars for their honeymoon, at Ikea near the Portland airport. Then we would take them to the airport, retrieve both cars and drive to downtown Portland where we would have some lunch then spend the afternoon at Powells Bookstore.
Unfortunately, Portland traffic changed all that. We lost each other in the process of trying to take the City Center exit, then found ourselves in bumper-to-bumper traffic for 30 minutes until we could exit well south of downtown. By the time we got off at different exits, phoned each other, and reconnected, all we wanted to do was get something to eat and drive home to Eugene. We still encountered horrible traffic for the next 15 miles, which took about an hour to cover. So our afternoon of leisurely book browsing turned into a session of agonizing driving.
It’s common wisdom that plans go awry. My supposed ancestor (another story) Robert Burns penned the famous line, “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.” It comes near the end of a poem addressed to a field mouse whose nest he has just turned up with his plow, upsetting the mouse’s expectation that she had created a snug dwelling for the winter.
Dwight Eisenhower, quoting a line he says he learned in the Army, said, “Plans are worthless; planning is everything.” By that he meant that any particular plan is doomed to failure caused by the unexpected, but the process of planning, of wrestling with possible problems and their solutions, helps make us more prepared to deal with the unexpected and to succeed even when our plans go “agley.”
Burns’ poem ends with an expression of his own fear of the future and what it might do to his own plans. Eisenhower is more optimistic in his conviction that we can prepare ourselves for unforeseen events. Yet both men fail to take into account another, more important factor in all human planning. Proverbs 16 teaches us to consider God and His design as we make our plans.
Verse 1 is tantalizingly difficult to decipher, “The plans of the mind belong to mortals, but the answer of the tongue is from the Lord.” The antithesis makes good sense in its focus on human planning, but the thesis that “the answer of the tongue is from the Lord” is hard to decode. Does it imply that God is speaking through human lips? Whatever it means, we can feel that it is in the same spirit as the more clear and better known verse 9, “The human mind plans the way, but the Lord directs the steps.”
In the speech in which Eisenhower made his remark about planning, he especially urged a national reliance on science as the way to wrestle with future problems. Proverbs, on the other hand, is clearly pointing us toward a reliance on God and a recognition of God’s providence at work in the outcome of whatever plans we make. Another well-known English saying is, “Man proposes, God disposes,” apparently taken from The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas a Kempis. That could be the theme of Proverbs 16.
The best known verse in the chapter, verse 18, “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall,” clusters with other verses about the importance of humility. A humble spirit is held up as the wise way to approach planning for the future, with a recognition of our dependence on God and the very likely failure of our plans. So we get another familiar word in verse 25, “Sometimes there is a way that seems to be right, but in the end it is the way to death.”
This chapter in Proverbs is inviting us to proper humility about all our schemes and designs for life. They are in many cases likely to be abrogated by unexpected disasters, and in every case they are completely dependent on God’s favor and concurrence with what we plan. It is foolishness to lay out the course of one’s life with considering what God might do or ask of us.
The last verse of chapter 16 sums all this up well with the image of God’s control over even the seemingly random event of a throw of dice. “The lot is cast into the lap, but the decision is the Lord’s alone.” Without denying human free-will or even genuine chance as a feature of our world, we must constantly acknowledge that God is in control and that His decisions lie behind even the smallest happenings of our lives.