Take your Bibles, if you will, and open again to James chapter 1. The title of the message this evening is, “Why Do You Sin?” That’s a rhetorical question right now. We’ll answer it as we go through, I hope. Last Sunday, we saw in the earlier verses, 1 to 12, that James is dealing with the subject of trials. And now in verses 12 through 18—there’s a transition in verse 12—and now we come to the subject of temptations.
James 1, beginning with verse 12:
“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, ‘I’m being tempted by God.’ God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. But each person is tempted when he’s 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 first fruits of his creatures.”
Let’s bow together for prayer. Our Father, we pray that through this passage this evening, you will give us and instill deep in our hearts a greater sense of the awfulness, the severity, the evil, and the consequences of our sin. Give us a sense of responsibility, and increase our appreciation for the grace that we have in Christ to overcome. We pray in his name. Amen.
I Want To Begin With Three Questions
I want to begin with three questions.
Number one: Did you ever notice how any given trial has built into it a strong potential for sin? Any given trial has built into it a strong potential for sin. That is, you’re going through a suffering, a trial of some kind that we looked at in verses 5 to 12, and at some point in those trials, it becomes temptation to sin. Well, that’s the transition we see in verses 12 and 13 here. “Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test…” All right, so there we’re told that our trials are there for testing to prove us. “Blessed is a 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, ‘I’m being tempted by God,’ for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one.”
So trials are testings. They’re not just a suffering for its own sake, but they are testings to prove us. That’s the idea here of standing the test and being proven. We saw last time that trials do not automatically lead to spiritual growth. They’re intended for that, but it depends on our response in faith, and so trials are testings that also prove what we are. And yet, verse 13, somehow in that same trial, it can become an occasion for sin. Distrust God, become faithless, give up, lapse of faith, grumble and complain. So the happy benefit of trials, verse 12—being approved and standing the test and all of that—does not come automatically. It depends on our response. So again, our first question, the answer: trials have at the same time built into them a potential for sin, temptation to sin.
Question number two: Where do those trials come from? That’s a trick question, so don’t answer out loud. Where do those trials come from? Is not God sovereign over all? Does he send trials? And if it is the purpose of trials to prove us and to test us and to make us better, isn’t that God’s intent in sending the trials? So God sends those trials.
Now, if God sends the trials, and if those trials are at the same time brimming with potential to sin, question number three: Isn’t it true that God tempts us to sin? The logic is compelling, isn’t it? Where are you going with this, Fred? In fact, you might even draw a further conclusion from it. If I sin, it must have been God’s will. He predestines everything, doesn’t he? Never mind the devil. God made me do it. Well, it makes great sense, and the logic is compelling. God orders all that is. He sends the trials. He didn’t give me the victory. He not only tempted me, but it was his will that I fail and that I sin. It’s all a part of God’s predestinarian plan. The God who makes everything that is ordered this failure in my life.
God Himself Is Untemptable
Well, the logic is compelling, but I have to tell you it is completely wrong. Completely wrong. And we have that on the basis of verse 13. “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I’m being tempted by God.’ For God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one.” Absolutely, under no circumstances, never does God tempt you to sin. That’s the statement. To sustain the point, James offers the theological reasoning. The second part of the verse: God himself is untemptable. He cannot be tempted with sin. He’s a good God. He can’t be tempted with sin, and he doesn’t tempt anyone. So God cannot, will not, under any circumstances, tempt us to sin.
So then, what about all of this good theological reasoning that I started with? It sounded so good anyway. It makes logical sense, but the fact is it’s entirely unbiblical. Because while it makes sense, it’s drawing some conclusions without taking into some other considerations that James brings in, particularly in the last part of verse 13, but throughout verse 13, that God is not tempted with sin and does not tempt anyone. In fact, it doesn’t take into consideration God’s purpose in sending trials.
God’s purpose in sending trials, we saw in verses two and following last time, is to grow us, to rub off all of those rough edges, to make us what he has called us to be. And so God sends suffering, a trial of some kind; he sends it to prove us, to rub off the rough edges. And then we, in response to those trials we saw last time, verse five, pray and ask God for wisdom in those trials so that we’ll grow through them and his purpose will be realized. We pray and ask for wisdom, resolve that we will follow through with it and grow, or we don’t. And when we don’t, what God intended for good becomes an occasion for sin. God had no ulterior sinister motives in it to make us sin, but we fail and the testing intended to prove us brings us down.
