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Well, looking at this verse of the Lord’s Prayer, the word temptation shows up in most translations of it. As I mentioned a moment ago, I think the word should be translated as “Trial”. “And bring us not into the time of trial” would be how I read it. I would like to make my case. So, there is a season of the Church Year that we all know as Lent where the topic of “temptation” comes up. Lent is the forty days preceding Easter and traditionally it is supposed to be a time of introspection and self-denial that tastes of the Israelites’ wandering in the wilderness and/or Jesus forty days of fasting in the wilderness that culminated with his encounter with Satan. Traditionally, Lent is to be a season to fast and to pray in an intentional effort to reawaken our sense of reliance on God for everything. It’s good to undertake such a practice. Fasting for a day or days at a time does have spiritual benefit. So also, being more intentional about one’s prayer life certainly has spiritual benefit. These two disciplines of intentional self-denial, fasting and prayer, have long been beneficial to so many as means of increasing one’s awareness of the presence of God in our lives.
My rant on Lent is with how tacky some of this self-denial stuff became and how Lent got reduced to being about how we struggle with temptation to sin, which gets defined as carnal pleasure or carnal vice. It went like this. You know, someone asks “What are you going to give up for Lent?” and the answer would be chocolate, or coffee, or alcohol. Some people would go as far as to try to give up smoking. The idea was to give up your vice, your bad habit, and somehow resisting the temptation to resume that vice before the forty days of Lent was up was somehow supposed to lead to a greater sense of desire for God. Typically, all that happened was that we became much more aware of how dependent we were on what we were giving up. Moreover, that Jesus gave up his life in such a horrific way doesn’t seem to jive with our giving up chocolate.
This temptation centered approach to Lent just reduced the intent of Lent to being an exercise in how we deal with temptations to carnality. It reduced our relationship to God, our practice of faith down to avoidance of those seven deadly sins that the medieval church was so preoccupied with: Pride, wrath, envy, sloth, gluttony, lust, and greed. It focuses on sin rather than on what God has done. God through the incarnation and faithfulness of Jesus the Son in the power and presence of the Holy Spirit according to the will and the love of the Father has and is saving his entire creation from evil, sin, and death. Eternal life is knowing God the Father Son and Holy Spirit and God’s bring us into communion with God’s very self. To reduce this wondrous new life-giving relationship with God down to how well me, myself, and I resist those things I’m prone to have a bad habit relationship with is more than just tacky.
Temptation is just not the right word. It’s trial, a trial or testing of where our loyalties lie, a trial of faith. A trial, not a temptation, is what the Israelites faced as they wandered through the wilderness. In the harsh scarcity of the wilderness would they stay loyal to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob who brought them there in order to prove himself faithful or would they serve the gods of the nations whom their faithful God drove out of the Land before them. Too often the Israelites chose to serve the gods of the nations.
It was a trial of identity that Satan put Jesus through in the wilderness when he tried to get Jesus to use his power and identity as Son of God to serve himself rather than God the Father. Satan’s tests began with “if you are the Son of God”. Early Christians also constantly faced the trial of staying loyal to Jesus in the context of being persecuted for their loyalty to him. They lost their jobs, families, friends, homes, communities, and even their lives…they lost so much not just for having beliefs about Jesus but because they were personally loyal to him, a loyalty that came to them as a gift after having encountered him through the presence of the Holy Spirit, an encounter that changed their lives, healed them, gave them hope.
A trial is having to go through something so difficult that it has the potential to crush our fidelity to Jesus. And so, this verse in the Lord’s Prayer isn’t that the Father not bring us into a time or place where we are tempted to succumb to carnal pleasures but rather that God not bring us to situations or seasons in life that are so difficult they have the capacity to destroy our faith and hope in Jesus, our love for him, our loyalty to him. Bring us not into the time of trial.
So, there you go but we’re not done yet. We have to look at why we would pray that God not bring us or lead us into times of trial. It seems that would go without saying. Why would God bring us to or lead us to a trial? I could understand the second part of the verse where it’s implied that it is the Evil One who brings about trials in our lives and we’ll talk about that next week. Most assuredly, there is something called Satan out there who loves to try to destroy our relationship with God, but here it seems Jesus is telling us to ask that God the Father not bring us or lead us into those trials. Let’s sort that out briefly.
