Temptation

Shortly before his arrest, Jesus warned his disciples to “Keep watching and praying, so that you do not come into temptation; the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” (Matthew 26:41) When he talked about the weakness of flesh, I do not believe he was talking about his own flesh so much as ours. He was warning us to avoid temptation, because there is great truth in the saying, “I can resist anything but temptation.” Paul makes that point in Romans 7:14-25, where he says that he wants to do what God says he should, but he finds himself doing the opposite.

I’m sure you remember the line from the Lord’s prayer: “And do not lead us into temptation.” (Matthew 6:13) Since James 1:13 assures us that God “does not tempt anyone,” let’s delve a little deeper. The meaning of the original Greek is closer to this: “do not allow us to enter into a situation in which we would be tempted to sin.” So it would be like praying, “do not let us be tempted.”

The 2^nd half of that line from the Lord’s prayer is “but deliver us from evil.” The Greek word translated “deliver” is rhuomai, which can mean “deliver,” but it can also mean “rescue,” “save,” “guard,” or “free.” In the original Greek, Jesus adds the definite article with the word for “evil,” giving it a meaning of “the evil one.” So he is telling us to pray that God would rescue us or guard us from the evil one—undoubtedly referring to Satan, because Satan is the one who tempts us to sin. Matthew 4:3 even refers to Satan as “the tempter.”

Temptation comes in many flavors. For Adam and Eve, it was the forbidden fruit and the possibility that they could “be like God.” For King David, temptation came in the form of a beautiful and naked, but married, Bathsheba. In 1 Corinthians 7:1-5, Paul warns married couples not to deprive each other of sex, “so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.”

In 1 Timothy 6:9-10, Paul warns us about a temptation that seems so common in our culture today:

But those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap, and many foolish and harmful desires which plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all sorts of evil, and some by longing for it have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.

For Jesus, temptation took a different form. Satan first tempted him to satisfy his hunger by turning stones into bread. As Luke tells it, the next temptation was power—“I will give You all this domain and its glory” (Luke 4:6). But the last temptation must have been the hardest of the three to resist, because it has been the downfall of so many—Satan appealed to Jesus’ pride: “And he brought Him into Jerusalem and had Him stand on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to Him, ‘If You are the Son of God, throw Yourself down from here.’ ” (Luke 4:9) In other words, here’s your chance to prove your greatness, to prove that you have God’s favor. Jesus of course declined.

Yet the hardest temptation of all for Jesus to resist must have been in Gethsemane, when he was tempted to save himself from the agony and humiliation that he was about to endure. Faced with the temptation to call upon his father in heaven and a host of angels to rescue him from that terrible ordeal, Jesus found the strength to resist by following the advice he had given his own disciples—he prayed.

That’s good advice for us.

And we have this assurance from Paul in 1 Corinthians 10:13: “No temptation has overtaken you except something common to mankind; and God is faithful, so He will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will provide the way of escape also, so that you will be able to endure it.”

When we are tempted to do something we know is wrong, two things are essential. First, we must want to resist temptation, for if we don’t want to resist we are unlikely to do the 2^nd thing—which is that we must pray for the strength to resist.

And if, like Paul, we nevertheless find ourselves doing what we don’t want to do, we need to repent and appeal to God’s grace, for in Christ there is grace sufficient to save us despite our weakness.