Whose Fault Is It When I Sin?
Well, then the question: whose fault is it when I sin? Now you might say, “The devil made me do it,” and there’s something to that, but that’s not what James tells us here. James tells us in verse 14, “Each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire.” See where he places the blame? Your sin is your fault. Put it another way, verse 14: you sinned because you wanted to. That’s it. You sinned because you chose to. Take away the devil, you still have an evil heart, you still have evil desires, you still have evil tendencies, and you sinned because you found that sin attractive.
Now you notice in verse 14 the allusion to fishing. It’s there; you might not have noticed it as we went through, but he uses some of that vocabulary. Verse 14: “Each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire.” The word “lured” is just what it says. It’s something alluring and entrapping. “Enticing,” well, that’s the idea. The word means something like dragging him in, reeling him in, we might say.
Now, I’m out of my league here. I don’t know much about fishing. We could ask Joe Horchuk about that. I don’t know a lot about fishing, and I offer this as proof: the largest fish I ever caught was too small legally to keep. It’s true. A number of years ago, Jim and I were down at the bay at the ocean fishing. I pulled in a flounder. Thing was huge. Measured it. Nope, not big enough. Can’t keep it. That’s my fishing ability. But I do know that when you fish, you have to use some kind of bait. The bait is something that the fish finds alluring. You might use a lure to fish. The bait is something the fish finds attractive, alluring. For the life of me, I don’t know what is alluring about a worm, but there it is. You put the worm on the hook, you thread it through, you throw it in the water, and the stupid fish thinks that’s attractive. He bites. He’s snagged. You reel him in, and he becomes your dinner. He was allured. He was enticed. He found the stupid worm attractive, and the joke was on him.
And so, verse 15, “Then desire, when it has conceived, gives birth to sin, and sin, when it’s fully grown, brings forth death.” Just as the fish was tricked by the worm on the hook, so also you find sin attractive. And you bite. And it’s not till later that you realize that it wasn’t worth it. It was deceiving. But you did find it attractive, and that’s why you bit. Say it again, verse 14: your sin is your fault. You sinned because you wanted to. There’s something about sin that we find attractive and that’s why we do it. It deceives us. The tempting voice, though, is not outside of us. The tempting voice is inside of us. And because we have this attraction for sin, we bite.
God’s Universal Sovereignty And Human Sin
Now, this is consistently—and I’m going to do a bit of an aside here—this is consistently how the Bible handles the problem of God’s universal sovereignty and human sin. If God is sovereign over all, if God created all that is, then did he create sin? Did God create evil? Somebody asked me that question last Sunday here at church. “Did God create evil?” And again, the logic is compelling. God created everything that is. Evil is. Therefore, God created evil. The Bible’s answer to that—and I’ll take a couple of minutes to work through that—that answer is just oversimplified. God stands behind all that is, but he does not stand behind evil the same way that he stands behind what is good.
So for example, when you do what is good and right before God, God gets the credit for it, right? He works in us both to will and to do of his good pleasure. So when we do what is good and right, God gets the credit for it. When we do what is evil, we get the blame for it. It’s not symmetrical, is it? We do what’s right, God gets the credit. We do what’s wrong, we get the blame. The same sovereign God behind it all. How does that work out? Well, I thought I’d quote here from our church’s Statement of Faith, the 1689 London Baptist Confession. Now this is a very compressed statement like the Confessions of Faith are, so you have to listen carefully:
“God hath decreed in himself from all eternity, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably all things whatsoever come to pass. Yet, so as thereby is God neither the author of sin, nor hath fellowship with any therein, nor is violence offered to the will of the creature, nor yet is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away.”
You got all that? Okay, that’s a pretty compressed statement. The idea of it all is that God cannot be said to be the direct or immediate cause of evil. He himself is good, he is not temptable himself, and he does not tempt with evil. And yet, God has decreed a world in which sin will emerge. But that evil that emerges in God’s world is always traced back to the choices of his willful creatures. Always.
