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.

Proverbs 21:30

21:30 There is no wisdom and there is no understanding,

and there is no counsel against ⁵  the Lord. ⁶ 

Lamentations 3:27

3:27 It is good for a man ⁷ 

to bear ⁸  the yoke ⁹  while he is young. ¹⁰ 

Matthew 26:5

26:5 But they said, “Not during the feast, so that there won’t be a riot among the people.” ¹¹ 

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 The form לְנֶגֶד (lÿneged) means “against; over against; in opposition to.” The line indicates they cannot in reality be in opposition, for human wisdom is nothing in comparison to the wisdom of God (J. H. Greenstone, Proverbs, 232).

⁶ sn The verse uses a single sentence to state that all wisdom, understanding, and advice must be in conformity to the will of God to be successful. It states it negatively – these things cannot be in defiance of God (e.g., Job 5:12-13; Isa 40:13-14).

⁷ tn See note at 3:1 on the Hebrew term for “man” here.

⁸ tn Heb “that he bear.”

⁹ sn Jeremiah is referring to the painful humiliation of subjugation to the Babylonians, particularly to the exile of the populace of Jerusalem. The Babylonians and Assyrians frequently used the phrase “bear the yoke” as a metaphor: their subjects were made as subservient to them as yoked oxen were to their masters. Because the Babylonian exile would last for seventy years, only those who were in their youth when Jerusalem fell would have any hope of living until the return of the remnant. For the middle-aged and elderly, the yoke of exile would be insufferable; but those who bore this “yoke” in their youth would have hope.

¹⁰ tn Heb “in his youth.” The preposition ב (bet) functions in a temporal sense: “when.”

¹¹ sn The suggestion here is that Jesus was too popular to openly arrest him.