Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him.

Let no one say when he is tempted [or “tested,” as in verse 12], “I am being tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.

Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.

Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures. (James 1:12–18)

When you hear the words of verse 12, “Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial [testing],” you are hearing an echo of what it was like to be a Jewish Christian in the churches to whom James was writing. Testing, testing, testing.

Some were poor and wore shabby clothes and lacked daily food (2:16). Some were humiliated when they came to church dressed like that and were told to “stand over there” (2:3). Some were dragged into court by the rich (2:6). There were fights and quarrels (4:1). People spoke evil against them (4:11). Some were defrauded of their wages (5:4). Some were condemned and murdered (5:6). Some were sick (5:15). And all of them were told to be patient in suffering (5:7, 10).

We usually think of the book of James as the book of doing. And it is at least that. “Be doers of the word, and not hearers only” (1:22). Put away anger (1:19). Be done with filthiness and wickedness (1:21). Visit orphans and widows (1:27). Don’t practice any partiality (2:1). Shun adultery and murder (2:11). Give to the needy (2:16). Tame your tongue, and use it for blessing, not cursing (3:8, 10). Forsake jealousy and selfish ambition (3:16). Be peaceable and gentle and open to reason, impartial, full of mercy and good fruits, bearing a harvest of righteousness (3:17–18). Learn how to pray like a wife who loves her husband (God), not like an adulterous wife who uses her husband’s generosity to hire lovers (4:3–4). Love your neighbor as you love yourself (2:8). Yes, it is the book of doing the word. Faith without doing is dead.

But what this text in chapter 1, and I think the whole book, presses on us is that all of James’s exhortations are written to people whose lives are characterized by suffering.

Painful Path to Joy

He begins with it in 1:2: “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds.” He spends almost the whole first chapter on it. And he ends with it in 5:10: “As an example of suffering and patience, brothers, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord.” And he soberly implies that it will be this way till Jesus comes: “Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord” (5:7).

Therefore, if you are a faithful Christian, this is going be your life — a life full of faith-filled good deeds clothed with hardships and suffering, which James calls “tests.”

Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials [or tests] of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. (1:2–3)

Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial [testing], for when he has stood the test [i.e., when he has been proven and found genuine] he will receive the crown of life. (1:12)

James calls them tests because they are from God. Neither nature nor Satan gives tests. They attack faith; they don’t test faith. They do not put you through fire to prove the gold of your faith is genuine. Satan aims to devour, not refine.

We know this is the way James thinks about suffering because in 4:13–15 he says,

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit.” . . . Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”

If I live to the end of this chapel, it is because the Lord willed it. If I die before the end of this chapel, it is because the Lord willed it — and thus it will be an all-wise test for my wife. And he goes further. If I “do this or that,” it is because the Lord willed it. If I totally blank out while preaching and can’t finish the message, that will be from the Lord, and it will be a test for my faith in the goodness and kindness of the Lord for me.

Or we could make the same point — that God governs our suffering — from James 5:10–11:

As an example of suffering and patience . . . you have heard of the steadfastness of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord [telos kyriou], how the Lord is compassionate and merciful.

All Job’s sufferings were purposeful. And the purpose was God’s (see Job 42:11). And the goal was a compassionate and merciful testing.

So, when we read James 1:12, “Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial [testing],” James means for us to understand that the testing is from the Lord, not Satan and not nature. And I am going to argue now that all of verses 12–18 are intended by James (and by God!) to help us see our lives as blessed (with the deepest and longest happiness) because of this testing.

Blessing Through Testing

In other words, James says, I am about to exhort you five dozen times (there are 62 imperatives in the Greek of this letter) to be doers of the word (1:22). And I am fully aware that I am calling upon you to live this unselfish, other-person-oriented, loving, sacrificial way of life in the midst of many God-given miseries called tests. And since I am aware of that, I am devoting most of the first chapter to persuading you that these painful tests are designed by God to make you blessed (makarios) — that is, deeply and lastingly happy. I believe that is the main point of my text (James 1:12–18), and it is the main point of this message. Everything after 1:12a (“Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under [testing]”) is argument.

The text is built around four arguments that support this main point — namely, that God’s tests are designed to lead us to deep and lasting happiness (our blessedness), not designed to make us sin and lead us to death.

Argument 1

Blessed [deeply and lastingly happy] is the man who remains steadfast under trial [testing], for when he has stood the test [been proven like gold through fire] he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him. (verse 12)

So, the reason that God-given tests of affliction make you more deeply and lastingly happy is that they provide the circumstances, the occasions, the means by which God fits us to wear the crown of life — to have eternal life. Painful tests and patient endurance and provenness lead to life. If we really believe this is how God is fitting us for eternal life — for eternal joy — would we not say, “I am blessed”? These are reasons for me to be deeply and lastingly happy.