So for example, when Satan fell, he rebelled against God. Do you think for a minute that Satan stood there and said, “You know, I really don’t want to rebel against God. I know this is not going to work out well for me, but God has decreed it and is forcing my hand and I have no choice in it. I’ve got to rebel. Here I go. Fall on the sword”? Or do you think when Eve ate the apple or the kumquat or whatever it was, do you think for a minute that she thought, “You know, I really don’t want to eat this thing, I don’t want to rebel against God, but God’s decreed it, here I go”? Or do you think that Adam, when he took the apple, or whatever it was, “I really don’t want to do this, but you know, the whole plan of redemption hangs on this, so God has decreed it, here I go, I’ll take it,” and he ate it? No. What Satan did, what Eve did, what Adam did, they did willfully. And therein lies the blame. And this is the way the scriptures treat it everywhere.
Now, just how evil emerges in creatures that were created good by a good God, there’s something in there that’s difficult to work out. Call it mystery. God created them good, yet he decreed that evil would arise from them, and yet when they sinned, it was their own willful choice, and they received the blame for it. God is the immediate cause of what is good. God is not the immediate cause of sin.
Now there are other factors to consider in working all of this out, and this should be several hours to do this and not just five minutes, but whatever evil is entailed in God’s decree for all that comes, we have to see it was for a purpose of a greater good. Because God is good, he could never have any kind of an evil purpose. He has a good purpose, even in decreeing that evil will arise from his good creation. He has a good purpose in it. Now, another problem arises with that: what is that greater good? And there you have to realize that God is under no obligation to tell you always what his greater purpose is. He doesn’t reveal all of that to us. Somehow it’s connected to his glory, whether in mercy or in judgment, but it is never the case that evil would arise from a good God apart from his purpose to do good through it.
Well, those are the major factors of the reasoning that goes into it. The idea of it, in short, is that the biblical writers always distance God from evil. God stands behind all that is, but he does not stand behind good and evil in the same way. It’s asymmetrical. He stands behind good as the immediate cause. He stands behind evil but in a distant way, and the evil and the guilt of it all is always assigned to the willful choices of his creatures.
And so, back to the question I was asked last week: does God create evil? Did God create evil? You want to say God created everything that is, but if you say God created evil, you have implied too much. And the biblical writers won’t do that. So for example, in Genesis, Joseph’s brothers—they wanted to kill him. They decided, “No, that’s mean, let’s not kill him. Let’s throw him in a pit and make him a slave.” I always think of my kids when I think of that story. One time Jim and Gina were scrapping and fighting. Gina says, “Daddy, would you shoot Jimmy?” “Gina, don’t you think that’s a little harsh?” “Yeah. Can we just give him away to a nice family?” That’s the Joseph story. And what they did was evil. And there’s no other way to say it. Completely evil. Now we get to the end of the book of Genesis and we find out God had a purpose in that. And in fact, you get Psalm 105 and it says it directly: God sent Joseph ahead. And yet the evil of it was the brothers’ entirely.
Or we get to Exodus. Pharaoh. You think for a minute Pharaoh’s thinking, “You know, I really want to let these people go. This is not going to work out well. But God decreed it and here we go”? A fascinating illustration of this is in Isaiah chapter 10. Isaiah is prophesying to the northern tribes of Israel. And he says, “You guys have been so wicked. I’m going to send the Assyrian armies down on you, and they’re going to be the axe in my hand to cut you down.” But when the Assyrian armies come, they don’t come saying, “We are the axe in God’s hand, and we are simply performing God’s will out of holy motives.” No. What they did, they did selfishly and with murderous and wicked intent. And so God judges the Assyrians for what they did to Israel.
Same thing happened to the southern tribes. Remember Habakkuk struggled over this. “Lord, Judah, they’re terrible. You’ve got to deal with their sin.” God says, “Okay, I’m going to send Babylon.” Habakkuk says, “Babylon? They’re worse than we are. You can’t do that.” God says, “Well, I’ll judge them when I’m done with them too.” You see, God doesn’t stand immediately behind evil. The classic example, of course, is the cross, ordained before the foundation of the world, and yet it was with evil hands they took him and crucified him. Judas—he wasn’t struggling over thinking, “Well, I really don’t want to do this, but it’s the creative purpose of God, I’ve got to betray Jesus.” He did it out of evil intent. The Jews that handed Jesus over—what they did, they did out of evil intent, and the blame is all theirs. And yet, in doing it, they accomplished the saving purpose of God. All the illustrations could go on. The point is, God stands behind all that is, but to say that he created evil, or to say that in this context he tempted me to sin—that just says way too much. And the biblical writers will never do that.
