SproulLordsPrayer 8

The Prayer of the Lord

Chapter 8: Do Not Lead Us into Temptation

Having taught His disciples how to deal with their past sins in the fifth petition of the Lord’s Prayer—“Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”—Jesus turned His attention from the past to the future and addressed their vulnerability to sins beyond today and into tomorrow. By teaching His followers to ask, “Do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one” (
Matt. 6:13
), Jesus showed that we are to ask the Father to spare us from the temptations and the spiritual attacks that can lead us into new sin.
A superficial reading of this petition of the Lord’s Prayer should jar our sensibilities to some degree, because nothing could be farther from the realm of possibility than that God would entice anyone to sin. James teaches in his epistle, “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am tempted by God’; for God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He Himself tempt anyone” (
James 1:13
). James goes on to explain that enticement and temptation to sin arise from within, from our own evil inclinations and desires. External temptations can come to us from fellow sinners who want misery in company or from Satan himself, who is known in the Bible as the tempter. But God Himself does not engage in temptation to sin. How, then, are we to understand this petition?
The force of the language does not have to do with God’s enticing us to sin. A better wording might be, “Do not lead us into the place of testing.” Jesus is saying that we should pray that the Father will never cause us to undergo a severe test of our faith or of our obedience.
God, however, sometimes deems it best for His children to go through testing. For this reason, we see examples in Scripture of God delivering someone to be tested, to go through trials in order to purify that person’s faith and to refine his or her righteousness. Consider Abraham, who was put to that abysmal test that is recorded in
Gen. 22
. For many years, hoping against hope, believing against all things that were seen, Abraham hung tenaciously to God’s promise that he would have a son from his own body and that he eventually would be the father of a great nation. Finally, in his old age, God fulfilled His promise, and the child of promise, Isaac, was born. But one dreadful day, God put Abraham to the test. God came to him and said, “Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you” (
Gen. 22:2
). Abraham obeyed all that God told him to do, to the point of raising his knife to slay Isaac on the altar. But at the last possible second, God sent an angel crying out, “Abraham, Abraham! … Do not lay your hand on the lad, or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me” (
Gen. 22:11–12
). Abraham had passed his test. He then turned and saw a ram caught in the thicket by its horns. God was Jehovah Jireh, the God who provides. He had provided a substitute to be slain in the place of Abraham’s son.
A Specific Evil
Jesus does not simply teach us to pray that God would deliver us from testing. He gets very specific in the second part of the sixth petition. This part of the petition both reinforces and expands what Jesus is teaching us in this petition, for we find here a Hebrew literary strategy called parallelism, a technique that links two statements so that the second illumines the significance of the first.
This petition is frequently translated and recited with these words: “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” The use of the word evil in this translation is not accurate, and it often causes a lot of misunderstanding. People come to all sorts of incorrect ideas about what “evil” means, but the original Greek makes the meaning perfectly clear.
In the Scriptures, in the New Testament Greek, the word for evil is poneron. The last two letters, -on, indicate something particular. In the Greek language, as in many languages, nouns can be masculine, feminine, or neuter. We sometimes do this even in English when we talk about ships or even cars and call them by feminine pronouns. Well, the -on ending puts this Greek word in the neuter form. In this form, it refers to evil in the abstract. But this is not the form in which the word appears in the Lord’s Prayer. Here, the Greek word is not poneron, it’s poneros—and the -os ending in the Greek indicates a masculine noun. Therefore, what Jesus is saying here is best translated not as “deliver us from evil” but as “deliver us from the evil one.” The New King James Version has it exactly right, for when the term ponerosis used in the New Testament, it is a title specifically for Satan.
Now we can see how the second half of this petition amplifies the first. As Scripture reveals, God often uses Satan to bring testing on His children. Thus, when Jesus teaches us to pray, “Do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one,” He not only is teaching us to pray for deliverance from testing, but teaching us to seek divine protection from the wiles of Satan. He is calling us to pray that we would not be exposed to the Devil’s onslaughts, to his attempts to entice us to sin or to destroy our confidence in our Savior by accusing us of our failures and of our imperfections.
