“Perhaps God intended hereby to teach us not to put that confidence in creatures, that are servants, which the power of the Creator, their Master and ours, will alone bear the weight of. Gehazi returns re infecta – without success, without the tidings of any sign of life in the child (2Ki 4:31): The child is not awaked, intimating, to the comfort of the mother, that its death was but a sleep, and that he expected that it would shortly be awaked. In the raising of dead souls to spiritual life servants can do no more by their own power than Gehazi here could; they lay the word, like the prophet’s staff, before their faces, but there is neither voice nor hearing, till Christ, by His Spirit, comes Himself. The letter alone kills; it is the Spirit that gives life. It is not prophesying upon dry bones that will put life into them, breath must come from heaven and breathe upon those slain.”
— Matthew Henry on 2 Kings 4