(Genesis 22:1-19; James 1:12-18)
I imagine you’re all familiar with the sort of mock awards that label people most likely to do this or that. You know, the section in the high school yearbook that picks the boy and girl most likely to succeed, and then goes on to such things as “Most Likely to Host a TV Game Show.” Well, in my class at Hope, if our senior yearbook had had “Most Likely to Win a Nobel Prize,” there’s no doubt who would have won it: Richard Bouwens. Richard was, to put it mildly, an interesting character. He was sweet-natured and gentle, but completely clueless socially; he had at once the most brilliant and the most narrowly focused mind of anyone I’ve ever met, and while he probably understood physics and its underlying math as well as any of our professors, the rest of his subjects were a mystery to him, as were most of the people he studied them with.
I remember a table full of us helping him set his schedule one semester, and his complete bewilderment at all these subjects, what they were and why he needed to take them; I also remember one of my roommates talking about taking Richard for Sunday dinner at a friend’s house one time and spending the whole meal translating, Richard to English and back again. If you’ve heard the stories about Einstein getting lost walking to work from his house in Princeton, when he could see the campus from his front step—that’s Richard.
As I said, though, he was kind and likeable, and undeniably brilliant in his field, so we all helped him deal with the areas where he was weak; to his math and physics professors, though, he was a real challenge. In particular, there was the problem of how to push him hard enough without completely losing the rest of the class, which is something I don’t think any of them ever solved. I still remember the time—my roommate was in this class and told me about it—when one of Hope’s math professors decided he was going to write a test that Richard couldn’t ace. It didn’t work. Richard still got his A, but the whole rest of the class flunked. I think the prof ended up having to take Richard’s score out and grade the rest on a curve to avoid wrecking their GPAs for the semester.
Now the problem with that test was that the professor got so focused on Richard, and on not letting Richard beat him, that he forgot the real purpose of that test. It wasn’t, properly, to keep Richard from getting an A, but to show the students in that class how well they understood the material (and, of course, to help him quantify that so he could grade them). The proper purpose of that test, like any test, was educational, to help the students see what they still needed to learn. In forgetting that, he ended up producing a test designed not to educate his students but to fail them—which, except for Richard, is exactly what it did. It’s unfortunate the prof only realized that after he’d given it.
Fortunately for us, this is a mistake God never makes. As we saw last week, the purpose, or at least one purpose, of testing is to produce endurance; part of that is that testing teaches us what we can endure, that we’re actually capable of doing a lot more and pushing ourselves a lot further than we think possible. God tests us, stretching us so that we grow, and so that we see ourselves growing; he pushes us to our limits at times, not to find out where they are—he already knows that—but so that we find out where they are. After all, believing we can endure testing is essential to actually enduring it.
This is why verse 12, which both closes the previous section of James and opens this one, says, “Blessed is the one who perseveres under trial.” Blessed are those whose faith is tried and proven true and strong, for they are the ones who run the race with endurance, taking hold of the eternal life to which they were called, and at the end of their race receive the crown of life from the Lord’s hand. We noted a few weeks ago that the winners of the ancient Olympics would receive a laurel wreath as their prize, a temporary crown that would last only a week or two before withering completely; but those who win the race of faith, who run with endurance, receive something far better, something eternal: the crown of life that the Lord has promised to those who love him. This is the gift of true, unending life, the life of God, with God, forever.
That said, no one always perseveres. Trials always bring temptations with them, temptations to yield to the pressure and take the easy way out, and sometimes even the best of us give in to those temptations. When that happens, there’s the further temptation to blame the whole thing on God. After all, it’s well established in the Scriptures that God tests us; we have the definitive example in Genesis 22, where God tests Abraham’s faith about as sorely as it could possibly be tested. (There’s a lot that can be said about that story, about how it foreshadows but inverts God’s salvation—because in the end, he would provide the lamb to take the place of all of us, but that lamb would be his own son; but for this morning, note another critical point in verse 5. Note how Abraham says, “The boy and I are going over there to worship, and then we will come back to you.” He trusted that somehow, some way, God was going to be faithful, and Isaac would come home with him; that was his response to God’s test.) But if it’s God who tests us, then it’s just a short step to saying that it’s God who tempts us; and if we can blame him for tempting us, then it’s his fault if we give in, not ours.
