The Sources of Temptation

Genesis 3.6; Matthew 4.3-9; 1 John 2.16

When people go to professional counselors for help, it is common practice for them to ask for a family history. They know that by understanding where you came from they can understand what you are today. You are to a large degree the product of your family origin or personal history. That also seems to be the underlying logic of Genesis. The account of the first temptation and the fall of man is telling us about our lives today. That scene of the first temptation in Eden is a situation that has been replayed many times over. Unfortunately, the results have always been the same: Satan tempts us, and we fall. 

There has been only one human being who successfully resisted temptation. Jesus’ skirmish with the Devil at the beginning of His earthly ministry is one of the great moments in salvation history. We should read and think about Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness in juxtaposition to the very first temptation in Eden. Where Adam and Eve failed, Jesus succeeded. And in so doing He inaugurated the New Creation.

We are never going to be perfect people, even after we decide to follow Jesus. But there is no reason for us to give the Devil any more advantages. You probably don’t leave your keys in your car, inviting someone to steal it. You probably lock your doors at home because you are not just going to give a burglar an easy time. Likewise, the Bible tells us not to give a place to the Devil, making his evil work even easier.

There is no way to escape being tempted. While we are in the world the “lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” are all around us and even within us. But simply knowing what our situation is will help us, even if we sometimes feel overwhelmed by the challenge.

We have been given an advantage in the fight against temptation because we are told about the sources of our temptations. All temptations come through: I. our adversary, II. our desires, and III. our location.

I. The first and most notable source of temptation is our greatest adversary. In Genesis the serpent just shows up without any back story being offered as to his origins. But his purpose is immediately made clear, and that is what we really need to be aware of. It is dangerous to be too curious about the Devil himself. We need to know he is there and what he is up to but having a morbid curiosity about the Prince of Darkness is not a healthy preoccupation. The Devil is no laughing matter and should never be taken lightly. The comical depiction of Satan with horns and a tail is folklore, not Biblical theology, and has fostered a kind of lightheartedness about our adversary that plays into his hands. In her innocence, Eve did not recognize the danger of the serpent. Many people today simply laugh at the idea of Satan and do not acknowledge the danger.

Satan is the enemy of God and he targets those made in God’s image seeking to destroy anything and everything that God loves and cares for. His ultimate intention is to destroy us by separating us from God. He wants to make us enemies of God just as he is, and he is not above twisting God’s words and questioning God’s intentions. Satan loves to talk theology and can even quote Scripture. But he can soon have you thinking that God is your real enemy, the one who is keeping you from really enjoying yourself. The only way to really live is to throw off this obtrusive God and live your own life as you please. Everything will be alright, the Devil reassures us, because God does not really mean what He said.

One of Satan’s most effective lies has been that God is some cosmic killjoy. Many people are convinced that God will only spoil our fun and that life is better lived on our own, apart from His petty rules and interference.

There in that pristine paradise of Eden God richly provided the first man and woman with everything they needed. There was only one restriction placed upon them: they were forbidden to eat from one of the trees God had planted in the garden. This single restriction was the very thing the Tempter directed Eve to think about and discuss with him. Even though she had the freedom to eat from a hundred of the other trees in Eden, the Tempter wanted her to think about that one restriction that God had placed upon her.

Eating a piece of forbidden fruit does not seem like a serious sin. But the serious nature of that transgression was in their intention to have a go at life without God. Satan managed to convince Eve that her independence would be better and that God’s warning about death was a lie or maybe just an exaggeration designed to frighten her into submission. Satan turns God into a problem that Eve must be rid of if she wants to really be something.

When it comes to the Devil there are two extreme errors to be avoided. One extreme is to disbelieve in the Devil’s existence. There are those materialists who reject the existence of any supernatural beings. But there are plenty of people in the Church who do not believe in the Devil.

Not only does this position reject the teaching of Scripture, it also oversimplifies the problem of evil in the world.  In other words, if we reject the existence of cosmic evil, we will always be trying to explain evil either as a psychological or sociological problem with psychological and sociological solutions. But evil is not that simple to explain or to eradicate.

It is dangerous to discount or underestimate the power of Satan, even this side of the Cross and Resurrection. Satan is called the god of this world and he still rules a kingdom of darkness. Everyone who does not belong to Jesus is under Satan’s dominion.

But the other extreme is to give the Devil too much power or attention. We are told to fear God, but we are never told to fear the Devil. And just as Satan has convinced many people that he does not exist, he has convinced many more to fear and even worship him. This explains the stubborn fascination people have with the occult and spiritualism.

We are told to resist the Devil and to be aware of his schemes. Christians have been delivered from the power of Satan and we can say “NO!” to him just like Jesus did when he was tempted. We cannot personally overcome the Devil. Jesus has already done that for us. But we can resist the Devil. We may have to resist repeated attacks. Jesus just kept saying “No!” to the Devil until the Devil left him. Perhaps we fail in temptation because we simply give up too soon. Consider this encouragement from Luther’s famous hymn: “The prince of darkness grim, we tremble not for him; his rage we can endure, for lo! his doom is sure; one little word shall fell him.”

