James 5
James ends his letter the way he wrote the whole of it - bluntly, and with the poor squarely in view. He opens with a cry of judgment over the rich who have hoarded wealth and used it to crush the people beneath them: Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you (v. 1). It is the language of a prophet announcing a reckoning. The riches they trusted are already rotting, their hoarded garments are moth-eaten, their gold and silver corroded - and worst of all, the wages they withheld by fraud are crying out to heaven, where the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth (v. 4).
This opening sets the chapter's stakes: there is a God who hears the wronged and will judge the oppressor.
From the oppressor James turns to the oppressed, and the whole tone changes. To those who are suffering, who are waiting for justice that has not yet come, his word is patience: Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord (v. 7). He reaches for the steadiest image he knows - the farmer, who plants and then must wait through the seasons for the precious fruit of the earth, trusting the early and the latter rain.
Be ye also patient; stablish your hearts: for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh (v. 8). He points back to the prophets who suffered, and to Job, whose long endurance ended in the discovery that the Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy (v. 11). And he asks for plain truthfulness in the meantime: let your yea be yea; and your nay, nay (v. 12).
The letter closes on its great theme of prayer. Whatever the season - affliction, gladness, sickness, sin - the answer is to bring it to God. Is any among you afflicted? let him pray… Is any sick among you? 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 (vv. 13-14). The promise attached is rich and tender: the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him (v. 15).
Then comes the call to confess to one another and pray for one another, with the assurance that the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much (v. 16) - proven by Elias, an ordinary man whose prayer shut and opened the heavens. And the very last word is mercy: he which converteth the sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death (v. 20).
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People in this chapter
James 5:1-6Weep and Howl, Ye Rich Men
1Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. 2Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. 3Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. 4Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth. 5Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter. 6Ye have condemned and killed the just; and he doth not resist you.
James opens his last movement with a blast that belongs to the great prophets: Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you (v. 1). The phrase go to now is an old way of saying “come now, pay attention” - he is seizing the collar of the comfortable to make them hear. And the word he chooses is not merely weep but howl, a raw, animal wailing, the sound of those who suddenly see catastrophe bearing down.
It is worth being clear about whom he addresses. James is in the prophetic tradition: Scripture knows godly rich men, from Abraham to Joseph of Arimathaea. His condemnation lands on a particular kind of rich man - the one who hoards while others go hungry, who has made money his security and his god, and who, as the next verses will show, has gotten rich by defrauding the people who worked for him. To such a person the riches that felt like a fortress are about to become a horror.
The prophets spoke this way to shake the secure out of their false peace; James does the same. Before he comforts the suffering, he must warn the comfortable that the miseries they cannot imagine are already on the way.
James then shows how worthless the hoard already is: Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire (vv. 2-3). He names the three great forms of ancient wealth - stored goods, fine clothing, precious metal - and shows each one decaying in the owner's grip. Grain rots; the wardrobe of expensive robes feeds the moth; even gold and silver, which do not truly rust, are pictured as corroded, eaten away.
The point is that wealth hoarded is wealth wasted; piled up and never used for good, it simply spoils. But James presses further with a chilling image: the very corrosion will be a witness against you. The rust that should have warned them - you are storing what you never needed while others starved - will stand up in the day of judgment as evidence, and then eat your flesh as it were fire. The treasure they trusted becomes the thing that testifies against them and consumes them.
And the closing line is heavy with irony: Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. They imagined they were securing their future; in truth they were only stockpiling the case that will be read out against them at the end.
Now James names the specific sin behind the woe, and it is the most damning charge in the chapter: Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth (v. 4). The wealth was not merely hoarded; it was stolen. These rich men withheld the wages of the day-labourers who harvested their fields - kept back by fraud the pay that those workers needed that very day to buy bread.
The law of God had guarded against exactly this: at his day thou shalt give him his hire… for he is poor, and setteth his heart upon it: lest he cry against thee unto the LORD, and it be sin unto thee (Deut. 24:15). James says it has happened: the wages crieth, and the cries of the reapers have entered into the ears of God. The defrauded poor had no court that would hear them, no power to force the matter - but they had a hearing in heaven.
