Temptation

Reading these passages

Two verses on this page give opposite instructions, and both are right.

James says Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Paul tells Timothy Flee also youthful lusts. One says stand and face it; the other says do not stay in the room. They are not addressing the same thing, and working out which is which turns out to be most of what this page is about.

James is talking about an adversary — something with intent, that can be opposed and will give way. Paul is talking about an appetite, which is inside the person and cannot be argued with. You cannot out-argue an appetite; standing your ground with one is simply prolonged exposure. The two verses divide the field between what is confronted and what is escaped, and getting them the wrong way round is a common and expensive mistake.

The verse that is not about hardship

1 Corinthians 10:13 is regularly quoted to people in grief, illness or disaster, usually in a paraphrase that does not appear in the text: that God will not give you more than you can handle.

What it says is: There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.

The subject is temptation, not suffering, and the difference matters. The verse promises that no enticement will be irresistible. It says nothing at all about the weight of circumstances, and Paul elsewhere describes himself as pressed above strength, in so many words — so he plainly did not hold the view the paraphrase attributes to him.

Second, what is promised is not a ceiling but a door. A way to escape renders ekbasis, which means the way out of a place — a mountain pass, the exit from a defile. It is not a reduction in pressure. It is a route, and a route has to be taken.

And the opening clause is the one that does the pastoral work. Such as is common to man — the Greek is anthropinos, simply human. Whatever it is, it is not unique, not a special disqualification, not evidence of being worse than other people. That is a plainer comfort than the version the paraphrase offers, and unlike the paraphrase it is actually there.

Where it comes from

James is careful about attribution in a way that closes off an easy excuse: Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man.

The Greek word behind tempted is peirazo, and it covers both testing and enticing — the same word does duty for a trial that proves something and a lure that ruins it. James has just used it in the first sense a few verses earlier, writing about trials producing endurance, and here he switches to the second and marks the switch by denying God any part in it.

Then the mechanism, and it is unflattering: But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Both verbs are from hunting and fishing. Drawn away is what a lure does to an animal out of cover; enticed is deleazo, from the word for bait. The picture is of something being caught, and what does the catching is described as belonging to the person: his own lust. No external agent is required for the machinery to work.

Watch and pray

The instruction Jesus gives in Gethsemane is given to men who are failing at it as he speaks: Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.

The second half is usually quoted as an excuse and was said as an observation. He is not condemning them; he had asked them to stay awake and they could not, and the sentence reads more like a diagnosis than a rebuke. The word for weak is asthenes, the ordinary word for physically frail — the same term used of the sick.

What is being recommended is preventative rather than heroic. That ye enter not into — the prayer is to avoid arriving at the situation, not to prevail once inside it. Which is the same logic as Timothy's instruction to flee, and the opposite of how the sentence about the willing spirit is normally deployed.

Peter supplies the other half of the posture, and it is alert rather than anxious: Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour. Note what the lion is doing. Not attacking — walking about, looking. The warning is about a search in progress, which is why the instruction is vigilance rather than defence.

Before it starts

The two Old Testament verses on this page are both about preparation, and both locate the work well before the moment of decision.

Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee. The verb is deliberate — hidden, stored, put somewhere for later. It describes something done in advance of needing it, by a person who is not currently under pressure and who expects to be.

And Proverbs states the principle in the language of civil engineering: Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life. Keep here is a guarding word — the term for a watchman on a wall. Issues translates a noun meaning outflowings or springs: the sources from which water runs. The heart is being described as a headwater, and the argument is about where to place your effort. You guard the spring, not the river, because by the time it is a river it is too wide to manage.

The verse for afterwards

One passage on this page is not about resisting anything. It is about what happens once the resisting has failed: If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Its presence here is the most practically useful thing on the page. Advice about temptation tends to stop at the moment of decision, as though the only two outcomes were victory and silence. This assumes the other outcome and supplies the procedure — which is short, and does not include penance, restitution or a waiting period.

The word pairing is worth noticing. Faithful and just, not faithful and merciful. Dikaios is the courtroom term, and the claim being made is not that God is lenient but that withholding forgiveness from a confessed sin would be an injustice. Whatever weight a reader gives that, it removes the question of whether one has been sufficiently sorry.

And Paul's instruction to be strong sits at the head of a passage about armour, which is the same logic looked at from the other side: Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might. Everything issued in the verses that follow is defensive except one item, and the equipment is described as something put on before the day rather than reached for during it — which is the point Psalm 119 made about hiding the word beforehand, in different vocabulary.

Tempted, and without sin

Hebrews makes a claim that has caused a great deal of argument: For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.

The difficulty is obvious once seen. If temptation begins, as James says, with being drawn away by one's own desire, what does it mean for someone without sin to be tempted at all? Christians have answered differently and the disagreement is old. Some hold the temptations were entirely external — real pressure applied from outside, with nothing inside answering it. Others hold that the capacity to be genuinely attracted was present without the consent that turns attraction into sin, on the grounds that a temptation nothing in you wants is not a temptation. A third position declines to specify, treating the mechanics as beyond reach and holding only to what the verse asserts.

What the verse is doing, whichever reading is taken, is establishing sympathy rather than explaining psychology. The phrase touched with the feeling of renders a single Greek verb meaning to suffer alongside. The argument is not that the high priest understands in principle. It is that he has been in the same position, and the writer uses that to justify the instruction in the next verse, which is to come and ask for help.