James 5:13-18 – “Thoughts”

As always, here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

¹³Is anyone among you troubled? Let him pray. Is anyone happy? Let him make music. ¹⁴Is someone sick among you? Let him call for the elders of the church. Let them pray over him anointing [him] with oil in the name of the Lord. ¹⁵And the prayer of faith will save the sick one, and the Lord will raise him up; and if he might have committed sin, it will be forgiven him. ¹⁶Therefore, confess the sin to one another, and pray over one another in order that you (pl.) may be healed. [The] energetic prayer of a righteous one is much mighty. ¹⁷Elijah was a man of like-passion to us, and he prayed to prayer that not to rain, and it did not rain upon the earth [for] three years and six months, ¹⁸and he prayed again and the heavens gave rain, and the earth yielded its fruit.

As I said in my last post, “… so much is said in these short succinct statements that leave us with more questions than answers … which usually leads me to the suspicion we’re all missing the point … Sometimes we need to just back up and ask whether there isn’t a bigger picture going on but we’re missing it, being distracted by a lot of minor (and perhaps unimportant) issues."

The passage before us is a prime example of exactly this conundrum. I really believe the point of it all is to encourage us to be better pray-ers and it has certainly had that effect on me. Tennyson’s quote, “More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of,” has echoed almost constantly in my mind and moved me to much more deliberate prayer than I’ve certainly ever known.

All that said, though, I still want to record a few random observations from the details of the passage – things I learned or noticed as I was studying and would like to record so that, should I return to the passage in the future, I’ll be reminded of them.

The first thought is the implication of the statement, “Is anyone in trouble, … Is any one sick among you?” Obviously the Lord’s beloved children still face trouble and sickness. I don’t know where we get the idea that somehow, if I know the Lord, I should be “spared” from the afflictions and sorrows and diseases of the rest of the world. Martha and Mary’s words to Jesus ought to ring down through the ages, “Lord, the one You love is sick” (Jn 11:3). “The one You love.” The “faith-healers” of this world jump on v15 of our passage, “And the prayer of faith shall save the sick...,” and they would want us to believe that all sickness can be healed by faith. However, the rest of the Bible will not support such a claim. “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints” (Psalm 116:15). Every believer, every servant of the Lord, from the greatest of prophets down to the least believing slave – all died. Not a single one of them is still with us. All faced trouble. All faced sickness. And all eventually died. The promise of grace is not that we’d be spared trouble but that the Lord would be with us through it. “When through the deep waters, I call thee to go, the rivers of sorrow shall not overflow; for I will be with thee, thy troubles to bless, and sanctify to thee thy deepest distress.” Is anyone in trouble? Is anyone sick? Yeah … it’s part of life.

As far as the anointing with oil, there are those who hold that this is simply medicinal, as in the case of the Good Samaritan who went to the beaten man and “bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine” (Luke 10:34). These people claim that the Greek word translated “anoint” only refers to medicinal use and that there is another Greek word which is used to express the idea of ceremonial anointing. It is the word krio, from which we get Christ, or the Anointed One. What I  found is that there is no such distinction in the Greek words. There are actually four that get translated “anoint” or “rub” or “pour” in reference to oil and they get used interchangeably. It is true that krio is most often used in the Bible for ceremonial anointings (like anointing kings), but then we have passages like Mark 6:13, where Jesus’ disciples “drove out many demons and anointed many sick people with oil and healed them.” The Greek word is not krio but the same word used in our passage. I personally think this particular passage in James contains too little information to be the basis for dogmatic assertions about “healings” other than the obvious that people should care, people should pray, people should do what they can for their sick friends, and, in the end, it is the Lord who will or will not “raise him up.”

The third is a “for whatever it’s worth.” Notice that our passage tells us that Elijah prayed and it did not rain, then he prayed again and it did. If you go back to the story in I Kings 17:1, we are told that Elijah announced “As surely as the Lord lives, no rain or dew will fall during the next few years unless I command it.” Then in chapter 18, Elijah prays and it does rain. What I want to notice is that the Old Testament never says that the rain was stopped by a prayer from Elijah. If we had only the Old Testament, we would probably assume that the Lord had informed him that it would not rain and Elijah simply announced it to the world. But James says he prayed and it did not rain.

How does James know that, if the Old Testament doesn’t say it? Of course we could say, the Lord told him; that it was simply part of the inspiration process as James wrote. That is entirely possible. However, there are a lot of details provided by the New Testament that were never recorded in the Old, as in II Tim 3:8, where we are told that “Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses.” Long-standing Jewish tradition says that Jannes and Jambres were the two chief Egyptian magicians who withstood Moses and Aaron in Exodus 7. But the Old Testament doesn’t tell us their names.

I could give many other examples, but my “for whatever it’s worth” is simply this, that we err greatly when we maintain that the people in the Old Testament only knew what was written in the Old Testament. Modern theologians will say things like that the Jewish people couldn’t have known much about the coming Messiah because they don’t find “much” written in the Old Testament. Or they will claim the people then couldn’t have understood about Heaven and Hell like we do, or the resurrection of the dead, or a lot of other subjects, because there just doesn’t seem to be a lot written in the Old Testament. They will make claims that only in the New Testament do we really come to understand many of these teachings.

My answer to all of that is balderdash.  I would rather suggest the written word was probably the least significant form of revelation in the Old Testament. The fact is the prophets spoke much to the people and the vast majority of what they said was never recorded for us to read. The book of Isaiah covers what seems like a long 66 chapters, but it would be ludicrous to say that was all he ever said. I think it is a matter of historical fact that few people in the ancient world could read and almost all of their knowledge of God came from the oral teaching of the prophets and priests. As I read the Bible I find extensive evidence of people “knowing” truth which, as far as we know, “hadn’t been revealed” to them. I think of Job’s statement, “For I know that my Redeemer lives and that He shall stand in the latter days upon the earth, and that, after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh shall I see God; I myself shall see Him with my own eyes, I and not another …” (Job 19:25-27). Job seems to have a rather informed understanding of the coming Messiah and of resurrection. How could he have known these things, if all he had was the written Scriptures? I think the obvious answer is that much more was “known” than what got written down for us to read centuries later.

I guess my bottom line is don’t buy the foolish idea that people in the Old Testament were theologically ignorant and lived on bare fragments of truth, that they had only a very vague understanding of important doctrines. The fact is they knew a lot. A very small part of what they knew was written down “for our admonition, for us, upon whom the end of the ages has come.”

Just a few thoughts I wanted to record before moving on.