Scripture Notes: Tested or Tempted? (James 1)

In his New Testament letter, St. James makes a critical distinction between testing and temptation. Apparently some Christians of his day were getting confused, thinking that God was tempting them to commit sin. No way, James responds; God does not tempt anyone. God never deceives anyone or leads anyone into sin. God never wills us to do evil. When we are tempted, the problem is ourselves, our concupiscence (that tendency we all have toward sin), our disordered desires, our out-of-control passions. Sometimes the devil tempts us, too, nudging us toward something we know is wrong, making it look really good, prodding us to take just one more step (and then another and another) down a path we should not go. But the choice is ours, and God gives us the grace to resist temptations that come from ourselves and from our enemy.

While God does not tempt us to sin, He does test us at times, and He does so because He loves us. James tells us that God sends us trials, but He has a very good reason for this. We need to grow. We need to understand ourselves better. We need to strengthen our faith. All of this happens with God’s help of course, but it does not tend to happen when our lives are smooth sailing. It is then that we get complacent, flabby, lazy. Everything is going great, and we forget we need God. We forget we are supposed to be on the path to Heaven, and the world looks pretty good as it is.

So God wakes us up. He tests us, challenges us, sends us some difficulty to work through so that we discover how small and weak and sinful we are and then turn to Him, embrace His grace, and grow stronger by it. We learn how to endure, how to have patience, how to rely on God. We find out that we are not as independent as we thought we were; in fact, we are completely dependent upon Him. And when we work through these trials, these tests, with God’s help, they lead us to deeper faith, deeper hope, and deeper love and, as James says, to the “crown of life which God has promised to those who love Him.”

Tempting and testing, then, are fundamentally different. Temptation can lead us away from God, but only if we choose to give in to it. Testing can lead us closer and closer to God, but only if we understand what is happening and reach out to God in our need, relying on Him to give us the grace to pass the test and keep on strive for the crown of life.