And in fact, in this passage here, he’s speaking of redeemed men and women here, who still struggle with sin. They still have, we still have, the remains of sin, even though we’ve been redeemed, sin’s grip has been broken, it doesn’t hold us with the same authority it used to have, and yet we struggle against sin. Paul deals with it in Romans chapter 6: “Yield yourselves to righteousness, don’t yield yourselves to the flesh.” The believer is one who’s caught, as it were, between two worlds. We have that in Galatians chapter 5: the flesh warring against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh. This is why Proverbs tells us you’re a fool if you trust your own heart. We’re too much a walking civil war. We can’t trust our heart. And that in the Bible is always the ground of individual responsibility. We sinned because we wanted to. We sinned because we chose it. The problem was me, my “want to.”
And so James says here, don’t blame God when you sin. I doubt that too many of you, when you sinned, were brazen enough to say, “God made me do it.” But I suspect there are some among us, and I would have—well, that’s enough. Some among us who have dared to say, “Well, God put me here,” or “These circumstances that God put me in,” or “God never gave me the victory over it. What was I to do?” Or maybe it’s more subtle than that. “Well, when I was a child, this and this and the other…” It all is very reminiscent of “the woman which you gave me.” Shifting the blame: “This is just the way God made me.” James says, no, you sinned because you wanted to, you chose it, it’s your fault. End of discussion. You found that sin alluring. Puritan John Owen said, “Temptation puts nothing into a man, it only draws out what was in him before.”
That’s what James is telling us here. In fact, he’s telling us more. He’s saying that, in fact, we love sin so much that we never stop to consider the insanity of it. You ever notice that sin never has a conscience? Temptation never has a conscience. It’s not till afterwards. Somehow, we don’t consider the cost. We don’t consider the consequences. All we consider is our right to this particular sin, whichever we’re being tempted with. Somehow we think God’s warnings against sin don’t apply in this case.
And so because sin is so deceitfully alluring, James reminds us in verse 15 of that ugly career of sin. He gives us this grotesque picture here of desire: desire conceiving, giving birth to an ugly child by the name of sin, and then sin resulting in death. “Desire, when it has conceived, gives birth to sin, and sin, when it’s fully grown, brings forth death.” Desire conceives when we welcome rather than resist the temptation that comes. We have this illicit rendezvous, as it were, with temptation. It gives birth to sin, and the result is not as happy as promised. In other words, we don’t consider often enough the high cost of sin. And that’s what verse 15 is about. It’s like a big warning sign. Remember, sin isn’t worth it. Look at the end. Look where it goes.
When Jim was growing up, I used to warn him about that as well. Remember when you’re tempted: this isn’t going to work out well. Think of the consequences. That’s verse 16. Do not be deceived. Keep your head about you. Think right about sin. There’s an old adage that says sin takes you further than you want to go, it keeps you longer than you wanted to stay, and it costs you more than you ever wanted to pay. That’s exactly what James is telling us here in verse 15. And so he tells us in verse 16, “Do not be deceived, my brothers.” He’s calling us to a clear-headed thinking, to sober assessment of what sin is and where sin takes us. Think, think, think, think, think, think like a Christian. Don’t be deceived in the moment of temptation. Keep your head; remember this isn’t going to work out well. The sin promises great pleasure and it just ends in something very different.
God Is Not Leaving Us To Hopelessness
Well, it’s one thing then to expose the root problem of sin—my sinful heart—but it’s quite another thing to resolve that problem. So what do we do with it? You might wonder if I’m so given to sin and I think sin is so attractive and it’s always my fault when I do it and that’s just the way I am, you might wonder then how will I ever make it? Well, I don’t think it takes a lot of careful meditation to notice what verse 17 is all about. “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.” You see what James is stressing here about God’s gifts. The goodness of God’s gift: he gives good gifts. There’s a plentitude, there’s an abundance of his gifts. Every good gift, every perfect gift—God is the source of every good thing that you have. And there’s a constancy about it. That’s the last part of the verse. It “comes down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variableness or shadow of turning.” Like the planets that you see—them come and they go and they turn and they get dark and they get bright—God’s not like that. He’s the Father of lights. It’s constant—constant in his goodness, constant in his giving. And he keeps giving perfect gifts all the time. That’s what God does. And James is telling us here, God is not leaving us to hopelessness in our sin. He makes ample provision. I think that’s the point of verse 17. God is the God who gives good gifts.