But here’s a key question for your real-life experience of this: What’s being tested by hardship? James mentions only one thing. He doesn’t mention faith (which would be my first thought). He doesn’t mention hope. What he mentions is love — love for God.

Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him. (1:12)

Who gets the crown of life? Those who love God. So, those who are tested and endure and are proven as real get the crown, and those who love him get the crown. Surely those two ways of describing how we get the crown of life are not alternatives! Surely James is saying, “When you walk through the fire of testing, will you come out on the other side more deeply loving God, or not? If you do, you get the crown.” What’s being tested and refined and proven is love. Love for God. Valuing God. Enjoying God. Treasuring God. Being satisfied in God.

So, what is that? Do you love God? What are you feeling or willing or doing when you are loving God? Your eternity hangs on this. Here’s a picture of it in James 4:2–4:

You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask [God]. You ask [God] and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. You [adulteresses]! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God?

The word really is “adulteresses,” not “adulterous people.” Why? Because the picture is of God as our husband and we as his bride — the church. And James presents us praying — going to our generous husband (God) and asking him if we can have some money to go hire a prostitute because he does not satisfy anymore. That’s the picture: “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. You adulteresses!”

To love God means you find God to be so satisfying as your husband, shepherd, Father, King, Savior, treasure that you will not turn him into a cuckold and use his gifts to go get your satisfaction from another. That’s adultery.

“Take heart, suffering Christian. All your hardships are God’s tests.”

And the fires of affliction are designed by God to test and refine and prove the reality of that. Do you love God more than the spouse you just lost? Do you love him more than the health you just lost? Do you love God more than the life the doctor just said you will lose in six months? Suffering tests and refines and proves our love for God — that God is our supreme treasure, the deepest desire of our souls. And those who love God like this, verse 12 says, receive the crown of life.

Therefore, argument 1 that God’s painful tests lead to deep and lasting happiness (blessedness) is that God’s tests are designed to refine and prove our love for God, which in turn is how we inherit the crown of life.

Argument 2

Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death. (verses 13–15)

The main point of verses 13–15 is this: Nobody should ever say, “Those God-given tests of verse 12 are really God-given temptations designed to entice and drag us into sin and death.” And the reason we should never say it is because it’s not true. And verses 13–15 are the explanation for why it’s not true. So, the way verses 13–15 argue for the main point (tests are to make us deeply and lastingly happy) is to prove that those tests are not designed to entice us into sin and death.

What makes the connection between verse 12 (God is testing us) and verses 13–15 (God is not tempting us) difficult for the translators is that those two English words, testing and tempting, are the same word in Greek. So, all of us here at Bethlehem College & Seminary who are learning Greek have to decide where James stops talking about testing and starts talking about tempting (if he does), and what that connection means.

Here’s what I propose, and I’m not unique in this. In verse 13, I would translate it, “Let no one say when he is tested, ‘I am being tempted by God.’” And that’s how the two units relate to each other: I am being tested by God. Verse 12 says so. But I am not being tempted by God. And that’s what verses 13 and 15 explain and defend.

To make the argument work, everything hangs on the meaning of tempt. What does James mean by tempt in this text? Not, what do you mean by it? Or what do I mean by it? James has a very precise and limited definition for tempt in verses 13–15.

Verse 13b: “God cannot be tempted [apeirastos] with evil, and he himself tempts no one.” God can be tested (as he was sinfully tested over and over in the Old Testament, as Psalm 78:41 says). And God does test us. That’s the point of verse 12. So, James is drawing a firm line between testing and tempting in this text. God does test, but he does not tempt.

What’s the difference? Verse 14 gives James’s definition of tempt and temptation. “But each person is tempted when he is lured [literally dragged] and enticed by his own desire.” So, James is drawing a line through the progress of desire. On one side of that line, desire is moving toward an object without sin. When Jesus had fasted forty days in the wilderness, Matthew says he was hungry (Matthew 4:2). Hunger is a desire for food. After forty days, it would be a strong one. And as Jesus’s desire moves toward the object of bread, his desire approaches a line. And it doesn’t cross the line. On Jesus’s side of the line, his desire is holy and without sin.

And James is saying that the line is crossed when desire turns into being dragged and enticed by a sinful pleasure. For Jesus, that would have been doing what the devil wanted him to do. “Use your amazing power and satisfy your desire by abandoning the path of suffering and sacrifice” (see Matthew 4:3). None of Jesus’s desires ever crossed the line where they became sinful enticement.

