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.
