Thank you, my dear friend, for your very good question, and I praise the Lord for your faith in and obedience to the Word of God! My take on James 5:14-15 is that this is the Word of God, and I would never want to be in the camp of those who claim that any portion of God’s Word is “irrelevant” today (2 Timothy 3:16). I would encourage you to continue to follow God’s Word, despite what the so-called “new age” thinkers might say. When you anoint with oil and pray, you are demonstrating your faith in God’s Word; and also, you are demonstrating your desire to hold fast to the precious promises of Scripture and to be obedient to the Lord, and this is a beautiful testimony to the world. 

I do want to point out that all healing is ultimately from God, whether accomplished through prayer alone, prayer and anointing with oil (or medications), prayer and surgery, or by prayer and the natural processes that God has given us…our immune and repair systems.  William MacDonald in his Bible commentary tells us: “God can and does heal. In a very real sense, all healing is divine. One of the names of God in the OT is Jehovah-Ropheka, “the Lord who heals you” (Ex. 15:26). We should acknowledge God in every case of healing.” In the NT, we see many instances of miraculous healing, accomplished in a variety of ways. So, let’s take a look at James 5:14-15, “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: 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.” You might notice first in this verse that the one who is sick is to “call for the elders of the church” who anoint with oil and pray over the person. I like the thought of the sick individual calling for the elders as I believe it expresses the person’s faith that according to the Word of God, this one is coming to the Lord to be healed. To me, this would appear to be the appropriate action for any tenacious illness in a Christian in an assembly. But I believe it would apply to that special circumstance where a believer in an assembly has sinned and is now experiencing an illness that the Lord has allowed in order to draw this person back. Perhaps another example would be found in 1 Corinthians 11:29-30, “For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body. For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep.” However, I’m not sure that I would limit the force of this Scripture to an illness brought about by a specific sin in a person’s life, though certainly that case is included in this section.

I think you’d agree that not all infirmity results directly from a specific sin that a person has committed, confessed or otherwise (see John 9:1-3 and 2 Corinthians 12:7-9). Now, we all realize that all sickness and death have their root cause in sin. Adam’s fall resulted in all the sadness, war, sickness and death that we observe around us. But the first example shows us an infirmity that does not arise from a specific sin in the person’s life. The second is an infirmity in the Apostle Paul’s life for which he prayed three times (not certain if oil was used), but he was not healed, showing that God has His own sovereign will. In Mark 6:13 we have the section of Scripture where the Lord Jesus sent out His disciples two by two to the villages in Galilee, and we read: “And they cast out many devils, and anointed with oil many that were sick, and healed them.” In this verse, we are not told what the source of the sicknesses were, but that oil was used, and many were healed. As to the use of oil, we know that in Bible times, oil was often used medicinally as we see in the account of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:34 where we read that he “…went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.” Going back to your example in the case of James 5, again, I believe we might be seeing a case of a believer who has sinned, and once the sin was confessed, the elders applied oil and prayed in order to restore the man from the infirmity laid upon him by the Lord, which apparently would not depart from the man until he publically repented and received the prayers of the saints. So, is oil necessary in all cases when we pray to help others? I would say that the prayers of faith with supplication by the saints is the key factor, with the application of the oil being a sign to all that we are in dependence on the Holy Spirit for the healing, according to the Lord’s will. I tell you this last as a caution that when someone is not healed, we cannot doubt God’s power or love or feel that our faith or that of the subject is not strong enough. Given the example in 2 Corinthians 12, we must realize that God may have a purpose in the illness that we do not see. I have been blind these past 35 years, and many times I have prayed in faith, and others of the household of faith have prayed for me, but the blindness has persisted. Still, looking back on how God changed my life through His Holy Spirit when I was saved, and how He has abundantly blessed me over the years, I believe my prayers have been answered beyond all I could ever have imagined, and hopefully this has been a good testimony to a sin-sick world.  (SF)  (646.2)