Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death. – James 1:13-15
Here’s the problem:
1. God cannot tempt. “Our own lust” is the thing that tempts.
2. God created everything. And “everything” includes “our own lust.”
3. Therefore God set in place the mechanism of our temptation.
Has he not then ordained our temptation? How is that practically different than his tempting us directly? “For will resist his will?”
For one thing, there is a mystery wherein, as John Piper says, “God disapproves of the moral nature of many things he has ordained to happen–like the crucifixion of his Son.” God had chosen to crucify Christ before he even created the world. Square One, Plan A.(see Acts 4:27-28) Evil has always been useful in the glorification of God, it seems.
But does the end justify the means, you will ask? Is it not evil to do evil so that good may result, by God’s own moral code? “God cannot be tempted” much less sin. He cannot do evil. If he does it, it’s not evil.
So how then do we explain his ordination of this lust of ours, which carries us away and entices us? I present an image that has helped me understand a mite of this, if it may help any other reader (or simply remind myself when I get hung up on the issue again in a few minutes). The image may be hinted at, I think, by the verses immediately following James 1:13-15.
Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. – James 1:16-17
Consider me standing near a light bulb and casting a shadow on the ground. Is the shadow from the light bulb? (Can it “be held responsible”?) In weak sense, yes – if it weren’t for the light from the bulb, no shadow would be distinguishable. Yet the light bulb only emits light, it doesn’t emit non-light. In fact, darkness is everything the light bulb doesn’t emit. The thing that is creating the shadow is my body, which is obstructing its rays. It makes little sense to attribute the darkness to the light.
God has created in us the capacity to experience the “not-God.” It is this absence of Him in a desire that twists it into dark lust (1 John 1:5, “God is light”). But when we choose to love the darkness (John 3:19), to gaze intently upon a shadow, he is not to blame for having “made it.” Evil, like shadow, is not something as much as it is the lack of something.
God has not tempted.
He is all light.
We ourselves have cast the shadows which we have chosen to worship.
Ben Taylor 