The Greek word for “bring” or “lead” is interesting. It’s a word used for bringing or leading an animal to sacrifice. This part of the prayer sounds a lot like what God did in asking Abraham to bring his son Isaac to Mt. Moriah to sacrifice him. Isaac was the means to God fulfilling his promise to Abraham. God had promised to give Abraham the Land we know as Israel/Palestine and make his descendants a great nation on that land that would be a blessing to all other nations. The promise seemed impossible from the get go because God made it to Abraham when he was in his 90’s and Sarah in her 80’s. Short of a miracle, it is all but impossible for people that old to produce children. Yet God gave them Isaac and the name Isaac means laughter because both Abraham and Sarah laughed at the idea of having a child in their old age.
So, why would God ask Abraham to lead, to bring Isaac his only son, the child of the promise to Mt. Moriah to sacrifice him. I cannot emphasize enough the horror of this event especially for the almost teenage boy Isaac and the men who accompanied them. The jury is out on how Abraham really felt. The biblical account speaks of Abraham’s unwavering confidence that God would provide the sacrifice, that God would keep his promise. This sheer confidence kept Abraham from succumbing to the sheer horror of it all and refusing to do as God asked. Abraham followed through right up to the point of bringing the knife down on Isaac and God stopped him and provided a sacrifice…just as Abraham had been telling Isaac.
So, if I were to try to pull together the drift of this part of the Lord’s Prayer, we’re asking God the Father to not test or not let our loyalty to Jesus be tested by Satan by our having to go through things horrible enough to make us lose faith. But, we still have to wrestle with the fact that the feathers still hit the fan and the gory part that we have to accept is that God lets them and the purpose of that is so that God can prove his faithful love to us and our faithfulness to him. I’ll talk more about this next week looking at the Book of Job and the horrible bet Satan and God made with respect to proving Job’s loyalty to God.
For now, let me mention a few things. Trials happen so how do we respond? Well, Abraham had full confidence in God and God’s promise to him, full enough to carry through on God’s asking him to seemingly obliterate the promise by making a child sacrifice of Isaac which was a common practise in the surrounding nations of kings who wished to make themselves and their kingdoms great and powerful. We’re typically not going to be giants of faith like Abraham was when facing trials. We will have our doubts, our anger, our sense of righteous indignation towards God for letting this “blank” happen. In my walk I have found that taking time to sit in the presence of God to read the Scriptures and to pray is truly beneficial. God gets through to us with words of assurance and a sense of his presence with us.
I’m reminded of when Jesus, just after feeding that huge crowd on five loaves and two fish, sent his disciples out in a boat while he stayed back to pray. He sat on a hillside and watched as a wind storm came up and the waves battered the boat threatening to kill them. Jesus walked to them on the water in the midst of that storm. They thought he was a ghost which only compounded the fear. But he said to them, “Have courage. It is I. Don’t be afraid.” He got in the boat and calmed the storm. Don’t be afraid of trials. God hasn’t forgotten you. He’s got his eye on you. He’ll show up when the time is right and the storm will go away.
I’m reminded of the words of Paul at the opening to his first letter to the Corinthian churches. He says: “For in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind— just as the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you— so that you are not lacking in any gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ. He will also strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful, by whom you were called into the partnership of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord (1 Cor. 1:5-9).
I’m also reminded of when Paul talks of how he prayed earnestly, multiple times for Jesus to heal him of this horrible, oozy eye disease that he had. Oddly, Jesus refused and told him: “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” We grow stronger through these trials.
Again, Paul says, “No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it (1 Cor 10:13).
When you find yourselves in the midst of trials and struggling to not renounce your loyalty to Jesus, draw close to him and he will draw close to you. Don’t be afraid, he will strengthen you. He will in time bring the trial to an end and you will be the better for it. You will know him better and the trial will have been the vehicle of God to produce in you the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Amen.
