Is temptation, in and of itself, sin?

GDL · Apr 8, 2021

zippy2006 said:
Then we are involved in the claim that in some cases God wills that we oppose his will, which is problematic.

Why is this problematic? Some rambling thoughts:

Isn't it a part of raising children to desire them to learn to think on their own? Sometimes the ultimate growth is to let them run and learn what you know they need to do to learn. In a way this would seem to support a concept of His will being that we oppose His will (to a point), so we can learn to do all of His will, which would ultimately include even making requests couched in obedience.

By the point of Jesus prayer re: the cup, as you pointed out, His prayer was couched in obedience. And our Father did not alter His will. Nevertheless, Jesus made the same request 3 times.

Makes me think of how Moses negotiated with the Lord re: the destruction of S&G.

I think it honors our Father to see His children thinking and knowing when to question and when to just proceed as He wills. I think Jesus covers a similar lesson in Luke 17, where I see Him saying that at times just do what He says, where at other times He's willing to work with us.

As I pointed out in an earlier post, there is a hierarchy to God's Law. So, He wills that we oppose a point of His will in order to fulfill a higher point of His will. There is a dimensional reasoning necessary to fulfill God's ultimate will. I don't see us getting there until we learn what this involves

public hermit · Apr 8, 2021

sawdust said:
I didn't read this thread all the way through so forgive me if this has been brought up but ...

What of Christ in the garden? His desire was not to suffer and there can be no question He had to struggle to get to the "not my will" place. I think that instance definitely counts as "being tempted as we are".

Yes, I'm inclined to agree. And, as has been pointed out, he struggled to the point of asking for something he knew was not the will of God. I don't know how to parse that, but it is interesting.

Clare73 · Apr 8, 2021

GDL said:
The flesh/body itself is limited and weak (resurrection body now, please).

I see what Jesus went through as the most extreme of tests that took Him to the brink in His humanity:

37 "He began to be sorrowful and deeply distressed. 38 Then He said to them, "My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death. 39 He went a little farther and fell on His face, and prayed, saying, "O My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me....42 Again, a second time, He went away and prayed, saying, "O My Father, if this cup cannot pass away from Me...44 So He left them, went away again, and prayed the third time, saying the same words. (Matt. 26:37-44 NKJ)

42 saying, "Father, if it is Your will, take this cup away from Me. 43 Then an angel appeared to Him from heaven, strengthening Him...44 And being in agony, He prayed more earnestly. Then His sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground. (Lk. 22:42-44 NKJ)

The way I see this, on the one hand, when He told His disciples the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak, He was obviously addressing them to be on guard of temptation. On the other hand He is going through mental anguish not said of Him anywhere else but on the cross itself when He cries out to God, so, in His words, I think there is some self-realization and experiential understanding of what we deal with in temptations/tests.

Matthew tells us He was "exceeding sorrowful even to death." Luke helps us to see what the mental agony is doing to His body - His flesh - but not flesh in the sin sense. He's putting so much intense pressure on His flesh by His spirit that His flesh reveals it's weakness of standing against mental pressure. In a way, His body was fighting back against His mental agony and breaking down in the effort. We know He won the battle, but the battle between the flesh & the spirit is intense to the point that it even challenged Him to accept the cup of the Father after 3 requests to let it pass from Him and to learn obedience from what He suffered.

We, go from indulging our flesh at the slightest hint of pressure (temptation) from it, to learning about it and how to deal with it in Christ by the Spirit. But, like I pointed out before, have we been challenged until blood? When Paul says he boxes not as beating the air, but he strikes his body and subjugates it (1 Cor 9:26-27), he's dealing with the same concept.

Jesus was tempted/tested but without sin. The temptations never got past His defenses. He dealt with external temptations and, the way I see it, even an internal temptation to disobedience caused by external agonizing factors He knew He was going to face. But, no matter the mental and emotional agony, the psychosomatic effects on the weak flesh and its efforts to get us to yield to it, the strengthening by an angel,

He dealt with it as we are to deal with it - "Your will be done" - no matter how much pressure or metaphorical boxing and striking we need to apply against the flesh to override it.

Long answer, but make sense? Or raise more questions?

So by "personally experiencing the sin problem," you mean his struggle was every bit, and more, of what the struggle with temptation to sin can be, but not that he experienced the problem of sin itself?

