Temptation
5 April 2010It had been many, many years since I read C. S. Lewis’ book Mere Christianity so I decided to take it up again. I remembered it being a great book but it was to far removed in time to remember any details.
One of the things that struck me most in this re-reading of the classic work was what Lewis had to say about temptation.
Lewis said that only Jesus really understood the full force of temptation. The rest of us don’t really understand temptation because we end up giving in to it. The man who doesn’t even struggle against temptation, says Lewis, has the least understanding of all.
Lewis’ point is that to really understand temptation you must resist it. If you give in right away you haven’t really experienced the power of it. Only through resisting do we experience the power of temptation and to understand it to the fullest, we would have to always successfully resist. Since only Jesus has ever done that, only He really understands the fullness of temptation.
We tend to have the opposite view. We think that because Jesus is God, He never really dealt with temptation the way we do because He wasn’t born with a sin nature. I confess that I’ve been guilty of such thinking at times but that is equivalent to saying that Adam and Eve didn’t experience temptation because they weren’t born with a sin nature. That turns out to be an indefensible position considering that they were tempted and gave in to that temptation.
Jesus not only experienced the full force of temptation because He never succumbed to it, He also experienced the full consequences of temptation and sin because He bore our punishment in our place.
We want to make excuses. We want to say that temptation is to difficult to resist and that God doesn’t really understand what we’re going through. But the reality is that He understands better than we do. He has compassion when we face temptation and fail but He does not excuse us.
For our part, we need to put some real effort into resisting temptation. We recognize that we cannot prevail on our own, that only by the power of God in us can we ever prevail. But I know from my own experience that far to often we fail because we don’t really even try. We don’t depend on God for strength. We don’t hide His Word in our hearts so that we can draw on that when we’re tempted. Indeed, far to often we don’t want to resist because we really want to do the thing that is tempting us!
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April 21st, 2010 at 8:34 am
I think you are right that we often don’t try enough or at all to avoid temptation. It it is through the struggle of doing so that we can learn how powerful the enemy is and how powerless we are on our own — and how desperately we need God’s strength to overcome. Thank you for this post, Ron!