God has determined from eternity what will happen and His providence is what brings it to pass. The Heidelberg Catechism describes God’s providence this way: “The almighty and everywhere present power of God; whereby, as it were by His hand, He upholds and governs heaven, earth, and all creatures; so that herbs and grass, rain and drought, fruitful and barren years, meat and drink, health and sickness, riches and poverty, yea and all things come, not by chance, but by His Fatherly hand…since creatures are so in His hand, that without His will they cannot so much as move.” Everything happens by the upholding and governing of all things by God’s own hand. “In Him, we live, move, and have our being.” Acts 17
The Bible is clear that this is the case with the so called problem of moral evil. God is behind our temptations. James 1. In the firs several verses he is unashamed to attribute the cause and purpose of our trials as coming from our benevolent God. Then James moves on to address the issue of temptation as to it’s use as an enticement to sin. Yet he does so as a clarification of a potential misunderstanding. When we sin, we tend to shift the blame from ourselves to others. At times we might say something like, ‘I would not have sinned if so and so had not enticed me.’ The excuses we make can cloud the issue of responsibility. And the issue can be made so cloudy, that we can blame God for our sin. However, though God uses temptation in order to test us, James is careful to point out that God cannot be blamed if we sin. He moves from, pieros, which is the testing from God, to pierosmos the inward effect of being drawn away to sin. For instanc we can say, “I am tempted by that television” referring to the outward temptation presented by the television itself. Or we can mean we are tempted so as to be inwardly drawn toward the television. From pieros to pierosmos.
In verse 13, “let no man when he is tempted say, he is tempted of God.” That is, do not say God is the culpable source of your enticement to sin. “For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He tempt any man.” The issue is sin, something which God cannot do. He can’t sin because there is no Law placed over Him by which He could transgress. He is the law, which means if He were to sin it would be against Himself. But since He only ever acts according to His own inherent moral perfections, the idea of God being tempted to evil is absurd. Therefore when a man commits evil, it’s not because God is evil, but because we are evil.
“But each man is tempted when he is drawn away by his own lust and enticed.” Our lust is the blamable source of sin, not God. Consider Romans 7:7. The act of lusting (epithumea) is bound up in the commandment which forbids coveting (epithumeo). To covet is to set your heart upon that which is forbidden by God. Lust is a desire for something God forbids. It is an inordinate desire, either for something God expressly forbids, or for an excess of something God approves, such as eating food.
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Lust is not of God. Look at 1 John 2:16. Lust is of the world (the flesh, the eyes, the pride of life). Therefore God cannot be blamed for our inordinate desires.
See how this is demonstrated in the first sin committed by man. When Adam sinned he blamed God and His providence. When questioned about what he had done, Adam answered, “the woman whom You gave Me, she gave me of the fruit and I ate.” Adam was right about God appointing the means which led to his temptation. Adam could have gone a step further with it and said, “God, by your providence, Eve had the tree before her, the serpent came and called her attention to it, she ate, then offered it to me. You had so orchestrated everything which led to this temptation.” In fact, Adam’s answer implied as much. But God did not accept his answer because Adam also implied something false. He was implying that he was an innocent victim of providential circumstances. But God gave to Adam, as He gives to all men, a role of active involvement in His providence; a role in the context of a moral law by which God obligates all men to the duty of obedience. Therefore in spite of God’s provision of the test, Adam was morally culpable because his duty was to obey God.
We see this more explicitly laid out in Eve’s case, Gen. 3:6. If the Devil succeeded at anything, it was at preoccupying Eve’s thoughts with the tree. But notice that her thoughts about the tree were not about how awful it would be to disobey her loving heavenly Father, or about God’s threat of death were she to disobey. Rather, her thoughts about the tree accorded with a desire for the forbidden, she was lusting after the fruit. Before she even took the fruit in her hand, she took hold of it in her heart as she saw it was good for food: lust of the flesh, desirable to the eyes: lust of the eyes, and good to make one wise: the pride of life.
We are active agents in the providence of God, responsible for how we act and react when temptations come before us. God is the one ultimately in control of how we respond to His testing. He determines what the test will reveal as to what is in the the heart whether grace or corruption. The Bible teaches that if our corruption is revealed, it is because God has withdrawn the sanctifying influences of His grace from us. He is exposing our sin and our need of His grace, as was in the case of Hezekiah. 2Chron 32. But, if we resist the enticement of lust as Abraham did in Gen. 22, then God is demonstrating the preserving and renewing power of His grace.