TedT · Apr 8, 2021

zippy2006 said:
That's a pretty interesting question. Was Jesus' desire to abandon the cross at Gethsemane an interior desire to sin, and one that he consented to?

Whose interpretation is it that He was trying to avoid the cross? The facts of who He was and the job HE came to do point to the interpretation that He thought HE might die in the garden which was not supposed to happen but if the Father chose it, He would go along with the change...

Where does this stuff come from and why do people accept it ??

zippy2006 · Apr 8, 2021

GDL said:
Isn't it a part of raising children to desire them to learn to think on their own?

You make some good points. I guess what I would say is that there is a difference between disobeying a parent and disobeying God. The reason a parent wants their child to disobey them at times is because the parent knows that they are fallible and that at times they should be opposed. But this isn't true with God.

Haha - I don't know. I guess I don't have a good short answer, and I don't feel like writing a 10-page essay in response. Maybe someone else will have some thoughts.

TedT said:
Whose interpretation is it that He was trying to avoid the cross? The facts of who He was and the job HE came to do point to the interpretation that He thought HE might die in the garden which was not supposed to happen but if the Father chose it, He would go along with the change...

Where does this stuff cme from and why do people accept it ??

So you think that when Jesus asked for the cup to pass from him in the garden, he was asking not to die in the garden? In which case God granted his request, and the cup did pass from him?

fhansen · Apr 8, 2021

GDL said:
Why is this problematic? Some rambling thoughts:

Isn't it a part of raising children to desire them to learn to think on their own? Sometimes the ultimate growth is to let them run and learn what you know they need to do to learn. In a way this would seem to support a concept of His will being that we oppose His will (to a point), so we can learn to do all of His will, which would ultimately include even making requests couched in obedience.

By the point of Jesus prayer re: the cup, as you pointed out, His prayer was couched in obedience. And our Father did not alter His will. Nevertheless, Jesus made the same request 3 times.

Makes me think of how Moses negotiated with the Lord re: the destruction of S&G.

I think it honors our Father to see His children thinking and knowing when to question and when to just proceed as He wills. I think Jesus covers a similar lesson in Luke 17, where I see Him saying that at times just do what He says, where at other times He's willing to work with us.

As I pointed out in an earlier post, there is a hierarchy to God's Law. So, He wills that we oppose a point of His will in order to fulfill a higher point of His will. There is a dimensional reasoning necessary to fulfill God's ultimate will. I don't see us getting there until we learn what this involves

Personally, I don't think we can say that God wills that we oppose His will-as in actively desiring that we oppose it-only that we're allowed to oppose it. Otherwise He'd be directly willing evil, while commanding us to shun it. In any case Jesus never opposed God's will, while He struggled with opposing it in the flesh. And I still think we need to keep in mind that this was God, Himself, involved somehow in experiencing that conflict.

Clare73 · Apr 8, 2021

zippy2006 said:
What's interesting is that the Gethsemane event seems to go beyond passive solicitation such that Christ's will does become involved in the desire.

According to your OP, "(Augustine) teaches that it becomes sin only when either act or consent follows the conceiving or apprehension of it..." To be averse to suffering is not a sin, but to be averse in an inappropriate way is a sin. To be willfully averse to suffering contrary to the will of God would seem to be inappropriate.

The question, then, is whether Augustine too would consider it a sin. That is, first the non-sinful apprehension is presented, "Christ experiences a desire to avoid suffering even though this desire is contrary to the will of God."

But it doesn't stop there. Christ goes on to "act or consent" by asking that the suffering be avoided. That act of prayer/petition goes beyond a passive desire to acquiesce. We are not only in Calvin's territory of sin, but also Augustine's.

It seems to be a pretty tricky problem.

So how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

zippy2006 · Apr 8, 2021

Clare73 said:
So how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

Oh, that was solved years ago. Now we're investigating how many angels can dance on the point of a pin. A much more interesting question.

Clare73 · Apr 8, 2021

GDL said:
I also wonder if it was just the aversion to physical pain that He was agonizing over. Knowing His hatred for unrighteousness, and His knowledge that He could call down angels to fight, and His knowledge of who He is, what about other things going through His mind, e.g. having to submit Himself to His creation to be unjustly abused, tortured, and nailed to a tree.