In fact, and he’ll progress with this now into verse 18, in fact, although by birth we are helpless sinners and we’re drawn to sin because of who we are and the sinfulness of our own heart, God has not left us there. Verse 18: “Of his own will, he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of first fruits of his creatures.” So God hasn’t left us with our original birth. He’s given us another birth, born all over again, as it were, and made us somebody entirely new. There’s new life. There’s new desires. The death grip of sin has been broken. We are made new people in Christ.
And in fact, that new birth was not due to our own will. If ever a verse forces you to be a Calvinist, it’s this one. “Of his own will, he brought us forth with the word of truth.” It wasn’t due to your own will; just like the physical birth is the result of the parents, so also our spiritual birth is the result of God’s decision. There’s a sovereign intervention. We loved our sin. We were going our own way. God intervened, made us all over again in Christ by uniting us to Christ by his Spirit, and we’re born all over again.
Now, be sure he uses means: the Word of Truth. “He brought us forth by the Word of Truth.” And there’s that great emphasis that the Reformers so insisted on: it’s the Spirit and the Word. The Spirit and the Word. The Spirit and the Word. It’s not the Word by itself; it’s not enough. But the Spirit doesn’t work in a vacuum. He works by means of the Word. And so the Word is proclaimed, the Gospel is preached, the Spirit works through that, brings us to life, and it was all God’s doing. That’s verse 18.
And in fact, verse 18 goes on to tell us, in bringing us to life, that was just a pledge of a larger, fuller harvest that was yet to come. “Of his own will, he brought us forth by the word of truth that we should be a kind of first fruits of his creatures.” So God intends to gather in the end a full harvest of men and women that he has brought to himself, making them his own. All of that to say, you are not in this by accident. God has brought you into this. And if you’re in this thing at all, you are part of a grand scheme that God has purposed and brought you to himself.
Well, what does that have to do with the passage? Well, do you think that this God who takes the initiative like this, this God who brought you forth by the word of truth from his own will, not waiting for you, would somehow abandon you to sin? Now that you’ve been made his, even though you struggle with sin, do you think he’s going to abandon you in that? Can you imagine that a God who does all of this would then just leave us? I think that’s the connection here. And I think it’s interesting that even in this, what Luther called the “straw-y epistle” of James, we have here this wonderful reminder of God’s sovereign grace powerfully working in us, reminding us again that God gives us everything he requires of us. That’s the nature of God’s grace. In a way, it’s reminiscent of 1 Corinthians chapter 10 and verse 13. God will not give you a temptation without making a way of escape with it by his grace. When we sin, it’s our fault. We should not despair, however, because God is the kind of God who has given us so much graciously, and that ought to encourage us that he will continue to do that.
There’s an ancient legend, a legend of an ancient kingdom whose king died suddenly. The heir to the throne was not clear. He had twin infant boys. The ambassadors were tasked with going to the nursery and deciding which of these two boys would be made king. And as the legend goes, they go there—how do you decide between two infant boys lying there in the cradle? They noticed one curious little difference according to the legend. One of the boys had his little tiny fist clenched tightly, and the other one, his hand was just wide open. And so they, of course, chose the one with the wide open hand, and the legend appropriately concludes with this king growing up to become known as the king with the open hand, generous and kind to his people.
Well, that’s a legend, but it is no legend—it’s experienced reality—that God is not a close-fisted God. God gives and he gives. That’s what he told us back in verse 5. He gives and gives, and doesn’t upbraid us for giving. He gives us in every good thing that we have. We have because of him and he took the initiative in it all. He’s the great giver of all that is good. He even sent his Son to take our place and bear the punishment of our sin. He sent his Spirit to bring us life in uniting us to his Son. He gives us every good thing that we have and so that although we may feel at times that indwelling sin may be all but completely unconquerable, we may be sure that because God is the lavish giver that he is, we will, verse 12, obtain the crown of life which God has promised to those who love him. Amen. Let’s pray. Our Father,