James then completes the picture of these men: Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter (v. 5). While their workers went without, they fattened themselves - like cattle gorging, all unaware, on the very day they are to be slaughtered. Ye have condemned and killed the just; and he doth not resist you (v. 6): the powerless righteous, unable to fight back, were ground down to death.
It is a portrait of injustice so complete it seems to go unanswered - until you remember whose ears those cries have entered.
And the Lord Jesus made this listening God the very point of His teaching on prayer: shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him…? I tell you that he will avenge them speedily (Luke 18:7-8). The justice the defrauded poor long for is not foreign to Christ; it is the justice He embodies and will execute. He stood, in His own life, with the powerless, pronouncing woe on those who devour widows' houses (Matt. 23:14) and blessing instead the poor and the mourning.
The same Lord who hears the reaper's cry here is the One who will return as Judge to set every account straight - so that the oppressed who seem to have no advocate have, in fact, the surest advocate of all. To wrong the weak is never to get away with it; their cry has already entered the ears of the Lord of hosts, and He does not forget.
Hear verse 4. Your cry has entered the ears of the Lord of sabaoth. He is not indifferent, and He is not weak. You can bring the injustice to Him and leave it in hands strong enough to hold it. Second, from the side of the rich: where do you hold power over someone - an employee, a contractor, a person who depends on you, someone who cannot easily push back? The sin James names is not dramatic villainy; it is the small fraud of the powerful, the wage kept back, the corner cut against someone who cannot resist.
This week, pay what you owe promptly and fully. Be scrupulous with the person who has no leverage over you. Treat the people beneath you on the ladder exactly as you would if the Lord of hosts were watching the transaction - because, James says, He is.
James 5:7-12Be Patient Unto the Coming of the Lord
7Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain. 8Be ye also patient; stablish your hearts: for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh. 9Grudge not one against another, brethren, lest ye be condemned: behold, the judge standeth before the door. 10Take, my brethren, the prophets, who have spoken in the name of the Lord, for an example of suffering affliction, and of patience. 11Behold, we count them happy which endure. Ye have heard of the patience of Job, and have seen the end of the Lord; that the Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy. 12But above all things, my brethren, swear not, neither by heaven, neither by the earth, neither by any other oath: but let your yea be yea; and your nay, nay; lest ye fall into condemnation.
Having thundered at the oppressor, James turns with great gentleness to the oppressed, and his word is one syllable longer than they want it to be: Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord (v. 7). The therefore ties it to what came before. Precisely because the Lord of sabaoth has heard the cry and judgment is sure, the wronged need not avenge themselves or collapse in despair; they can wait. And to show what that waiting looks like, James reaches for the farmer: Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain. The image is exactly chosen.
The farmer cannot hurry the harvest. He has done his work - he has sown - and now everything depends on rains he cannot summon and a growth he cannot force. So he waits, through the early rain that softens the ground at planting and the latter rain that swells the grain before harvest. His patience is confident waiting, grounded in the certainty that the seasons will turn and the precious fruit will come. That is the patience James asks of the suffering believer: the settled trust of one who knows the harvest is sure because the Lord who promised it is faithful.
James presses the exhortation home and adds a reason: Be ye also patient; stablish your hearts: for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh (v. 8). The phrase stablish your hearts means to make them firm, to set them on a steady footing, the way a builder braces a structure so it will not be shaken. Suffering and delay loosen the heart; they make it waver, doubt, drift toward bitterness or despair. James says: brace yourself, and brace yourself on this - the coming of the Lord draweth nigh. Then comes a sharp and practical word, easy to overlook: Grudge not one against another, brethren, lest ye be condemned: behold, the judge standeth before the door (v. 9).
It is a revealing turn. Pressure from outside has a way of curdling into friction inside; people who are suffering together start to chafe against one another, to grumble and assign blame. James warns the waiting community not to turn on itself. And the reason is the same one that fuels their patience: the Judge is near - standeth before the door, as close as someone about to knock. The nearness of the Lord cuts two ways at once.