Biblical Tests of Faith
Let’s look at some of the biblical narratives in which we find Satan being used in the testing of individuals. First, let’s go back to the creation story, to the pristine purity our primordial parents enjoyed in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve were created and lived initially without sin, in a state of innocence, but the opening words of
Gen. 3
are ominous. They are filled with a sense of foreboding, as something dark and sinister is introduced to redemptive history with the seemingly innocuous words, “Now the serpent was more cunning than any beasts of the field which the Lord God had made” (
Gen. 3:1
). What follows in this narrative is the attempt by the serpent, who is Satan, to persuade Adam and Eve to follow him rather than their Creator. He comes to them with a simple question about God’s authority: “Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden?’” (
Gen. 3:1
). When Eve answers the serpent and mentions that death is the penalty God has assigned for eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Satan then launches a frontal assault: “You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (
Gen. 3:4
). In other words, Satan says: “God didn’t tell you the truth. Don’t believe Him. Believe me.”
The backdrop to this encounter is the probationary status of Adam and Eve. God had given them a promise of life contingent on their obedience to His one command. They were not to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. When God allowed them to be tested, they failed. They succumbed to the subtle wiles of the evil one and plunged the entire human race into ruin and death. This was a monumental test, a supremely important trial, but Adam and Eve failed it miserably.
Fast forward to the patriarch Job, who though he was a member of the fallen race of Adam, nevertheless distinguished himself by his extraordinary righteousness and obedience. Satan, we are told, comes to heaven after walking to and fro across the earth. In that encounter, God asks whether Satan, in his wanderings, had taken notice of Job. God adds, “There is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, one who fears God and shuns evil” (
Job 1:8
). Satan responds with sneering contempt: “Does Job fear God for nothing? Have You not made a hedge around him? … You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. But now, stretch out Your hand and touch all that he has, and he will surely curse You to Your face!” (
Job 1:9–11
). God says, “Behold, all that he has is in your power; only do not lay a hand on his person” (
Job 1:12
). God tells Satan, “You can take his wealth, you can take his property, you can take his good name, his reputation, his family, you can afflict him any way you want, but you can’t make him suffer physically.” Satan doesn’t hold back. If any man in the history of the world is subjected to every dreadful attack that Satan could make, it is Job. His livestock, his servants, and his children all are taken away, but Job refuses to find fault with God’s providence.
That leads to Satan’s second visit to heaven, where he once again discusses Job with God. God mentions that Job “holds fast to his integrity, although you incited Me against him, to destroy him without cause” (
Job 2:3
). To that, Satan replies that Job would curse God if he were to suffer in his body. Once again God acquiesces and once again Satan goes after Job with all his fury, so that Job is afflicted with boils all over his body. In the midst of his hellish suffering, Job’s wife, who no doubt loves and cares for him, and who wants to comfort him and release him from his pain, becomes an instrument of the serpent. She says, “Do you still hold fast to your integrity? Curse God and die!” (
Job 2:9
). Job can hardly speak, but he says, “Shall we indeed accept good from God, and shall we not accept adversity?” (
Job 2:10
). Later, as Job endures the “comforts” of his friends, he makes an even more powerful statement of his trust in God: “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him” (
Job 13:15
). That’s what it means to be a servant of God. Job aced the test, and God blessed him and restored the things he had lost.
The worst test ever endured by a human being was the one given to the God-man, the Lord Jesus Christ. Immediately after His baptism, the Spirit of God drove Him into the Judean wilderness, to be tempted by the Devil for forty days. We have no idea of what our Lord endured in that time alone in the wilderness. Whereas the first Adam fell to a simple seductive suggestion, the new Adam endured everything that hell could throw at Him. Satan tempted Jesus in manifold ways, but Jesus answered each temptation with Scripture and so turned back all the assaults. But the test didn’t end when the forty days were finished. The Devil finally left Jesus, but Luke adds, he left only “until an opportune time” (
Luke 4:13
). Satan kept coming back to try to cause Jesus to stumble, to try to make Him fall.
