Why Must We Call the Elders to Be Healed?
Is anyone among you sick? Then he must call for the elders of the church and they are to pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord; James 5:14 (NASB 1995)
Before we answer the question of why the sick must call the elders for healing, we must first answer a more fundamental question: why must the Christian do anything at all to enter the Kingdom of God?
This is not a detour. It is the foundation the truth is built upon. Without it, the commands of James 5:13-16 will continue to be dismissed by the very men this book is written for – the elders of the church. Most translators write this prescription for the sick as optional instructions that grace has rendered negotiable. Like the translators of the NASB, I intend to show that they are not optional, that grace never made them optional, and that the belief that they are optional is not a Reformation discovery.
It is a very old deception called solo gratia – grace alone – not as Yahweh intended it, but as men have twisted it to mean that grace eliminates obedience entirely. In its most corrupted form, it teaches that what you do after conversion has no bearing on your inheritance in the Kingdom of God. This deception was condemned as heresy before the second century ended. And the apostle Paul – whose letters are the very foundation upon which this corrupted doctrine is built – never taught it.
Paul knew this deception was already at work in his own lifetime. Writing to the Galatians he warned them – and he noted it was not the first time he had warned them – that those who practice the works of the flesh “will not inherit the Kingdom of God.” That is not James speaking. That is Paul. He wrote:
Envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. Gal 5:21 KJB (emphasis mine)
In his most grace-saturated letter, in the very passage where he defines the fruit of the Spirit, he issues an eschatological exclusion based on behavior.
Then to the Corinthians he was equally direct: mē planasthe – do not be deceived – followed immediately by a list of those who will not inherit the Kingdom.
Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, 1 Cor 6:9
Do not be deceived by whom? By those telling you that what you do with your body and your obedience has no bearing on where you spend eternity.
This very old deception has a name and a face. In the middle of the second century a man named Marcion of Sinope gave it its most systematic expression. Marcion solved the tension between grace and obedience by eliminating the tension entirely. He discarded the entire Hebrew scriptures, edited the writings of Paul to remove what he found too Jewish, and declared that the God of the New Testament was a different god altogether – one who had nothing to do with Torah, covenant, or commandment. No law. No obligation. Pure grace from a deity unconnected to Israel’s history. Surely, that is not the Jesus of the Bible.
If ye love me, keep1 my commandments. John 14:15 (see also Dt 30:16)
The institutional church condemned Marcion as a heretic in 144 AD. They were right to do so.
But here is what must be said plainly to every church elder reading these words: Marcion was condemned for following the antinomian logic to its honest conclusion. What the Roman church condemned in him it has quietly tolerated in softer form ever since. The anti-law belief that produced Marcion did not die with his condemnation. It survived, resurfaced through the Reformation in the doctrine of “grace alone” improperly applied, and has so thoroughly saturated institutional Christianity that the elders sitting in churches today have inherited his premise without knowing his name.
Some elders who read these words will object that James is merely offering pastoral suggestion while Paul teaches the deeper theology of grace. They also ignore James 2:17. But I assure you that this objection dissolves the moment we examine what James 5:13-16 actually wrote grammatically.
The Greek word James actually wrote is proskalesasthō – a third person aorist imperative in the middle voice. Most English translators render it ‘let him call,’ a softening that makes it sound permissive. But the Greek form allows no such softness. It is a command. This is not the language of recommendation. It is the language of a divine requirement issued through a human instrument. And James does not invent this requirement. He is functioning within a grammatical and theological structure that runs unbroken from Genesis to Revelation.
When James uses the imperative mood, he assumes the authority of a Divine command because his instructions are always rooted back into the absolute legal framework established by God’s character and Jesus’s words.
That structure works as follows. Yahweh first states what He has done – the Divine Indicative. Because of that established reality, the human imperative follows as the only appropriate covenant response. This is not works-earning grace. This is grace producing obedience. The imperative is always the fruit of the indicative, never its substitute.