It is the comfort that steadies the wronged, and it is the warning that silences the grumbler, for the same Lord who will vindicate the oppressed will also call the impatient to account.
James does not leave patience as an abstraction; he gives it faces. First the prophets: Take, my brethren, the prophets, who have spoken in the name of the Lord, for an example of suffering affliction, and of patience (v. 10). The men who spoke most faithfully for God were not spared suffering; they endured rejection, persecution, and long delay, and they are held up as patterns to follow. Then James gathers the principle into a single sentence: Behold, we count them happy which endure (v. 11).
The blessed life, the truly happy one, belongs to those who endure hardship. And for his supreme example he names Job: Ye have heard of the patience of Job, and have seen the end of the Lord; that the Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy. Job is the great case study - a righteous man stripped of everything, who suffered without understanding why and yet did not let go of God. James points to the outcome: the end of the Lord. Look how the story finished, he says.
The Lord brought Job through to restoration, and the whole ordeal revealed one who is very pitiful, and of tender mercy. This is the deepest ground of patience. We endure because we have seen how the Lord's stories end - and the God we are waiting for is full of compassion.
James caps this section with a command he marks as weighty: But above all things, my brethren, swear not, neither by heaven, neither by the earth, neither by any other oath: but let your yea be yea; and your nay, nay; lest ye fall into condemnation (v. 12). At first it seems a sudden change of subject, but it belongs here. People under pressure are tempted to prop up their words - to swear by heaven, by the earth, by anything - in order to be believed, or to weasel out of a plain commitment with an oath that technically does not bind.
James cuts through all of it. The Christian's word should not need reinforcement; a simple yes should mean yes and a simple no should mean no. This echoes the teaching of Jesus almost exactly: Swear not at all… let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil (Matt. 5:34-37). The point is not chiefly about courtroom oaths but about the integrity of ordinary speech.
A person of real faith is reliable without elaborate guarantees, because the truthfulness is in the character, with no need for any special formula. In a world that hedges, qualifies, and dresses up its promises to make them sound trustworthy, the believer is to be the rare person whose plain word can simply be trusted.
The writer to the Hebrews sets it in the very key James uses for the patient farmer: For yet a little while, and he that shall come will come, and will not tarry (Heb. 10:37). And the last page of Scripture seals it with His own voice: Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus (Rev. 22:20). This is why the suffering can wait, and why the wronged need not avenge themselves - the One who is coming is the One who will set every wrong right.
The same Lord whose ears the reaper's cry entered (v. 4) is the Judge who now standeth before the door, and His coming is the answer to both the oppressed and the oppressor. James points to the certainty of it and bids the believer brace the heart upon it. To live unto the coming of the Lord is to live as the husbandman waits for harvest - sure that the season will turn, sure that the One who promised will not tarry, and so able to endure the long stretch in between without losing heart.
The temptation in all of them is either to force the harvest before its time or to give up on it entirely. James offers a third way: keep doing the farmer's work - keep sowing, keep tending, keep praying - and then wait, with a long temper, trusting the One who sends the early and latter rain. And notice the small, sharp warning he tucks in: grudge not one against another (v. 9). When you are under strain, the people closest to you tend to catch the overflow.
So this week, name the one thing you are most impatiently waiting on, and consciously hand it back to the Lord whose coming draweth nigh - then guard your tongue with the people around you, who are not the cause of the wait and should not bear the brunt of it.
James 5:13-20The Prayer of Faith Shall Save the Sick
13Is any among you afflicted? let him pray. Is any merry? let him sing psalms. 14Is any sick among you? 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 shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him. 16Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. 17Elias was a man subject to like passions as we are, and he prayed earnestly that it might not rain: and it rained not on the earth by the space of three years and six months. 18And he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth her fruit. 19Brethren, if any of you do err from the truth, and one convert him; 20Let him know, that he which converteth the sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death, and shall hide a multitude of sins.
