James 1:15

This passage follows straight on from James’s teaching on trials (James 1:2–12), where he told his readers to ask God for wisdom in them (James 1:5–8). They were Jewish Christians scattered abroad (James 1:1), under pressure and facing persecution. They knew from the Scriptures that God rules over all things, so that he can say, “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things” (Isaiah 45:7), and a suffering believer could twist that into the idea that God himself was pushing him toward sin. Jewish thought of the time already spoke of a tempter, whether Satan or the evil inclination it called the yetzer hara. James settles the matter with a plain command: “Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God.”

The word for tempt, peirázō, means to test, try or tempt, and the setting shows which sense is meant here. “Evil” stands right beside it, and the next verses speak of desire, sin and death, so in this verse it means being drawn toward wrongdoing. Blaming God for that pull can become an excuse for sin, a way of passing the blame upward, and James forbids the thought before anyone can say it.

“But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed.” Here dé links the thought as “But”, turning from God, who tempts no one, to us, who are all tempted. “Every man” takes in every believer, whatever his maturity or circumstances.

James draws two pictures from fishing and hunting. To be “drawn away”, exélkō, is built from words meaning “out of” and “to drag”. It means to be dragged out, the way a fish is pulled from its safe water by a line. To be “enticed”, deleázō, means to entrap, allure or beguile, and it is the word for baiting a hook or a trap. The bait is the pleasure or gain the sin promises, and it hides the hook, which is what the sin will cost. Desire first pulls a person off the path of righteousness, and then the bait draws him on toward the act.

The pull comes “of his own lust”. Ídios means one’s own, and with it James places the source of temptation inside the person. Epithymía means desire or longing, especially lust for what is forbidden. Jesus taught the same: “That which cometh out of the man, that defileth the man” (Mark 7:20–23), and “out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies” (Matthew 15:19). Paul describes the struggle in himself: “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do” (Romans 7:15–20).

Knowing where temptation starts puts the battle where it can be fought, in the heart and mind. James later tells his readers, “Resist the devil, and he will flee from you” (James 4:7), and “Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double minded” (James 4:8).

Verse 15 moves the picture from fishing to childbirth: “Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.” Desire is pictured as a mother. The verb for conceived, syllambánō, literally means to clasp or seize, and it is used for conceiving a child. A desire that is taken hold of, dwelt on and allowed to take root has conceived, and that is the moment of yielding inside the heart. What it gives birth to is hamartía, the common word for sin, broad enough to include sin in thought, word and deed.

Then the child grows. “When it is finished” means when sin has come to its full growth, practised again and again, left unrepented and allowed to rule a life. Its offspring is thánatos, death. The word can mean bodily death or death in a figurative sense, and here it means above all separation from God, felt now as lost fellowship with him and reaching at last to eternal death. It is the death God warned of at the beginning: “in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Genesis 2:17). Paul puts it in one sentence: “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 6:23).

Taken together, verses 14 and 15 trace four steps. A person is drawn away by his own desire, he is enticed, desire conceives and gives birth to sin, and sin full-grown brings forth death. The lesson is to deal with temptation at the earliest step, before desire conceives. “Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life” (Proverbs 4:23). Peter urges believers to “abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul” (1 Peter 2:11).

Verse 16 stands between the two halves of the passage. It looks back to the error James has just named, blaming God for temptation, and forward to the truth that guards against it, that God gives only good. The verb, planáō, means to roam from safety, truth or virtue, to go astray, to be deceived or led into error. A wrong belief about God is a serious wandering, and it can lead on to deception and moral failure. A believer who comes to think God tempts him will find his confidence in God’s goodness wearing away, and he may grow bitter and slow to draw near to God in prayer and worship. Blaming God also moves the blame off our own desires, and that stands in the way of repentance.

The safeguard is the truth God has given. All Scripture “is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16–17), and John tells believers to “try the spirits whether they are of God” (1 John 4:1).

James gives the warning in love. Agapētós means beloved or dear, and adelphós, brother, has the root meaning “from the same womb”. His readers are family to him, and the warning comes to them as a brother’s loving appeal.

Verse 17 sets God’s goodness against the dark chain of verses 14 and 15. Evil rises from within us, and all true good comes from God. “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above”. James uses two words for gift. Dósis is the act of giving, and dṓrēma is the thing given, the present itself. Together, with “every” repeated, they take in every good thing, both the act of God’s generosity and what it bestows. The gifts are good (agathós) and perfect (téleios), complete for what they are meant to do. They are “from above” (ánōthen), and they come down (katabaínō) from heaven, where God is.

The best gift from above is new life itself. “Of his own will begat he us with the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.” The new birth begins with God’s own will. The phrase comes from boulomai, to will or intend, and it stresses that God meant to do this and chose freely to do it. Paul says the same of salvation: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9). John speaks of those “which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12–13).

The verb apokyéō means to breed forth or to generate, and here it describes God bringing a new life into being. Set beside verse 15, the contrast is plain. Desire gives birth to sin, and sin to death, while God, by his own will, gives birth to children who live.

God does this “with the word of truth”. Lógos means something said, a message, and here it is the gospel, the good news of salvation through Jesus Christ. God gives new life as that truth is preached and received. Peter writes that believers are “born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever” (1 Peter 1:23–25). A few verses later James calls his readers to “receive with meekness the engrafted word, which is able to save your souls” (James 1:21), so the word that brought us to birth also goes on growing us.

God cannot be tempted with evil, and yet the Son of God, made man, faced temptation. He “was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). In the wilderness Satan tempted him, and he answered each temptation from the written word of God (Matthew 4:1–11). Every man is drawn away by his own lust, and Jesus had no corrupt desire for the devil’s bait to catch on, so the temptation came at him from outside and he resisted it completely. Because he was tempted, “he is able to succour them that are tempted” (Hebrews 2:18).

He also breaks the chain of verse 15. Where sin brings forth death, he came “that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10:10), and through his resurrection believers can say, “O death, where is thy sting? … But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:55–57). The Spirit he gives empowers us to resist the desires that conceive sin. “Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh” (Galatians 5:16), and “if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live” (Romans 8:13).

Christ is the greatest of the good gifts that come down from above. He is the Word made flesh (John 1:14), “the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person” (Hebrews 1:3), “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15), and in him the Father’s unchanging goodness is seen. He said, “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” (John 8:12), words that answer to the Father of lights. God gave his only begotten Son so that whoever believes in him should have everlasting life (John 3:16), and he is “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). Christ is the truth (John 14:6), and the Spirit he sends guides believers “into all truth” (John 16:13), which is the surest guard against the error of verse 16.

The word of truth by which God begets us is the message of the Word who was in the beginning with God and became flesh (John 1:1–14). And Christ is himself the firstfruits: “But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept” (1 Corinthians 15:20). His resurrection is the pledge and pattern of ours, and all who are in him share his new life, for “if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

When temptation comes, we can name it honestly as our own desire reaching for the bait, and that leaves us free to run to God for help. He wants us pure, and he gives the strength to stand. The chain is best met at its early steps, the first pull and the first look at the bait, and we can bring our desires to God to be changed by his grace while they are still small.

When we look at the good things in our lives, the provision, the people we love, the moments of peace and the truth we have come to understand, we can thank the one who gave each of them. His goodness stays the same through every change in our circumstances and our feelings. Our new life itself came from his own will and through his word, so it rests on his work, and we can live it gladly as part of the first harvest of all that he means to gather.