When Jesus instructed His disciples to pray, “Do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one,” He was speaking from experience. He had passed through a time of testing at the hands of Satan, so He instructed His disciples to ask the Father to spare them from the Devil’s attacks. He was teaching His followers to pray, “O Lord, don’t expose us to the place of temptation where we are going to be assaulted by the power of Satan, but protect us from his fiery darts. Place a hedge around us. Be our shields.” We should pray every day for deliverance, not in the sense of demon exorcism, but in the sense of protection from the assaults of Satan.
None of us has ever been tested like Abraham, like Adam and Eve, like Job, or like our Lord. Yet, church history is replete with examples of Christians being put to the test, even to the point of martyrdom. We can find many examples of God calling believers to endure the worst, then giving them the grace to endure it. For instance, in the second century, Polycarp, the aged bishop of Smyrna, was taken into Roman custody and told he must renounce Christ or be killed. Polycarp replied, “Eighty-six years I have served Him, and He never once wronged me. How can I blaspheme my King, who saved me?” He was martyred a few moments later. Likewise, Bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley were burned at the stake during the persecutions of “Bloody” Queen Mary for teaching justification by faith alone. As the fire was being lit, Latimer called: “Be of good cheer, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle in England by God’s grace as, I trust, shall never be put out.” So it has been through the centuries, as Christians have gone through deep testing.
The Devil’s Accusations
We’re familiar with the role of Satan as the tempter, and that’s certainly his stock-in-trade. But if anything is his trademark in terms of the work he does in the life of the Christian, it’s not so much the work of temptation as the work of accusation. Satan seeks to do everything he can to paralyze believers with unresolved guilt. In that sense, he’s standing in direct opposition to the truth of God, which, of course, has been his role from the beginning. Ever since Eden, Satan has been about contradicting what God says.
God makes a simple but profound promise to Christians: “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (
1 John 1:9
). When a child of God confesses his sin, God forgives it—it’s as simple as that. But as soon as God says that believer is forgiven, Satan shows up and says: “Oh, no, you’re not. You are still guilty.” When a Christian listens to him, he become burdened and weighed down with a paralyzing load of guilt. That guilt, in turn, robs the believer of his assurance of salvation.
Paul addresses this problem when he writes, almost triumphantly: “Who shall bring a charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is he who condemns?” (
Rom. 8:33–34
). God has justified us on the basis of the righteousness of Christ. Thus, when Satan brings his accusations against us, we should respond: “Yes, Satan, I sinned, but now my guilt is covered and my sin is washed away. Be gone!”
Peter referred to Satan as the believer’s “adversary” (
1 Pet. 5:8
). But we are assured that if we “resist the devil … he will flee” (
James 4:7
), and prayer is a key weapon in our resistance. Martin Luther is a powerful example to us in this. Luther had an acute awareness of the presence of Satan. On one occasion, he threw his inkwell across the room, saying he had seen Satan there. He spoke of the anfectung, Satan’s unbridled assault against him to try to make him compromise, fall into despair, or deny the faith. In this struggle, Luther resorted to prayer, and he went to his knees every day to pray the Lord’s Prayer, specifically the sixth petition: “Do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.”
I often ask myself how I would measure up if God allowed me to be severely tested. I honestly don’t know, and I don’t want to have to find out. So I often pray this petition of the Lord’s Prayer, asking: “O Lord, please, please, keep that hedge around me. Don’t put me in that place of testing. Deliver me from the evil one, who goes about like a roaring lion, ready to devour whomever he will.” I pray for divine protection from all the forces of evil that surround us, and I believe this petition should be on every believer’s lips each day.
SproulLordsPrayer 8
© 2009 R.C. Sproul Trust. All worldwide rights reserved.
Used with permission under license.