Tempted versus Tested
So this passage is saying that God will not tempt us. There are other passages saying that God will test us. How can those not be the same thing? Is allowing us to be tempted, not tempting in the first place? Does this make God an accessory to Temptation?
I guess to get this answer I have to go back to the beginning. It was not God's choice to allow sin into this word... it was ours. God being an ever-present God then could not escape being an accessory to anything. If God were not there, it would be the end of existence. The passages go on to tell us that temptation is only effective if it hits on a desire in our own self. Desires are not bad, but our actions based on them can be.
What I am getting out of this passage is that if we desire within ourselves things of God, there is no tempting then. It is only when the desires within us are not of God that we open ourself up to temptation. And those God uses that, he does not initiate or do the tempting. But it is in the tempting that we have to decide whether to turn that desire into sin, or not by our thoughts and actions.
Created over 2 years ago