II. The second source of temptation comes from within our own hearts through our desires. Satan’s strategy with Eve was simple: he made Eve want something other than God. We fail to see the true significance of the forbidden fruit because we usually don’t think of it in relation to God. God had to give them a choice between himself and something else. There could have been a world without the possibility of sin, but that world would also be devoid of loving relationships as well. God made it possible for them to choose fellowship with Him or for them to choose their own way.

The forbidden fruit was probably just another tree in Eden, but God made it the object of choice. Eve decided, under the serpent’s influence, that there was something she wanted more than God. The trouble began when she began to look at the forbidden thing and then to desire it. The actual transgression was just the final domino to fall. Temptation starts with desire or what John calls the lust of the flesh.

You will never be tempted by something that disgusts you. Temptations always come in delightful, attractive packaging. We think there is something that will make us more happy, secure, popular, wealthy, or calm. Sometimes we just want a good time and a tingle up and down our spines. We want those things that will give us some advantage in life and we may even begin to think that we really cannot live or enjoy life unless we have that thing. When a desire has really taken hold, we are convinced that if we can’t have that thing we would rather not continue living.

These things that we desire take many forms and may not be inherently wicked by themselves. Many of the desires we have are rooted in perfectly neutral areas of our lives. Temptation takes a harmless desire and attaches it to the wrong object. Or, a desire may become overgrown and out of control, dominating our lives like the constant throbbing of a toothache or cramping muscle.

At some point we can no longer differentiate ourselves from our desires. We are eaten up with desire and we become the things that we long for, like an addict loses himself and becomes nothing but a drunk, or a druggie, or a gambler, or a pervert. We can’t imagine ourselves or our lives without those things that we pine and wish for. We all have desires that captivate our imaginations and activate our living. We set our goals based on desires. These goals may be for good things, but Satan wants to make them the ultimate things in our lives instead of God.

Satan knows that you can easily be made a slave to your desires and will spend your life doing nothing but scratching all the various itches while ignoring God. Augustine said that sin is taking a legitimate desire and trying to fulfill it without God. God gave us desires so that He can fulfill them. He is no ogre or cosmic sadist, enjoying it while we twist and writhe in the agony of unfulfilled desires. For every desire there is a godly, lawful, even a holy fulfillment. If there is not a fulfillment in this life, there will be in the world to come. God is good, and He wants us to trust Him with our desires.

Satan wants us to grab what we want right now on our own initiative because God cannot really have our best interests in mind. When our minds have been so poisoned against God, most of Satan’s work is done.

Once Eve’s mind was poisoned against God she began to look at the forbidden fruit in a different light. God could not longer be trusted. Temptation is a direct attack on the character and goodness of God. When the Devil tempted Jesus to turn stones into bread, it was the same strategy. Jesus should use his power to care for himself rather than rely on His heavenly Father. You cannot trust God to take care of you, so you had better come up with something yourself. Jesus’ answer is “man does not live by bread alone.” There is more to life than satisfying one’s own desires. Satan made Eve forget that. Satan will not necessarily tempt you to become a professional criminal, a drug dealer, or pervert. He will simply make sure that you are always thinking about yourself first. Satan’s suggestion that Jesus throw himself off the pinnacle of the Temple mount is just another temptation for Jesus to put himself at the center of things rather than listening to God. If the Devil cannot persuade us to doubt God’s goodness, he might just take the opposite approach and tell us that God is so good He will support you and come to your rescue no matter what you do!

If God is not good, then you must do for yourself. If God is good, then you can do what you want. Either way, self is at the center and the Devil wins the contest.

So, what do we do with our desires? You really can’t just kill every desire and Christianity does not ask you to do that. The cessation of all desire is the religion of Buddhism, not Christianity. In fact, Christianity affirms that every desire at its core is something from God. The problem with desire is not the desire itself but the objects we become attached to. We love the wrong things. Our affections are misdirected and disorderly. Our hearts become so disordered that we often don’t even know what we want.

Salvation, or that aspect of salvation that is sanctification, is about getting the heart in order by reordering the affections. A famous Scottish preacher named Thomas Chalmers once preached a profound message entitled “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection.” The thesis of his sermon was the only way to effective expel the love of worldly things from our hearts is to get another more powerful love. We can give up this world if we come to love God. It is the love of God, not the Law of God, that will give us the power to overcome the sin in our hearts. But the reordering of our affections takes time. It is sort of like an army slowly taking back lost territory. We will never reach a state of sinless perfection. We will still be tempted by the Devil. And we will still have the Flesh in us with its desires. We will have to keep redirecting and reorienting our hearts toward God.

That is the whole purpose of worship, especially in a corporate setting. In worship we are helping each other see and love God more and more. When that happens all the desires of our hearts will fall into line. We will find that when we love God first we are set free to really love and appreciate other things more, especially other people.

The person who does not love God cannot love anything or anyone else truly because we will only be users not lovers. When we love God, everything else becomes good. When we do not love God, nothing is good.

