Lead Us Not, and James Says God Tempteth No Man

A man in a class put his hand up and asked a question that the room went completely quiet for.

He said: if I have to ask God not to lead me into it, does that mean He sometimes does?

Nobody laughed. Two people looked at the floor, which told me they had thought it and had never said it.

And I want to say straight away that it is a good question and not an irreverent one. It comes from reading carefully rather than from reading carelessly. A person who has never looked at that petition closely does not ask it.

But it matters enormously how it gets answered, because a person who quietly concludes that God is arranging their failures is going to pray very differently from a person who does not, and most of them never say the conclusion out loud to anybody.

What James rules out

James settles one half of this and he does it without leaving any room at all.

Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man. (James 1:13, King James Version)

Let no man say. That is about as direct as the New Testament gets. He is not describing a tendency, he is closing a door, and he closes it twice in one verse.

Neither tempteth he any man. Not some men. Not usually. Not except in special cases.

And he gives a reason, which is about God's nature rather than about His policy. God cannot be tempted with evil, so there is nothing in Him that the activity could come out of.

You are not being set up, and Scripture closes that door in the plainest sentence it has (James 1:13), and the Spirit is the one who takes a suspicion like that out of somebody who has been carrying it silently for years.

So what is the petition asking

Now the other half, because the petition is still there and it still says what it says.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. (Matthew 6:13)

Two clauses joined by but, and the second one interprets the first. It is one request in two halves rather than two separate ideas.

The Greek word behind temptation covers both trial and enticement, and the two are not the same thing. God does bring people through trials, and Scripture says so constantly. What James rules out is the enticement, the pull toward evil, and that is a different thing wearing the same English word.

So the petition is a person asking to be brought through rather than into. It is the prayer of somebody who knows their own weakness and is asking God not to let the road go through that particular valley if it does not have to.

That is a humble request rather than an accusation, and it assumes a God who can be asked about a route.

You have a God who can be asked about the road, and the petition assumes that rather than arguing for it (1 Corinthians 10:13). The Spirit is the one who makes a request like that ordinary rather than presumptuous.

You are asking to be brought through rather than accusing anybody of anything, and the second half of the petition is what the first half means (Matthew 6:13), and it is His Spirit who makes an honest request out of a verse a person had been reading as a suspicion.

And James, seven verses earlier and four verses later, says the thing that settles which direction gifts come from.

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. (James 1:17)

No variableness. No shadow of turning. He is describing somebody with no dark side and no alternating current, and he says it in the same chapter as the verse about temptation, on purpose.

Why the suspicion forms

I want to be fair to the man in my class and to everybody who has thought it, because the suspicion does not come from nowhere.

It usually comes from a pattern. A person notices that the same situation keeps arriving, at the same kind of moment, in the same kind of week, and after enough repetitions it starts to look arranged. And they are not wrong that it looks arranged. Patterns do look designed, which is what a pattern is.

It also comes from a certain kind of preaching about testing, where every hard thing is described as God's exam and the person's job is to pass it. Live under that framework long enough and every trap looks like a question paper with His name on the header.

And it comes, in some people, from a childhood where love and testing were fused together in a way that arrived long before any theology did.

You are not being examined, and there is no verse anywhere that turns a repeated weakness into a paper you are failing (James 1:17), and that part belongs to the Holy Spirit, who separates a pattern in a life from an intention in heaven.

And this belongs here plainly, because this category reaches people at the edge. If what keeps arriving is genuinely dangerous, to you or to anybody else, do not wait for the next time. Tell a doctor, a counselor, a sponsor, a pastor you trust, or call the 988 crisis line, in the United States. Going is strength.