Objection: James Said That the Prayer of Faith Would SAVE the Sick, Not HEAL the Sick

This objection seems ridiculous, because right after James said this, he said, “And the Lord shall raise him up” (James 5:15).   So the sick person would obviously be cured of his sickness.  What is there to debate?

The objector’s answer is that the use of the word SAVE (Greek sozo) rather than the more specific word HEAL (iaomai) proves that James was talking about soulish sicknesses, not physical sicknesses.  He may also try to convince you that the word for sick in James 5:14, asthenia, CAN be used to denote mere weakness (which IS a true statement, by the way) and therefore James is just talking about someone who feels weak, not someone who must have a disease.  Furthermore, he could pile on the fact that the Greek word for sick (kamno) in James 5:15 means faint or weary in the only 2 other places it appears in the Bible.  So perhaps we can’t dismiss this quite as easily as we first thought, but we still can disprove this objection.

For starters, the Greek word sozo refers both to salvation in general and physical healing – see the topic Saved! for proof of this.

Would any Bible scholar seriously argue that a sinner can have hands laid on him by the elders in order to be saved from hell?  If you believe that saved only means saved in the traditional sense, you would have to go along with that.

Being weary or faint is certainly a symptom of many physical illnesses, so this doesn’t disprove that a physical illness is involved.

If you were suffering from a soulish problem only, you could just GO to the elders of the church – you would not have to summon them to come to you.  It would not make a lot of sense to say that the Lord would “raise you up” from a soulish sickness.  When James says that the sick will be raised, the Greek word is egeiro, which also appears in Matthew 8:14-15 and Mark 1:30-31 where Peter’s mother-in-law arose (Matthew) and when Jesus raised up Peter’s mother-in-law (Mark).  It refers to raising the dead in Matthew 10:7-8 and Matthew 11:4-5.  It is the word Jesus used when He told the paralytic to “Arise, take up your bed and walk” (Mark 2:2-12).  The word indicates something or someone being RAISED, which includes Jesus being raised from the dead.  I could cite many other examples.  So this is definitely a word used to describe PHYSICAL raising up, not some kind of internal improvement from a “soulish” sickness or weakness.