III. The third source of temptation comes from our physical location in the world. John called it the lust of the eyes or the material things that we see and that we want. The forbidden fruit was tempting to Eve’s eyes. It was attractive. Is it strange to you that the thing God had forbidden would have been so pleasing to taste and to see? Why not forbid something that was already loathsome to see? Well, for one thing, everything that God made was good. God doesn’t make loathsome things. The world that God made was very good and was blessed by God. God has nothing against material things. He created matter. God made things beautiful.

As C.S. Lewis said, you don’t want to be more spiritual than God, as if all material or physical things are to be loathed. Naturally the fruit was pleasing to Eve’s eye and good to eat! God made it. We live in a world that is full of beauty and goodness, even this side of the Fall. There are thousands of things to see, touch, taste, and enjoy. God made these things and then gave us the faculties to experience these sensations. We are sensual beings who can respond to our environment.

When we hear the word “sensual” we almost always think of sex. The forbidden fruit has become a metaphor for sexual temptation, which is probably the most powerful physical experience we can have. But even that was created and blessed by God. Nothing is bad of itself.

Eve was not forbidden to eat and to taste fruit. She knew the forbidden fruit would taste good because she had presumably already tasted other fruits in the garden! The thing that God had made, which He had then forbidden, was sensually pleasing and attractive.

But we are overly impressed by the appearance of things. We like shiny things, colorful things, shapely things. We like to look at things, even those things we cannot possess for ourselves. We covet things. We spend vast amounts of time and energy looking at and collecting pretty things. Things become the main obsession of our lives, especially in the prosperous West.

For many people the accumulation of things becomes a standard by which to measure the success of their lives. To be successful implies the ability to get things or to purchase pleasures and experiences. The lust of the eyes is much harder to condemn than the lust of the flesh. We would immediately recognize adultery for the base sin of the flesh that it is, but you can be materialistic and still be an upstanding member of the local Church. If Satan can’t get you with the baser sins he will be satisfied to tempt you with the higher and more noble vices.

If he can’t make you into a sexual pervert or a drunkard, he may just turn you into an art collector or a purveyor of fine antiques. The result is the same in the end: something becomes dearer to us than God. Where our treasure is, there are hearts will be also.

The choice in the original temptation was between God and something God had made. They could enjoy the creation, but they could also enjoy the Creator. At some point, they had to choose to enjoy the Creator OVER the creation or the creation OVER the Creator. Creation was good and blessed. Creation was beautiful.

The natural world gave sensual delights and experiences. But the man and the woman were not made to enjoy these things as the primary experience of life. They were made to be with God. The Creator Himself was to be their ultimate delight and source of joy, not the fruits of the garden of Eden.

When Eve began to look at the forbidden fruit and saw that it was appealing to her senses, the sin of idolatry was conceived for the first time in the human mind.

Idolatry is to put some aspect of creation above or in the place of the Creator. Creation is good and was blessed by the Creator. But creation’s pleasures must never become a substitute for the glory of the Creator. Human life was never meant to be lived only on the level of the sensual to the exclusion of the spiritual. The world can be enjoyed but must never be worshiped. Life in the world can never be a substitute for life with God. It is possible for us to look at creation and see something of the glory of God. It is also possible for us to exchange the glory of God for some aspect of creation.

Temptation is what happens when our gaze is turned away from the glory and the beauty of God to some lesser glory or beauty. God does not forbid us from enjoying and experiencing beauty. The beauty that He has placed in nature is meant to be an invitation and an introduction to His greater glory. Satan would have us stop and stare at the threshold rather than enter the Holy of Holies.

The true depth of temptation is not simply in the appearance of the things the world parades before our eyes, but in how these things make us feel. The deception of temptation is in the fact that we seldom end up appreciating the things we want. We are after a feeling, not the things themselves.

If we could want things for those things themselves, we might begin to be thankful for them and this could lead us to worship the Creator who gave us those things as a gift. That would spoil all of Satan’s temptations. Satan’s temptation to Eve was not simply for her to enjoy the forbidden fruit as a midday snack, but to take it as a path to wisdom that would even make her like God. Imagine the intoxicating feeling of being truly free and independent like a god or goddess without any boundaries.

To step outside the limitations of our humanity, which implies dependence on the Creator, and to become gods ourselves is the ultimate form of temptation. That is the pride of life and it was pride that made the Devil fall from heaven.

Satan promises that god-like power to us. He promised Jesus all the Kingdoms of this world. Jesus came in humility, to do the will of His Father in Heaven, and then allow God to exalt Him in due time. Satan offered an alternative path to power and glory, one that did not require submission to God.

Remember the first time it dawned on you that your parents could no longer tell you what to do? That feeling of independence was intoxicating! There were probably things you suddenly wanted to do, not because you really wanted to do them, but because you now knew you could and because you also knew your parents would not approve. Satan wants us to feel that intoxicating power of being independent from our Heavenly Parent.

He doesn’t care how you get there, just that you get there. Because then you are separated from God, which was the intent of the temptation in the first place. The thing that separates us from God is not the Devil’s concern. It could be anything, even good things, can be used by the Devil to separate us from God. Life itself is just a series of choices between God and other things.