Greg Mazak on James 5:14-15

Here’s the ESV for James 5:14-15:

14 Is anyone among you sick (ἀσθενεῖ)? 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. 15 And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick (κάμνοντα), and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.

All the major English translations (24 that I checked, anyway) agree, translating ἀσθενεῖ and κάμνοντα with “sick” or “ill” (Tyndale’s “defeated” in v. 14 probably means “sick”).

Mazak’s View

Today in BJU’s chapel service, popular teacher Dr. Greg Mazak preached a searching and exegetically rigorous message on prayer in which he challenged this view.

He argued that ἀσθενεῖ and κάμνοντα refer not to physical sickness but to what Lloyd-Jones might call “spiritual depression.” He told the more academic in the audience he’d happily share his sources with them. His view, he said, was not novel.

I asked him if I could post those sources on my blog. Here they are:

1. Daniel R. Hayden, “Calling the Elders to Pray,” Bibliotheca Sacra 138:551, July, 1981; pp. 258ff.
2. John MacArthur’s commentary on James (see his discussion of James 5).
3. Very brief reference in the notes of the Ryrie Study Bible (Expanded edition).

My friend Brian Collins and I think this view makes better sense of the last phrase of v. 15: “And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.” If someone is “raised up” from spiritual defeat then certainly he is being forgiven of sins. If he is being raised up from sickness, it’s not immediately apparent how forgiveness of sins is a corollary. This is worth further perusal.

Zechariah, Congressional Deadlock, and God’s Providence

I was reading in Zechariah last night in my single-column Books of the Bible, and I was struck by this statement from God about Jerusalem:

This is what the Lord Almighty says: “Now hear these words, ‘Let your hands be strong so that the temple may be built.’ This is also what the prophets said who were present when the foundation was laid for the house of the Lord Almighty. Before that time there were no wages for people or animals. People could not go about their business safely because of conflicts, since I had turned them all against each other. But now I will not deal with the remnant of this people as I did in the past,” declares the Lord Almighty.

[From Bible.Logos.com]

It seems to me that the long-standing deadlock in Congress, more obvious now only because the financial crisis has made it so economically dangerous, is a result of God’s turning our hearts against one another as Americans. Let me clarify that I think Zechariah is talking about something a bit different. The conflicts he mentions are probably more physically violent. I cite this text only to show that God can and does turn people against each other as a method of judgment. That seems to be what he has done in this country.

As I wrote in the latest What in the World!, citing Joseph Bottum in First Things, the basically Protestant consensus that used to hold America together has withered away. In 1965, The mainline Protestant denominations counted more than half of all Americans among their members. But now those denominations (according to Bottum—and I agree) have completely capitulated to the world around them, guilty of “routine genuflections toward the latest political causes, the feminizing of the clergy, . . . the substitution of leftist social action for Christian evangelizing, and the disappearance of biblical theology.”

In fact, says Bottum, “All the Mainline churches have become essentially the same church: their histories, their theologies, and even much of their practice lost to a uniform vision of social progress.”

Let’s not imagine that the Republicans are the righteous stalwarts standing against the mainline liberal antichrists. By God’s common grace, the Republican platform is, I think, closer to biblical views than the Democratic. But the party is still far from God. And the Democratic party is closer to God than the Republican in some of its emphases. My point in quoting Bottum is simply that whatever moral—and therefore political—consensus we had as a nation is now disintegrating. We’re turned against one another, and I have to see that as the providence of God.

Bible.Logos.Com

I’ve got to hand it to Logos. This is pretty cool. Search the Bible, read the Bible in paragraph format, check a lot of major versions. I’m awarding it some much-coveted space in my Firefox Bookmarks Toolbar!

It’s very fast, though, making me think that Logos is not really behind this effort. It could be a front for BibleWorks.

The Bitter Cup

I tried to track down the following classic quote from Spurgeon, and the best I could do was a reference deep in the recesses of the Internet to his sermon “Woe and Weal” on Micah 7:9.

It would be a very sharp and trying experience to me to think that I have an affliction which God never sent me, that the bitter cup was never filled by his hand, that my briars were never measured out by him, nor sent to me by his arrangement of their weight and quality. Oh, that were bitterness indeed! But, on the contrary, the prophet here sees the hand of God in all his trials, and I pray that you and I may do the same. May we see that our heavenly Father fills the cup with loving tenderness, and holds it out, and says, “Drink, my child; bitter as it is, it is a love-potion which is meant to do thee permanent good.” The discerning of the hand of God is a sweet lesson in the school of experience.

I can’t pretend to have had many bitter cups to drink in my life. God has mixed for me a very pleasant draught! But I am trying to prepare myself and my family with good theology for when trouble comes.

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