James ends his letter where a faithful life finally rests - in prayer - and he begins by showing that there is no season of life left outside it: Is any among you afflicted? let him pray. Is any merry? let him sing psalms (v. 13). Two opposite states, and prayer is the answer to both. In affliction, the believer does not merely endure or complain; he prays, carrying the trouble straight to God. In gladness, he does not simply enjoy the moment and forget its Giver; he sings psalms, turning the joy back to God in praise.
Between these two poles - suffering and joy - the whole of life is covered, and James says every part of it is to be lived God-ward. This is the quiet remedy for two opposite dangers. Trouble tempts us to turn away from God in bitterness; James says turn toward Him in prayer. Happiness tempts us to forget God in self-sufficiency; James says turn toward Him in song. Either way, the instinct of faith is the same: bring it to the Lord.
Whatever the day holds, there is a form of prayer to meet it - and a heart shaped by this counsel is never left with nowhere to go.
James turns to the hardest of afflictions - sickness - and gives the church a clear pattern: Is any sick among you? 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 (v. 14). Notice each part exactly as he gives it. The sick person calls - the first move is his, an act of humble asking rather than suffering alone in silence.
He calls for the elders of the church, the recognized spiritual leaders of the congregation, so that the whole community's care gathers around him. They pray over him - prayer is the center of the whole act. And they anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. The oil is named plainly and without elaboration; what James stresses is that everything is done in the name of the Lord - in the authority and on the strength of the Lord to whom they pray, with no weight placed on the elders or the oil themselves.
James lays out the practice with great simplicity and lets it stand: the sick one calls, the elders come, they pray over him, they anoint him in the Lord's name. He gives it as a gift to a hurting church - a way for the sick to be carried by the prayers of God's people to the Lord who alone can heal.
The promise James attaches to this prayer is rich, and then he widens it to the whole church: And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him. Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed (vv. 15-16). The prayer that heals is the prayer of faith - trust placed in the Lord who raises up.
And James joins healing to forgiveness without forcing them into a single mold: if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven. Sometimes sickness and sin are tangled together; always the Lord who heals the body is the One who forgives the soul, and prayer opens the way to both. Then comes a striking command for the community: confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another. Sin festers in secrecy and isolation; brought into the light before a trusted brother or sister, and surrounded by prayer, it loses its grip, and the person is restored - that ye may be healed. James caps it with one of the great sentences on prayer in all of Scripture: The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. The earnest prayer of a person right with God genuinely availeth - it accomplishes, it has effect, it moves things.
This is the plain assurance that God hears and responds to the heartfelt prayer of His people, offered in genuine trust to a God who acts rather than a formula that obliges Him, so that such prayer is never wasted breath.
James proves his claim with the homeliest possible example - and then ends the letter on an act of mercy. The example is Elijah: Elias was a man subject to like passions as we are, and he prayed earnestly that it might not rain: and it rained not on the earth by the space of three years and six months. And he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth her fruit (vv. 17-18).
James is careful to underline the point that makes it useful to us: Elijah was a man subject to like passions as we are - an ordinary person with the same fears and weaknesses we have. Yet his prayer shut the heavens for three and a half years, and his prayer opened them again. The power was never in Elijah; it was in the God who heard him. And that is exactly the encouragement - the same God hears the prayers of ordinary believers still.
Then the letter closes, with no formal farewell, on a final charge of love: Brethren, if any of you do err from the truth, and one convert him; Let him know, that he which converteth the sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death, and shall hide a multitude of sins (vv. 19-20). The last picture James leaves is of someone gone astray and someone else who goes after them and brings them back.
To turn a wanderer back to the truth, he says, is to save a soul from death - the highest work there is. The letter that began by warning the proud ends by sending the church out after the lost.
He went about healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease (Matt. 4:23), and the lifting of the sick was so much His signature that he took her by the hand, and lifted her up; and immediately the fever left her (Mark 1:31). The same Lord whom James tells the sick to call upon is the One who walked among the sick and raised them. And His power to forgive is not separate from His power to heal; both flow from the one Lord to whom the elders pray.