This understanding of temptation (namely, being dragged away with sinful enticement) helps explain verse 13b, where James says, “God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one.” God is never dragged by or enticed by sinful allurements. He is never the victim of his own passions. This is the meaning of the doctrine of God’s impassibility — not that he has no emotions, but rather that they are never governed from outside his own sovereign will and self-sufficient fullness. God (and Jesus!) cannot be tempted in James’s sense because he is perfectly happy and self-sufficient. Nothing from outside him can create a controlling craving in him. He never says, “I’ve got to have that!” because he has everything in himself.

So, James infers from this that God doesn’t tempt anyone. James says in verse 14 that when anyone’s desire crosses the line from good desires to being sinfully enticed and dragged toward sinful acts, all that’s needed to explain this is our own desires.

God does not need to intrude into the dynamic of movement from good desire to sinful enticement. He doesn’t need to add anything from outside for our desires to cross from holy desires to sinful enticement. Our own desires make it happen. And we are responsible for those desires.

If we put this together with the absolute sovereignty of God over all things in James 4:15, what we conclude is this: God governs all things in such a way that he doesn’t need to reach in and drag us across the line from holy to unholy desires. Our desires in this fallen state are perfectly sufficient to bring about our entanglement in what James calls temptation.

And he completes his explanation in verse 15 by saying,

Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.

So, we have the picture of conception in the womb, birth out of the womb, and a completed lifespan ending in death. The conception happens in verse 14 with the coming into being of sinful enticement — that’s the unborn baby. So, verse 15 describes desire that, having conceived (namely, back in verse 14 with the awakening of sinful enticement), now gives birth to this active child of sin. And that sinning child grows up, fills up his life with sins, and as a result dies — perishes.

And James’s point in all of verses 13–15 is this: When God tests you with suffering (verse 12), he is not tempting you. He’s not intruding himself into your desires with a design to bring about sin and death. He is aiming to deepen and refine your love and bring you to the crown of life, and so make you deeply and lastingly happy — blessed.

Argument 3

Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. (verses 16–17)

Do not be deceived about what? I don’t see any reason to think he has changed his focus from what he’s been saying. So, I take this to be the same warning he gave in verse 13: “Let no one say when he is [tested], ‘I am being tempted by God.’” Don’t say that. It’s not true. It’s a deception. So, don’t be deceived into thinking God is the kind of God who is using tests as a way to get you to have sinful desires and then sin your way into death. That was the deception of verse 13.

So, here in verse 16 is the same warning: “Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers.” Yes, he sends many painful tests your way. But in doing that, he is not evil. He is not whimsical and unpredictable, with dark intentions. No. He is the source of every good gift. Every test that comes down on you comes from the Father of lights. Yes, all the lights of heaven — the sun and moon and stars — change continually. Brighter, less bright. Full moon, no moon. Bright sun, clouded sun. And shadows run with constant change all over the ground.

But it is not so with the Father of lights. He is the source of all light. And the source of light is always bright, always unchanging — inexhaustible in goodness and perfection. So, don’t be deceived. Your suffering is not sinister. Your testing is not temptation.

Argument 4

Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures. (verse 18)

The most striking link with the preceding is the word “bring forth,” or “cause to be born.” He caused us to be born by the gospel, the word of truth. The only other place in the New Testament where this word “cause to be born” (apokyeō) occurs is in verse 15: “Sin when it is fully grown brings forth death” — “causes death” to be born.

It is utterly striking. Who talks about giving birth to death? Birth leads to life. But that is exactly what James is contrasting. Temptation — the crossing of the line by our desires into sinful enticement — gives birth to sin, which gives birth to death. But God is not like that. He does not tempt, and he does not send tests to give birth to death. He gives birth to life. And that life is the life of the new creation, which has begun with every new creature in Christ. The “firstfruits of his creatures.”

The Heart Behind Every Test

So, the main point of the text and the message is this: God’s tests are designed to lead us to deep and lasting happiness (our blessedness), not designed to tempt us into sin and lead us to death.

• Argument 1 (verse 12): All God’s tests are designed to deepen our love for him, which leads to the crown of life.
• Argument 2 (verses 13–15): It is totally wrong to say, “When he tests us, he is tempting us.” He can’t be tempted and tempts nobody with sinful enticements that lead to death.
• Argument 3 (verses 16–17): To think otherwise is deception, because God is the source of all good and all light, not the source of sinful enticements that lead to death.
• Argument 4 (verse 18): Yes, God causes birth, but it is not the birth of death by sin. It is the birth of life and new creation.

Therefore, take heart, suffering Christian. All your hardships are God’s tests. They do not come from a fickle heart, or a dark heart, or a tempting heart. They come from the Father of lights, the life-giver, the all-sufficient, untemptable one, whose whole design for you is your unshakable love for him and his crowning you with life — with blessedness, with the deepest and longest happiness.