It's not as if we see Him being a pacifist in regards to dealing with evil.

There are so many things in play here.

Dealing with evil, Satan full-on--"wrestling around on the mat with him," "getting him all over you," such an "unclean" spirit--may have been the real agony.

Clare73 · Apr 8, 2021

GDL said:
I did the same earlier. 35 verses, 39 hits, 12 NT books. I quickly glanced through the verses and saw no direct tie to the heart.
One of the possibly tricky verses is the one in James that says God does not tempt anyone (likely to evil as just previously stated in the verse). But I'm not sure that God does not test - like the Spirit leading Jesus into the wilderness. I've looked at all this in some detail some time ago. As I recall, my conclusion at the time was that one had to pay very close attention to all contexts and consider other similar words in the study. You seem to be picking up some of the same considerations re: tempt vs. test in translating the same word.

There's another thread currently running OP'd by an atheist trying to make a case against inerrancy based upon a supposed conflict with jealousy pertaining to God and love. It's clearly a matter of context and what meaning we apply to the word.

Maybe/likely the same thing here, although a bit more difficult to make sense of it.

Scripture is pretty clear about God "testing," don't you think?

Clare73 · Apr 8, 2021

fhansen said:
Personally, I don't think we can say that God wills that we oppose His will-as in actively desiring that we oppose it-only that we're allowed to oppose it. Otherwise He'd be directly willing evil, while commanding us to shun it. In any case Jesus never opposed God's will, while He struggled with opposing it in the flesh. And I still think we need to keep in mind that this was God, Himself, involved somehow in experiencing that conflict.

You're into his revealed will vs. his secret will (Deuteronomy 29:29).

Cormack · Apr 8, 2021

Clare73 said:
You're into his revealed will vs. his secret will (Deuteronomy 29:29).

Which opens up an impossibly contradicting can of worms where God tells mankind He wants one thing, while in truth wanting the exact opposite.

“Don’t sin” (but I’ve decreed that you will commit that exact sin from before the world began,) “love thy neighbour” (but I’m going to control your desires in such a way that you don’t love him and will in fact hate him.)

Which isn’t so bad, hate I mean, since God already hates those people he’s led into hating others, yet he claims to love them all, the misled and the rightly guided, because in addition to having two wills, he has two loves also.

Cormack · Apr 8, 2021

Not to mention the wider fact that Deuteronomy 29:29 isn’t about God having a secret will, that’s to presuppose the content of what the “secret things” are. Jesus’ mission was in secret, but that’s not a secret will that contradicts Gods plain word.

The immediate context in Deuteronomy is about rebels against Gods revealed law being rejected from the land, and the awe and conversation that it inspires amidst the onlookers. Sodom and Gomorrah is an example used in the chapter, and the warnings are for Gods people not to abandon the way He’s shown them.

It’s certainly not about a secret will of God.

sawdust · Apr 8, 2021

public hermit said:
Yes, I'm inclined to agree. And, as has been pointed out, he struggled to the point of asking for something he knew was not the will of God. I don't know how to parse that, but it is interesting.

At the least it shows to desire something is not a sin in and of itself even if that desire is not what God has planned for you. If you look at the difference between Christ in the garden and the James 1 passage, is the element of being "drawn away". Christ was never drawn away from the truth and the will of the Father as revealed in the written word. James says we fall into sin when we allow our desire to draw us away from the truth. It is when we start to think in terms of lies (which is evil) that we end up committing a sin.

If we go back to the original garden it is most likely Eve had a desire to eat from the tree (otherwise why is she hanging around it). Not a problem at that point but then the temptation leads her away from the revealed truth. The moment she started thinking contrary to the Word, is the moment it was guaranteed she would sin as James reveals evil (anti-truth thinking) gives birth to sin.

fhansen · Apr 8, 2021

Clare73 said:
You're into his revealed will vs. his secret will (Deuteronomy 29:29).

I don't know if we can speculate about His "secret will" tho, as to what it consists of. Anyway, I see it as the difference between what He desires and what He's willing to put up with or allow, for a season, for His purposes, until He'll no longer allow evil to prevail and ultimately brings all things into subjection to Himself where He'll then be all in all, and where only goodness will prevail.

