Biblion Bible Commentary
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Elijah, and Turning a Wanderer Back
James 5:17-20
17 Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed earnestly that it might not rain, and it didn’t rain on the earth for three years and six months. · WEB
The example of powerful prayer is prefaced by insisting the man was ordinary, and the letter stops without a farewell.
Verse 17 names Elijah and then does something unusual before saying anything about him: a man with a nature like ours. The qualification comes first because the example would otherwise prove the opposite of the point. A prophet who called down fire is not an encouragement to ordinary people unless the letter first establishes that he was one.
What is then recorded of him is prayer, twice, and rain — withheld, then given 1 Kings 17:1 1 Kings 18:42–45. The letter is not interested in the fire or the contest. It selects the least spectacular thing in the account, which is a man asking.
Verses 19 and 20 close the letter, and there is no farewell, no greeting, no benediction — it simply stops, as abruptly as it began.
The final instruction is the letter in miniature. Someone wanders from the truth, and someone else turns him back. Not an elder, not a teacher — the letter has already discouraged wanting that office James 3:1 — but anyone.
And the promise given to that person is the largest in the letter: he will save a soul from death and cover a multitude of sins. After five chapters insisting that faith without works is dead and that hearing without doing is self-deception, the last work described is going after someone who has drifted.
A letter this severe ends by handing its readers the job of retrieval rather than the job of judgment.
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