Let no man, being tempted, say, I am tempted of God. For God cannot be tempted by evil things, and himself tempts no one.
Verse 13 turns a corner: James has been speaking of trials that come from outside, and now he deals with the pull toward evil. He shuts down the excuse people reach for first — that God is behind it.
One word covers two experiences. One writer sets the earlier verses of the chapter against this one:
The Apostle passes on to warn us of another character of trial. He has been speaking of the trial of faith that comes from circumstances outside (verses 2, 3). Now he warns us not to confuse this kind of trial with the trials that come from the flesh within. God can try us with outward circumstances, but God cannot be tempted with evil, and He does not tempt anyone to do evil.
Another writer contrasts this use of the word with its use elsewhere in Scripture:
Temptations elsewhere mean trials, not inward pulls toward evil... Here, on the other hand, we find the common sense of temptation. Sadly, the fact that it is common shows where people are. They have little to do with God and much in common with the world.
The reason is not that God keeps away from evil. His nature makes evil impossible for Him. One writer draws this from the picture of God as light:
Light cannot change, and God cannot be corrupted or stained. No moral poison can come into His moral nature. No evil, no sin can ever originate or be in Him. What He is in moral nature and character He has always been and must always be. He cannot be deceived; He "cannot be tempted with evil."
This belongs with a short list of things Scripture says God cannot do:
While it is clear there can be no limit to His power, we know He is governed by His love, and, in the area of moral truth, there are certain things He cannot do. "He cannot deny Himself" (2 Timothy 2:13). "God cannot be tempted with evil" (James 1:13). "God is not unrighteous" (Hebrews 6:10).
Genesis says God tested Abraham, which sounds like a flat contradiction until the two senses are kept apart:
Yet we are also told in the same Scriptures that God tested Abraham when He told him to offer up Isaac (Genesis 22:1). This must have been a different kind of temptation from the one James speaks of. It was certainly not an enticement to do evil. It could not have been. It is as impossible for God to tempt a man that way as it is for Him to lie. It was a testing of what was in Abraham. His faith was put into the crucible, and it came out, as we know, as gold tried by the fire.
The next verse locates the real culprit. One writer separates what God permits from what a person supplies:
The devil tempts us with evil. But he finds in us what he counts on as ready to yield. In fact, anyone is tempted when he is drawn away and enticed by his own lust. This is the only thing that makes him accessible. God is over all in permitting the outward pull, but the inward pull comes from man himself. There he is master of himself, and so responsible for the outcome always being against him.
Yet even the evil we meet is not outside God's control:
It is impossible for Him to tempt anyone with evil. But He may permit His people to be tempted with evil, and He knows well how to overrule even that for their ultimate good.
Why does James say this at all? Because when we fail, we look for somewhere to put the blame. One writer treats that move as no small fault:
There is no need for a child of God to fail, nor does God in any way tempt to evil. On the contrary, the one who has found Christ and yet fails by sinning is always without excuse. To allow the thought that God's providence has anything to do with this is little short of blasphemy. Even if we have gone wrong, let us beware of adding to it by throwing it on God and excusing ourselves at His cost.
The distinction also guards how we speak of the Lord:
The first of these passages speaks of temptation or trial coming from outside; the second, of desire or lust within. Our Lord faced the first kind throughout His whole life. He was absolutely incapable of the second.
- Two words in one. Trial comes from outside and can be counted joy. Enticement to evil comes from within. One English word, two different things.
- Two natures. Evil cannot reach God, because of what He is. It reaches us, because of what we still carry within.
- Two sources. God may permit the testing. The lust that answers it is ours, and that is where responsibility sits.
- Two responses. The excuse throws the fault on God. Faith owns the fault and leaves God's character untouched.
- Two hearts. In us the temptation finds something ready to yield. In Christ it found nothing — He knew every outward trial and none of the inward.
But every one is tempted, drawn away, and enticed by his own lust;
James traces temptation back to its starting point. The pull comes from inside the person, not from God. So what is this "desire" that drags a person away? And if it starts inside us, who is to blame?
James has already written about trials in the opening verses. Now the source of the trial changes.
He has been speaking of the trial of faith that comes from circumstances outside us (verses 2, 3). Now he warns us not to confuse that kind of trial with the trials that come from the flesh within. God can try us with outward circumstances, but God cannot be tempted with evil, and He tempts no one to do evil. We, though, can be tempted by evil through lust within, and so be enticed into doing evil. Judas was enticed by the lust for money in his heart. He fell into the devil's temptation and satisfied that lust by betraying the Lord.
The word behind "lust" is the same word the Bible uses for "desire." What makes it good or evil is what it reaches for.
"Desire" and "lust" are really the same word... The thing longed for is what gives the feeling its character. If the thing craved is good in God's sight, then it is a holy desire. The Lord Himself uses this same word when He says to His disciples, "I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer." (Luke 22:15.) But when the thing longed for is evil, then the desire for it is "lust." ... "Lust," as James teaches, starts in ourselves (chapter 1:14), but holy "desire" is the fruit of the Spirit of God working in the believer.
The verse before rules out one excuse: God. This verse rules out the other: our circumstances.
The real root of all temptation lies within ourselves, in our own lusts. We may blame the enticing thing which from without was presented to us, but the trouble really lies in the desires of the flesh within.
Something offers itself from outside; something inside answers. That inner answer is what makes a person reachable at all.
The tempter does not throw suggestions at random. He fits them to what is already there.
If Satan were to suggest eating a handful of mud and dirt, would anyone be inclined to do it? If he succeeds in touching us, it is because there is a desire in the sinful nature to which he adapts himself. If we are full of Christ, he will not succeed. But if the suggestion wakes up in our hearts, sin wakes up into active desire, even though we may resist it as we should. If we look to Christ, we shall be victorious.