GDL · Apr 8, 2021

Clare73 said:
So by "personally experiencing the sin problem," you mean his struggle was every bit, and more, of what the struggle with temptation to sin can be, but not that he experienced the problem of sin itself?

I don't think I said Jesus personally experienced the sin problem. He understands sin and He experienced the weakness of the flesh at minimum in dealing with heading to the injustice. etc. of the cross.

I would say it this way after what I've said (probably too lengthily) already: Sin is ultimately disobedience to God (lawlessness & unrighteousness). Jesus learned obedience through what He suffered. So, yes, in a way I think what you say may well be a way to express what His struggle was and wasn't. He obviously never sinned.

Something I didn't say before, but there is some interesting wording in Hebrews. I'll use the YLT then highlight what I mean:

YLT Hebrews 4:15 for we have not a chief priest unable to sympathise with our infirmities, but one tempted in all things in like manner -- apart from sin;

"in like manner" is a word that means "similarly." Hebrews uses it again here:

YLT Hebrews 7:15 And it is yet more abundantly most evident, if according to the similitude of Melchisedek there doth arise another priest,

So, what Jesus went through was similar to what we go through, but not exactly the same. Surely it was sufficient to accomplish God's Plan, and surely per 4:15 it's similar enough for Him to "sympathize/suffer with" us in our fight against sin.

Also, "apart from sin" means "separate from" and with the specific grammar trends into: without making use of something., without expressing or practicing something; without possessing something, apart from the presence of something; without relation to or connection with something., independent(ly) of something. (BDAG Lexicon).

So, it's very clear here that He was tempted/tested in a similar enough fashion to us, but not precisely the same as He was without sin. He learned obedience without possessing sin. We are learning obedience dealing with sin under subjection to God's grace. Similar enough. Not the same. He fully understands it all having also learned obedience through being tempted and experiencing the weakness of flesh even without sin.

Taodeching · Apr 8, 2021

daydreameranastasia said:
Idk whenever I’m tempted I (try) to say Go away like Matt 4:10

The Jesus Prayer is good too. I also rely on the St. Micheal prayer which is:

St. Michael the Archangel,
defend us in battle.
Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the Devil.
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray,
and do thou,
O Prince of the heavenly hosts,
by the power of God,
thrust into hell Satan,
and all the evil spirits,
who prowl about the world
seeking the ruin of souls. Amen

Cormack · Apr 8, 2021

fhansen said:
Personally, I don't think we can say that God wills that we oppose His will-as in actively desiring that we oppose it-only that we're allowed to oppose it.

The most helpful question any Christian can answer on the whole “two wills” catastrophe is “how true is this statement in the scriptures?” About the sacrifices of children to Baal, scripture teaches it was something God...

did not command or mention, nor did it enter my mind.

I have never commanded such a horrible deed; it never even crossed my mind to command such a thing!

which I did not command or decree, nor did it come into my mind—

something I never commanded or mentioned, nor did it even enter My mind.

which I commanded not, nor spake it, neither came it into my mind:

something I have never commanded or mentioned; I never entertained the thought.

How true is that? If we subscribed to the two wills theory, it’s both true and untrue, the sacrifices to Baal were his will and not his will, it’s a whole lot of smoke and mirrors.

Clare73 · Apr 8, 2021

Cormack said:
Which opens up an impossibly contradicting can of worms where God tells mankind He wants one thing, while in truth wanting the exact opposite.'

Not "want". . .command.

Don’t sin” (but I’ve decreed that you will commit that exact sin from before the world began,) “love thy neighbour” (but I’m going to control your desires in such a way that you don’t love him and will in fact hate him.)

Which isn’t so bad, hate I mean, since God already hates those people he’s led into hating others, yet he claims to love them all, the misled and the rightly guided, because in addition to having two wills, he has two loves also.

The Word can be rightly divided in light of the whole counsel of God.

Hmm · Apr 8, 2021

Cormack said:
How true is that?

" ... [the] precise correlation between the information that was communicated and the facts, insofar as they can be determined and demonstrated, is such as to cause epistemological problems of sufficient magnitude as to lay upon the logical and semantic resources of the English language a heavier burden than they can reasonably be expected to bear."

- Sir Humphrey Applebly. Yes, Minister.

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