I heard an interesting sermon on the second half of James 5 (v12 on) last night.

I really don’t get how prayer works in these circumstances though.

I’ve brought this up before, but I’d like to discuss it again because it really gets to how we understand parts of the bible, how/where God intervenes and therefore what/how we should pray.

The passage seems to indicate physical healing due to prayer pretty clearly (I don’t buy the ‘It just means spiritual healing’ argument), but we more or less never see this, do we?

We see God’s intervention in the world in bringing people to himself by the very fact that we see churches full of Christians - it’s an obvious thing we can observe very easily. But we almost never see ‘miraculous’ healing - if we did there would be no debate about it, it would be as obvious as seeing a bunch of Christians standing around!

(Yes, I think we’re extremely blessed through the technology/science/knowledge/money/resources we have in the West, and the doctors we raise ourselves and steal from poorer countries (!), and no I don’t think miraculous healing happens ‘over there’ in 3rd world countries or whatever. They have much lower life expectancy for a reason.)

Likewise we don’t see weather reports on the news saying “The Christians have started to pray to end the drought, so we’re seeing concentrated rainfall patterns in drought-stricken areas.” We also don’t experience sunshine whenever we pray for it because we have an event on that day - imagine the weird weather we would experience if God listened to peoples prayers for or against rain! Thankfully we seem to have a weather system that runs itself (be it ‘sustained’ by God or otherwise).

So what do we make of James 5? James explicitly uses Elijah, a man “just like us”, as an example that the “prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective” because he was able to get God to profoundly intervene with the weather!

So something has to give - either my observations that the weather is it’s own system and miraculous healing due to prayer doesn’t happen in any observable way are horribly wrong, or we need to read James differently.

I know it’s within God’s power to intervene, I just don’t see any evidence that he does, apart from bringing people to himself, for which we have a lot of very obvious evidence! So why pray for him to intervene as James suggests if there’s no evidence he actually does?

I personally think we need to consider whether James was more speaking from a point of view where sickness and the weather were pretty mysterious in his day and age, and may as well have been directly influenced by God. Better to pray to him about it than any of the other idols promising similar things.

So, in my view, if something is going to give, it’s how we read James.

What do others think?

Luke Stevens - 17 March 2008 01:28 PM

I personally think we need to consider whether James was more speaking from a point of view where sickness and the weather were pretty mysterious in his day and age, and may as well have been directly influenced by God.

Seems to me that both weather and sickness still carry their fair share of mysteries. But why is it one or the other? Why do we either have illness and weather being mysterious, and God intervening, OR illness and weather being somewhat and partially understood and God not intervening?

The idea that we only bring in God to explain what we don’t understand is more closely linked to deism, not theism (and of course, Christians are theists). Theism believes that God works in and through the laws of physics and biology, as well as in ways not explainable by our current understanding.

On James 5, I take it that we will all be miraculously healed by death and resurrection, if we trust him.

Luke Stevens - 17 March 2008 01:28 PM

I personally think we need to consider whether James was more speaking from a point of view where sickness and the weather were pretty mysterious in his day and age, and may as well have been directly influenced by God. Better to pray to him about it than any of the other idols promising similar things.

So, in my view, if something is going to give, it’s how we read James.

Hi Luke
I’m sure that the science behind weather forecasting and medical care were more mysterious in those days than now but I don’t think that is relevant except that arguably knowing the science for us can be a distraction to trusting God to work. I think we need to take that text at face value : that we can trust God to heal today.

rgds

Hi Luke,
you’re not going to like my answer ;)
I think the passage is about “spiritual healing.”
Here is a fairly literal translation of the passage:

12 But above all, my brothers, do not swear either by heaven or by earth or by any other oath, but let your “yes” be yes and your “no” be no, so that you may not fall under condemnation.
13Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray.
Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise.
14Is anyone among you is weak? Let him call for the elders of the church and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. 15And the prayer of faith will save the one who is weary, and the Lord will raise him up. Even though he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. 16Therefore, confess the sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed.
The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.
17Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it may not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. 18Then he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain and bore its fruit.
19My brothers, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back, 20let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering he will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.

The passage is sandwiched between references to the possibility of believers falling away (James 5:7-12 & James 5:19-20). and the language of a prayer of faith, being ‘saved’ , sin being forgiven and the Lord “raising up” seems to suggest a context of salvation.

Thanks for the responses…

@Gordon, if God’s actions are indistinguishable from the natural cause and effect we observe in the natural world, then that’s fine, so be it, but why pray for something other than what normally occurs then? I think you’re appealing to the weak reading of James 5 in that it’s only spiritual - what do you make of his example of Elijah and his prayers which changed the weather? Also, what do you make of the use of oil, which (I understand) was thought to have medicinal properties?