Temptation and hardship do not feel the same.
I know too well that when Satan tempts us there is an echo inside, an answer there. Instead of being suffering to us, it is pleasure.
If temptation of this kind needs an inward desire to work on, then it could not touch Christ.
The Lord was tempted in every way as we are, yet He could not be tempted like this. It would have denied and destroyed His moral glory... He did not have, and could not have, such evil temptations from a corrupt nature, because His nature was holy through and through. There was no lust of His own to draw Him away or attract Him. So He always rejected evil suggestions from outside with indignation.
Paul says elsewhere that sin produces lust; James says lust produces sin. Writers treat these as two angles, not a clash.
The difference between these two declarations is this: Paul keeps to the spiritual principles, while James looks at their effects. The one completes the other. The sin which is in the nature produces the lust (Rom. 7); and the lust produces the sin in the conduct of the man. (James 1.)
That leaves one place to look for strength.
No force of temptation would be enough to upset or draw away a soul that was finding its strength in God Himself. So a person is really "tempted" — that is, the temptation succeeds with him — when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. What exposes him to the evil is in himself, and not in his surroundings. A soul that fully knows its own helplessness and rests in God for help cannot be broken by any attack. Self-confidence, then, in some form, is the secret of all failure — the root of every sin we actually commit.
- Two words, one spelling. One word covers two things: trials God sends and enticements He never sends. This verse is the second kind — temptation from the flesh within.
- Desire named by its object. The word means longing. What it reaches for decides whether it is holy desire or lust.
- The hook needs a mouth. Bait from outside only works because something inside is ready to answer. That answer is what makes a person responsible.
- One exception. Christ had no lust of His own to draw Him away, so this verse describes every man but Him.
- Break it at the root. Judge the desire and the sin stops there. A soul that rests in God, not in itself, cannot be reached.
then lust, having conceived, gives birth to sin; but sin fully completed brings forth death.
James pictures sin as a family line: desire is a mother, and the child she bears grows up to have a child of its own. So who is to blame for that line, and where does it end?
The chain starts inside a person, not in the circumstances around them.
When we sin we tend to lay a great deal of the blame on our circumstances, or at least on things outside us. If only we are honest before God, we have no one and nothing to blame but ourselves. How important it is to be honest before God and judge ourselves rightly in His presence! That is the high road to recovery of soul. It will also help us to judge and refuse the lusts of our hearts, and so nip sin in the bud. Lust is the mother of sin. If it works it brings forth sin, and sin carried to completion brings forth death.
Elsewhere Paul puts the order the other way around. Commentators treat the two as fitting together rather than clashing.
Paul said the opposite in the Letter to the Romans (Rom. 7:8) — it is sin which produces every kind of lust. The difference is this: Paul keeps to the spiritual principles, while James looks at their effects. Each one completes the other. The sin that is in the nature produces the lust (Rom. 7); and the lust produces the sin in a man's conduct (James 1).
Because James starts his account at the birth of sin, some argue that desire itself is innocent. One writer asks where desire comes from.
Where does it come from? It is the fruit of the sinful nature: "sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness." Those who rest on the fruits in James find no sin until it has conceived and brought forth. Those who go to the root with the word of God know that there is sin in the flesh. If Satan were to suggest eating a handful of mud and dirt, would anyone be inclined to do it? If he succeeds in touching us, it is because there is a desire in the sinful nature to which he adapts himself.
Jesus was tempted, but not in this way. The process here needs something inside the person for the lure to catch on.
The Lord was tempted in all points in a similar way. But He could not be tempted like this. It would have denied and destroyed His moral glory, and it would have frustrated God's purpose in saving us to His glory... He had not and could not have such evil temptations from a corrupt nature, because His was expressly holy. There was no lust of His own to draw Him away or allure Him. So He uniformly rejected evil suggestion from outside with indignation.
One writer reads David's fall as this verse acted out step by step, in a man who had every reason to know better.
Had David always walked in the presence of the Lord he would have heeded the warning of His law. What a warning there is here for all believers! The flesh is the same today as it ever was; it does not change. We are told to "make no provision for the flesh" (Rom. 13:14). Put in other words, this means: do not feed the flesh by indulging it... "I have made a covenant with my eyes; how then could I gaze at a virgin?" said Job (Job 31:1). David knew no such covenant. He looks where he should not have looked, and sin soon follows.
One writer takes the verse's last word further than the grave.
You commit sin. "And sin when it is fully grown brings forth death" (James 1:15). This is more than the death of the body. It is eternal death in the lake of fire.
Since the sequence completes itself, the only safe place to act is before conception.
Whether Satan or men tempt him, he himself is responsible for yielding to it. And once lust is indulged, it conceives and brings forth sin; then of course sin results in death. So judging the root of self-indulgence is the one way for the child of God to meet this: the temptation is to be refused.
Waiting until later is not an option, because the later stages carry their own momentum.
One sin leads to another. We cannot stop just when we choose in the path of sin. As one has said, "A man cannot stop his boat at will in the strong currents just above Niagara, though he might have avoided them altogether."
- Mother — Desire is not a bystander; it is the parent. Blaming your circumstances hides the real culprit.
- Child — The birth is sin in conduct. James traces the effects; Paul traces the source, and the two accounts complete each other.
- Bloodline — The lure only catches because something in our nature answers it. In Christ there was nothing to answer it, so the chain never started.
- Grandchild — Death is the end of the line, and some read it as reaching past the grave.
- Break it — Refuse the temptation and judge the root early. Further down, as David found, you cannot stop the boat where you please.