This is why James can bind the two together so naturally - the One who answers the prayer of faith is the Lord who has authority over both the body and the soul. The text holds out the Lord's gracious answer to faith without reducing it to a guaranteed formula; it does not promise that He always heals in the way we ask, nor explain away the mystery of when and how He acts. It simply directs the afflicted to bring their need to the One who can meet it - the Lord who saves, raises, and forgives.
When a believer turns a wanderer back to the truth, he is doing in small what the Good Shepherd does in full: pursuing the straying, rejoicing over the found. The Lord Himself made this the closing charge to Peter - when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren (Luke 22:32) - and Jude echoes it: others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire (Jude 23). To hide a multitude of sins is not to cover them up or excuse them; it is to bring them where they are forgiven and gone, swallowed up in the mercy of God.
So the letter that opened by confronting the proud closes by sending the church out after the lost - for the Lord who has promised to come again is, until that day, still seeking the wanderer through the loving pursuit of His people.
So take James's counsel into the texture of an ordinary week. He gives the whole map in one verse: Is any among you afflicted? let him pray. Is any merry? let him sing psalms (v. 13). When trouble hits, pray. When something good lands, thank God out loud. And do not pray alone where you do not have to: James says confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another (v. 16).
Pick one trusted person and let them carry something with you in prayer this week - the sin you keep fighting in secret, the affliction you have been hiding. Then look around for the one who has erred from the truth (v. 19), and go after them, gently, the way you would want someone to come after you. The two great works of this chapter are to pray and to seek the wanderer - and neither one requires you to be anything more than a person, like Elijah, who will simply call on the Lord.
Where this echoes in Scripture
Weep and Howl, Ye Rich Men
- Deuteronomy 24:14-15at his day thou shalt give him his hire... lest he cry against thee unto the LORD, and it be sin unto thee.The very law broken in verse 4 - the labourer's wages must be paid the same day, lest his cry rise to God.
- Luke 18:7-8shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him... I tell you that he will avenge them speedily.The God who hears the cry of verse 4 - Christ's own promise that the cry of the wronged will be answered.
- Genesis 4:10the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground.The same truth as verse 4 - the wrong done to the powerless cries out to God of its own accord.
- Luke 12:20-21Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee... So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.The folly of verses 2-3 - treasure heaped up for oneself the very moment before judgment falls.
- Isaiah 5:9Of a truth many houses shall be desolate, even great and fair, without inhabitant.The prophetic woe behind verses 1-6 - judgment announced over those who pile up houses and lands at others' expense.
Be Patient Unto the Coming of the Lord
- Hebrews 10:37For yet a little while, and he that shall come will come, and will not tarry.The hope that anchors verses 7-8 - the certain coming of the Lord that makes patient waiting possible.
- Matthew 5:34-37Swear not at all... let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay.The teaching of Jesus behind verse 12 - the plain truthful word that needs no oath to prop it up.
- Job 42:10-12the LORD turned the captivity of Job... So the LORD blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning.The “end of the Lord” James points to in verse 11 - how Job's endurance was met by God's mercy.
- Galatians 6:9let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.The farmer's patience of verse 7 - the harvest comes in its season to those who do not give up.
- Revelation 22:20Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.The nearness of the Lord in verses 8-9 - Scripture's closing word on the coming the suffering await.
The Prayer of Faith Shall Save the Sick
- Matthew 9:2-6thy sins be forgiven thee... Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house.Healing and forgiveness joined in one act (vv. 15-16) - the Lord who has power over both body and soul.
- 1 Kings 17:1As the LORD God of Israel liveth... there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.The prayer of Elias in verses 17-18 - an ordinary man whose petition shut the heavens.
- Luke 15:4-7go after that which is lost, until he find it... joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth.The pursuit of the wanderer in verses 19-20 - the Shepherd's own heart for the one who has strayed.
- 1 John 5:14-15if we ask any thing according to his will, he heareth us... we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him.The confidence behind the prayer of faith (v. 15) - the assurance that the Lord hears the prayer of His people.
- Galatians 6:1if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness.The work of verses 19-20 - gently restoring the one who has wandered from the truth.