@Derek, I guess I’m asking what does that actually mean? Where do we observe it? What examples do we have?

@Mark, heh no worries, thanks for the more literal translation and I understand there are strong overtones of spiritual ‘healing’, with the surrounding comments of being saved & forgiven (especially with a more literal translation), but nevertheless it doesn’t appear to be exclusively spiritual - the use of oil seems to indicate some physical element, and the language seems to be, lets say, ambiguous about physical vs spiritual. Along the lines of what I asked Gordon I’d be interested to know what you make of the mention of anointing with oil, and the use of Elijah’s weather-changing prayers as an example in v17-18.

The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.
17Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it may not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. 18Then he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain and bore its fruit.

My take on these words is that they are descriptive of what happened with Elijah because of his special place in time in God’s scheme of things. They are not necessarily prescriptive for us Christians today.

On the subject of prayer and rain, one of our young parishioners depends on casual work as a greensman on a golf course - and during the long dry months he would always be the first to pray aloud at church “Lord we pray for rain”. Interestingly, during the extended rain in January and February, he was also the first to complain that we had had too much rain !

Yah, but James says “The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective. Elijah was a man just like us. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years. Again he prayed, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced its crops.”

So I think James is intending it to be at least somewhat prescriptive, hence the comparison to us today (or then), but surely he and his Jewish readers at the time would know that they couldn’t reproduce the same effects as Elijah no matter how hard they prayed. It would be as much outside their experience (I guess) as it would be outside ours.

Or James really did believe everyday people could do similar things, and he was mistaken..

I don’t think that James raises Elijah as an example of how anyone can change the weather - the context is the prayers of the elders who have been called to minister to the “sick” person. James is pointing to the example of Elijah as an encouragement that their prayers for the member of their congregation will be powerful.

The other thing to take into account is that Elijah prayed in response to the word of God to do so, and as a judgment on the sinful nation of Israel that it needed to return to God (and as an end to that time of judgement, following the incident on Mt Carmel with the priests of Baal) - he wasn’t simply trying to set up a good day for the church picnic.

As for the oil, it was used in the OT as a way of setting aside people for the work of God - especially priests and, of course most famously, for the Kings.
There may be a bit of an allusion to OT passages like Isaiah 1:4-6 and Isaiah 61:1-3

Luke Stevens - 17 March 2008 01:28 PM

What do others think?

Hi Luke. There was a discussion about James 5 and healing prayer about 18 months ago here.

My thought in that thread are here and here.

:)

To begin with a paraphrase: The universe is complex. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly complex it is. I mean, you may think it’s difficult to program your VCR, but that’s peanuts to running the universe!

ISTM that there are a number of issues which come into play when trying to understand something of how God answers prayer. For one, what happens when I pray for rain but my neighbour prays for fine weather? Is the answer to provide each and every one of us with our own individually tailored weather?

But there’s a bigger issue. Most people, it seems, agree that God is outside of time (whatever that may mean). Einstein theorised that time and space are related, and the Bible teaches that God created the universe which clearly included space. The upshot of these two claims is that time is also part of God’s creation, and so the notion that God is somehow outside of (at least our) time seems to have some reasonable foundation.

Given that God is outside of time, why should God’s response to our prayers be constrained by the limitations of our relationship to time?

Here’s a thought experiment. My friend is sick and I pray for healing. God answers my prayer not by healing my friend, but by preventing him from ever having become sick in the first place. The upshot is that neither my friend nor I am any longer aware of the sickness, I never pray, but my prayer (which I no longer pray) has been answered!

This is definitely in the realm of the hypothetical, and I’ve certainly been watching far too much Doctor Who, but if you affirm that God is “outside of time” then can you disprove this scenario? (One point counting against it is that there are no examples of prayers like my version of David’s “un-timely” prayer of repentance: “Lord prevent me from having sent Uriah the Hittite into battle...” although such notions may not have occurred to people back then.)

There are, of course, some rather mind-boggling consequences if God does operate in this way. For one, those studies that seek to compare the rates of recovery of people who were the subjects of prayer compared to those who were not are going to be proving nothing! In fact, it would mean that we have no reliable means to measure answer to prayer and are simply left with the Bible’s encouragement to pray and leave working out how to fit our prayers together with the running of the universe in God’s hands.

