The Conquest of Temptation
The Word of God never offers freedom from temptation. But it does offer to Christians victory over all temptation. One of Satan’s lies that has been accepted as almost an axiom in the thinking and the experience of Christians is that no one can expect victory over every one of his temptations. But God says: “There hath no temptation taken you but such as man can bear: But God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation make also the way of escape, that ye may be able to endure it” (1 Cor. 10:13). It is significant that this verse is immediately preceded by a word of warning: “Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.”
There is ever before the Christian the possibility of falling. There is no state of grace from which he may not, before some temptation, step into awful sin. But God’s Word, which cannot be broken, stands pledged to us that in every temptation there is “the way of escape.” And our Lord Jesus is “the Way.” Victory over temptation was won by Christ. Satan is an already defeated foe. Defeat in temptation came to Adam. It is for every man, and every Christian, to decide whether he will share the first Adam’s defeat or the last Adam’s victory.
The two great temptation scenes pictured in the Bible, that of our first parents and that of our Lord, show that temptation finds its way into the human heart through three avenues. When man falls before these temptations the resulting sins are what the Apostle describes as “the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the vainglory of life.” Let us see how this Bible picture of the sins that are in the world corresponds with conditions in the twentieth century.