1 Corinthians 4:19

4:19 But I will come to you soon, if the Lord is willing, and I will find out not only the talk of these arrogant people, but also their power.

Proverbs 19:21

19:21 There are many plans ¹  in a person’s mind, ² 

but it ³  is the counsel ⁴  of the Lord which will stand.

Jeremiah 10:23

10:23 Lord, we know that people do not control their own destiny. ⁵ 

It is not in their power to determine what will happen to them. ⁶ 

Acts 18:21

18:21 but said farewell to ⁷  them and added, ⁸  “I will come back ⁹  to you again if God wills.” ¹⁰  Then ¹¹  he set sail from Ephesus,

Romans 1:10

1:10 and I always ask ¹²  in my prayers, if perhaps now at last I may succeed in visiting you according to the will of God. ¹³ 

James 4:15

4:15 You ought to say instead, ¹⁴  “If the Lord is willing, then we will live and do this or that.”

¹ sn The plans (from the Hebrew verb חָשַׁב [khashav], “to think; to reckon; to devise”) in the human heart are many. But only those which God approves will succeed.

² tn Heb “in the heart of a man” (cf. NAB, NIV). Here “heart” is used for the seat of thoughts, plans, and reasoning, so the translation uses “mind.” In contemporary English “heart” is more often associated with the seat of emotion than with the seat of planning and reasoning.

³ tn Heb “but the counsel of the Lord, it will stand.” The construction draws attention to the “counsel of the Lord”; it is an independent nominative absolute, and the resumptive independent pronoun is the formal subject of the verb.

⁴ tn The antithetical parallelism pairs “counsel” with “plans.” “Counsel of the Lord” (עֲצַת יְהוָה, ’atsat yehvah) is literally “advice” or “counsel” with the connotation of “plan” in this context (cf. NIV, NRSV, NLT “purpose”; NCV “plan”; TEV “the Lord’s will”).

⁵ tn Heb “Not to the man his way.” For the nuance of “fate, destiny, or the way things turn out” for the Hebrew word “way” see Hag 1:5, Isa 40:27 and probably Ps 49:13 (cf. KBL 218 s.v. דֶּרֶךְ 5). For the idea of “control” or “hold in one’s power” for the preposition “to” see Ps 3:8 (cf. BDB 513 s.v. לְ 5.b[a]).

⁶ tn Heb “Not to a man the walking and the establishing his step.”

⁷ tn Or “but took leave of.”

⁸ tn Grk “and saying”; the participle εἰπών (eipwn) has been translated as “added” rather than “said” to avoid redundancy with the previous “said farewell.” The participle εἰπών has been translated as a finite verb due to requirements of contemporary English style.

⁹ tn Or “will return.”

¹⁰ tn The participle θέλοντος (qelontos), a genitive absolute construction, has been translated as a conditional adverbial participle. Again Paul acts in dependence on God.

¹¹ tn A new sentence was begun here in the translation due to the length of the sentence in Greek and the requirements of contemporary English style, which generally uses shorter sentences.

¹² tn Grk “remember you, always asking.”

¹³ tn Grk “succeed in coming to you in the will of God.”

¹⁴ tn Grk “instead of your saying.”