To this, James says, “No. It’s your own desires that tempt you—it’s you undermining yourself. God can’t be tempted by evil; it doesn’t appeal to him at all, and so he has no interest in tempting anyone else.” He allows us to be tempted in order to try to test us; he allows our desires to rise up against our faith, because if he suppressed them for us, we would be worse off in the end; but he isn’t the source of our temptation. For that, we must look within, to our own fallenness and our own weaknesses; and forcing us to do so, to see our dark side as well as our good side, is one of the benefits of the trials God sends us.
To avoid doing so, to refuse to see the darkness we all harbor in ourselves, is to yield to one of the most insidious and deadly of all temptations, that of spiritual pride, which is driven by the desire to see ourselves as holier than we really are. The only antidote to that poisonous sin comes through other trials and temptations; even if God protected us from every other temptation, it would only provide more room for that one to operate in our lives, which would be no gain to us in the long run. We must face our sinful desires directly, and see them for what they really are, if we’re to grow; and for that to happen, in order to see ourselves that clearly, we must be put to the test.
The key point here is that though testing and temptation are closely linked—indeed, the temptation often is the test—they’re fundamentally different. The temptation in itself is a bad thing, it’s the lure of sin and the pull of evil in our lives, and it is not of God; but he allows it in order to test us, and the testing, though difficult, is a good thing. It’s necessary for our growth, necessary for us to build endurance, and necessary to keep us humble. Without it, we end up like the student who coasted through school on challenge-free classes and easy As—lazy, unmotivated, with an unreasonably high opinion of ourselves and our abilities, and utterly unprepared to face any kind of real challenge.
This is important for us to understand, not only for our view of ourselves, but also for our view of God. You see, to confuse testing and temptation, to blame God for tempting us and accuse him of doing wrong in testing us, is to call him the source of evil in our lives as well as of good. Essentially, then, we’re saying that God is inconstant, that he’s good at one point and not good at another—that he’s as fickle and changeable as the weather. Of course, in the weather, that’s not all bad. One of the things I miss about Colorado is the play of light on the mountains—watching the cloud-shadows move, sharp-edged, across the slopes, seeing the peaks light up on a bright morning, and again with the alpenglow at sunset; but while that sort of variation is a beautiful thing in the mountains, it wouldn’t be good at all in God.
We’d be in a world of hurt, literally, if the goodness of God changed with the weather, or the seasons, or the time of day. And so James tells us—and there are a lot of different translations for this, since it’s difficult Greek, but the overall point is clear—that in God there is no such variation. We don’t see shadows move across our lives as God’s light shifts, or changes, or wanes; the world turns, and day comes and goes, but God is the source of all light, and his goodness remains steady. He is always good, and only good, and everything he sends is good, and nothing evil comes from his hand.
This is why we can, as James tells us, consider it joy when we encounter various trials; they’re difficult, yes, but we can approach them with the assurance that God is at work in and through them for our good. God has allowed them in order to help us grow, he’s with us in their midst, and he wants us to overcome them—he tests us because he wants us to pass. He isn’t trying to bring us down, he’s working to build us up, and if we will only lean on him when trials come, he will give us what we need to face them. As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 10, “No testing has overtaken us that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let us be tested beyond our strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that we may be able to endure it.” God is faithful, and his faithfulness is great beyond our ability to measure; he allows us to face trials only so he can bring us through them. We can trust this to be true, we can trust his goodness and his faithfulness, because he is the Father of lights, the source of all light, and in him there is no shadow of turning; his light never wavers, his goodness never changes, and he always keeps his promises.