Paul uses this identical structure throughout his letters. He does not oppose James. He employs the same framework James does – grace stated first, obedience commanded as the necessary response. When Paul writes to the Galatians warning them that those who practice the works of the flesh will not inherit the Kingdom — and notes it is not his first warning — he is issuing a human imperative rooted in the Divine Indicative of covenant identity. When he commands the Corinthians mē planasthe – do not be deceived – he is doing the same.
There is a form even stronger than the standard imperative that appears in both Greek and Hebrew. It is called the imperatorial future – a form identified as ‘future indicative active verb’ used to issue absolute, permanent, universal commands. When Yeshua quotes Deuteronomy 6:5 in Matthew 22:37 – “you shall love the LORD your God” – He uses this form.2 It is stronger than a simple imperative precisely because it does not merely command a moment. It declares a permanent reality about who the covenant people are and what they will therefore do. The Ten Commandments themselves are written in this form. “You shall not murder” is not a suggestion for a particular occasion. It is an unalterable decree about the identity and conduct of those who belong to Yahweh.
When James commands the sick man to call the elders, when he commands the elders to anoint and pray the vow of faith, when he commands mutual confession – these imperatives carry the full weight of this unbroken tradition. They are human imperatives flowing from the Divine Indicative of covenant relationship with a sovereign Yahweh who heals. To treat them as optional is not a discovery of grace. It is a rejection of the very grammatical and theological structure by which grace has always produced obedience in the covenant community.
Luther did not see this – or refused to receive it. The elders who inherited his framework have paid the same price for the same blindness.
I am not writing this to shame those elders. I am writing it because I was once as blind as any of them to what I am about to show you. The men who trained them were blind. The men who trained those men were blind. This blindness goes back nearly two thousand years and it has a single author – and that author is not Luther, not Marcion, not Jerome. They were instruments of a deception whose architect Scripture identifies plainly.
What I am teaching throughout this book requires that we first establish common ground: that James and Paul are not opponents, that grace and obedience are not enemies, and that inheritance into the Kingdom of God requires that we must do some things and must refuse to do others. Paul said so. Yeshua said so. And until that ground is established firmly beneath our feet, the commanded prescription of James 5 will continue to go unfilled in the churches of the Western world while the sick among us suffer and die without receiving what the covenant promised them.
We Must Call the Elders Because…
Because Yahweh said so. Through James He issued a command – not a suggestion, not an option, not a pastoral recommendation for those who prefer a more spiritual approach to illness. A command. And as we have now established, commands flowing from the Divine Indicative of covenant relationship are never optional for those who love Him.
They are called because Yahweh appointed them for precisely this function within the covenant community. James knew they had the knowledge to help the sick navigate the path to covenant restoration necessary. They are His agents for a covenant related symptom and a known a covenant cause. No physician holds that appointment. No counselor. No well-meaning brother. The elder does – and the elder who does not know this, or knows it and ignores it, has left the sick man without the only prescription Yahweh authorized. Yahweh brings our attention to this in Ezekiel 34:4:
The diseased have ye not strengthened, neither have ye healed that which was sick, neither have ye bound up that which was broken, neither have ye brought again that which was driven away, neither have ye sought that which was lost; but with force and with cruelty have ye ruled them. KJB
This is the cost of making the word “call” optional. When sola gratia in its corrupted form depletes the imperative verbs of their intended force, the prescription goes unfilled. We know the flesh does not like to be told what they must do. Therefore, commands are rarely taught. Commands are rarely obeyed because they are rarely taught. And the sick among us suffer and die having never received what the covenant promised them – not because Yahweh withheld it, but because the men He appointed to deliver it inherited a two-thousand-year-old deception and never knew to question it.
Is it “work” to fill a prescription and take it as directed? Too many think so.
That ends here. The remainder of this book details the full prescription so that the elders who read it can do what Yahweh commands them to. Let’s start with:
“…and THEY (the elders) MUST PRAY (proseuxasthōsan) over him…”
Footnotes
- This is an example of the Future Indicative Active verb
- I came across an author who has an interesting view on this command to love God. He writes, “We cannot be commanded to love, but we can be told that we should love.” That, in my view, is antinomian. While it is true all should love one another, the Divine commands are always conditional. Here in Mt 22:37, the condition is, If you want eternal salvation – to be healed or saved – you must love the LORD as He commands
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