Martin (Enkidu) Shields - 18 March 2008 12:07 AM

This is definitely in the realm of the hypothetical, and I’ve certainly been watching far too much Doctor Who, but if you affirm that God is “outside of time” then can you disprove this scenario?

Perhaps we should await the discovery of the long lost Letter of the Apostle Paul to the Gallifreans before commenting?

If we are allowing ourselves to indulge in hypothetical, pan-dimensional theology - for which there is no scriptural imperative, which is non-falsifiable, and whose conclusions should not have any significant impact on the way we live…

If we recognise that time and space are dimensions of the same unity, and that God is ‘outside’ of space-time, then it seems likely that God is able to alter events in our past in “response” to our prayer. But he would have already been aware of both our prayers, and his response to our prayer (of removing that event from ever having occurred) - so why wouldn’t he just not allow the event to take place to start off with?
Indeed, God removing an event from time would be the same as God never allowing the event to take place in the first place.
Thus, Occam’s Razor would suggest that we drop the theory wouldn’t it?

Martin (Enkidu) Shields - 18 March 2008 12:07 AM

Here’s a thought experiment. My friend is sick and I pray for healing. God answers my prayer not by healing my friend, but by preventing him from ever having become sick in the first place. The upshot is that neither my friend nor I am any longer aware of the sickness, I never pray, but my prayer (which I no longer pray) has been answered!

If we accept that time is non-linear and reentrant then history becomes meaningless since what happened in the past may never happen. Where does this leave the death and resurrection of Jesus? In fact in that scenario I may well not exist either (do I hear muted applause?).

Mark Williamson - 18 March 2008 01:28 AM

Thus, Occam’s Razor would suggest that we drop the theory wouldn’t it?

I suppose Enkers (who has stepped outside his normal space-time continuum of the Old Testament, and must be desperate for some normal human interaction ;-) ), may be using his ingenious but unverifiable speculation to demonstrate that questions such as those raised in the OP may not be worth raising except for entertainment purposes.

Luke wrote

I know it’s within God’s power to intervene, I just don’t see any evidence that he does, apart from bringing people to himself, for which we have a lot of very obvious evidence! So why pray for him to intervene as James suggests if there’s no evidence he actually does?

Another Luke wrote (Lk 18:1...)

Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up…

However when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?

Don’t give up praying. Even if we don’t see any miraculous healing or weather changes (which I would say is always disputable, just as Pharaoh’s men tried to copy & downplay Moses’ works from God, & people misunderstood & downplayed Jesus’ works… thus no it would not be simply a matter of a “bunch of Christians standing around” ... there will always be debate about it!!!)

& don’t downplay prayer to the role of putting your hands together so you don’t fiddle, & close your eyes so you can’t see distractions… That is exactly what the argument is that says pray to god tso you’re not praying to idols… it means prayer is useless, but it’s better than idolatry.

Have faith Luke. He does answer prayers.

Weather? We have been listing the dam levels of 7 cities for the past 3 years in our evening service & praying for full dams. In that time, we have taken Newcastle off, because they did get 100% a while ago. We rejoice for example that Goulburn has filled from 12.3% in May 07 to 67.3% in February 08. Was it circumstances.... some say yes, some no. But Hebrews 11 encourages me to see with faith. By faith we pray. By faith we see tangible answers, which some may dispute, but they always will because they don’t want to see the hand of God at work.

Strengthen our faith Lord, even though it is “as small as a mustard seed.” “Lord I believe, help my unbelief.”

[quote author="Angus Johnson"]If we accept that time is non-linear and reentrant then history becomes meaningless since what happened in the past may never happen. Where does this leave the death and resurrection of Jesus? In fact in that scenario I may well not exist either (do I hear muted applause?).

I’m not suggesting that time is non-linear and re-entrant for anyone except the creator of time, so unless you propose that God would choose to change his mind on the atonement your point is mute.

[quote author="Mark Williamson"]If we recognise that time and space are dimensions of the same unity, and that God is ‘outside’ of space-time, then it seems likely that God is able to alter events in our past in “response” to our prayer. But he would have already been aware of both our prayers, and his response to our prayer (of removing that event from ever having occurred) - so why wouldn’t he just not allow the event to take place to start off with?
Indeed, God removing an event from time would be the same as God never allowing the event to take place in the first place.
Thus, Occam’s Razor would suggest that we drop the theory wouldn’t it?

Perhaps so, but your objection is exactly the same objection I’ve heard raised against prayer to a omniscient God regardless of how he deals with time. Furthermore, you assume that the course of action to “just not allow the event to take place to start off with” is equivalent to allowing it to take place and then undoing it. Perhaps things are more complex than this (which was my original point)…