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 is not the heart of the chapter, but it sets its stakes: there is a God who hears the wronged and will judge the oppressor.3
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).2
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).1
Tap any highlighted phrase to jump to the commentary that unpacks it.
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 not condemning wealth as such; Scripture knows godly rich men, from Abraham to Joseph of Arimathaea. He is condemning 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.3
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.2
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 not idleness or resignation; it 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: not a grim gritting of the teeth, but 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 not as cautionary tales but 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 not to those who escape hardship but to those who endure it. 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. But James points past Job's endurance to its 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 not a cold or arbitrary God but one who is very pitiful, and of tender mercy. This is the deepest ground of patience. We endure not because we are told to grit it out, but because we have seen how the Lord's stories end - and the God we are waiting for is full of compassion.2
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, not in the 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.
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 - not by the power of the elders, not by the oil itself, but in the authority and on the strength of the Lord to whom they pray. 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 does not turn it into a theory; he gives it as a gift to a hurting church - a way for the sick not to be left alone, but to be carried by the prayers of God's people to the Lord who alone can heal.3
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 not in the ritual but 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. Prayer is not a polite formality that changes nothing; the earnest prayer of a person right with God genuinely availeth - it accomplishes, it has effect, it moves things. This is not magic and not a formula that obligates God; it is the plain assurance that God hears and responds to the heartfelt prayer of His people, 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 - not a superhuman, but 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.2
Further study
- The Greek text of James 5 word by word, each term linked to its lexical entry - useful for makrothymeo (vv. 7-8, “be patient”), for Kyrios Sabaoth (v. 4, “the Lord of sabaoth”), and for euche tes pisteos (v. 15, “the prayer of faith”).
- James 5 ↔ Job · the Prophets · the Sermon on the MountIntertextual BibleTraces the threads tying James 5 to the rest of Scripture - the cry of withheld wages (v. 4) read beside the law's charge to pay the labourer (Deut. 24:14-15), the patience of Job (v. 11) beside the book of Job itself, the ban on oaths (v. 12) beside swear not at all (Matt. 5:34), and the closing rescue of the wanderer (vv. 19-20).
- James 5 - Translators' NotesNET BibleThe NET Bible's detailed footnotes on James 5 - the rhetoric of the woe against the rich (vv. 1-6), the title Lord of sabaoth (v. 4), the agricultural picture of the early and latter rain (v. 7), and the much-discussed instructions on calling the elders, anointing with oil, and the prayer of faith (vv. 14-15).
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.