Job, James, and Jesus

Three different passages from Scripture have coalesced in my mind to form a rather striking image. If I’m honest, I’m not too sure I like what I see, yet I don’t think I can escape the conclusion.

Job was “blameless and upright, a man who feared God and turned away from evil” (Job 1:1, ESV). You’ll remember it was initially God’s idea, not Satan’s, to put Job to the test. And with glee I can only imagine, Satan did his darnedest. How did Job fair?

After losing his livestock, his servants, and his children, Job fell to the ground, worshiped God, and probably with tears running down his face cried out, “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21).

Jesus was not only blameless and upright, but he fulfilled all righteousness. That’s why he came to John near the River Jordan: to be baptized by him and in so doing to carry out God’s will in its totality. Down in the water Jesus went, and up from the water he came. The sky parted, a figure like a dove, the Holy Spirit, descended upon him, and he heard an audible voice from heaven declare, “This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17).

Anyone want to guess how the very next verse, Matthew 4:1, goes? “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.” If you change that sentence to the active voice, you get, “Then the Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness so that the devil could tempt him.”

Uh, excuse me? The Spirit who had just descended upon Jesus did that? And the Spirit did that intentionally so that the devil could throw his very best at him? You want to run that one by me again?

Then I stumbled upon the third passage that’s been rattling around in my mind for these last couple of weeks: “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness” (James 1:2-3, ESV). We see something striking right away about the nature of these trials. They are specifically trials that cause our faith to be tested.

With that in mind, then, take a look at the rendering of that verse in the King James Version: “My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations.”

Notice that the ESV translates the word as “trials” while the KJV translates the word as “temptations.” Now, I don’t know Greek, but I can recognize roots. Here’s what the Greek word for the noun “trials” or “temptations” looks like side by side with the Greek word for the verb “to tempt” (translated the same way in both the ESV and the KJV in James 1:13-14):

πειρασμοις (peirasmois, noun, temptation)
πειραζω (peirazo, verb, to tempt)

See what I mean? That’s the same root, meaning that the KJV has it right to link the noun “temptation” in James 1:2 to the verb “to tempt” in James 1:13-14.

What conclusion from these three passages has begun to rub my soul like a poorly fitted running shoe?

While of course it’s not wrong for us to understand James’s command in James 1:2 to read something like, “Rejoice when you face hard times,” I think his real meaning is even more challenging than that. I think James is actually commanding us to rejoice in the very moments that Satan’s hand is most heavily upon us and our faith is beginning to creek and groan beneath the weight. James wasn’t merely saying, “Find joy when you’re having a bad day,” though that’s not an untrue application of the verse. James is, in fact, saying, “Find joy when you get the news that God has given Satan permission to wipe out all your wealth and kill your children.” Or, “Count it all joy when the Spirit of God leads you out into the desert for 40 days specifically so that Satan himself can appear to you and try all he possibly can to turn you away from your good Father.”

I’m not going to lie. That’s a little harder for me to swallow, James.

Now, James goes on to make it very clear in 1:13-14 that the enticement to sin does not come from God. Our curiosity about sin is piqued by the desires that dwell within us and that at some point cross a line, conceive sin within the human heart, and then give birth to that sin in the form of sinful actions for all the world to see.

Yet, we cannot deny that God brought Job up in his conversation with Satan and the Spirit led Jesus out in the desert so that the devil could tempt him. So while the devil has one design in our being tempted—that is, to destroy our trust in God’s trustworthiness—God has quite another. James tells us what God’s good end is for us in trials that test our faith, in other words, in our temptation:

“Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet [fall into] trials [temptations] of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing” (James 1:2-4).

The devil wanted to eat Job’s and Jesus’s faith for breakfast. God wanted Job and Jesus to be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. (You’ll remember that even Jesus had to “learn obedience through what he suffered” and was “made perfect” [Hebrews 5:8-9].) So God ordained their lives in such a way that both would fall into some of the most intense temptations known to man—not “fall into them” in the sense of succumbing to them but “fall into them” in the sense of finding themselves right smack dab in the middle of them. And if Job and Jesus were both subject to Holy Scripture, then they, too, were subject to James’s command to count their temptations as joy.

Even as I write the words, I don’t like the thought of suffering beneath the strongest, hottest winds Satan is able to muster against me and having to conclude that this pain is ultimately joy due to the fact that by God’s grace it will produce a steadfast, enduring faith within me such that in the final analysis, I’ll be so mature and whole that I’ll have everything I need.

How worldly this mind of mine continues to be. I love comfort more than godliness, and God loves me, just like he loved Job and Jesus, much more than to let me simply remain comfortable. Such a thought runs contrary to the world’s logic. Surely love would never force me out of my comfort. Yet God’s love is far better than the world’s. I will submit to God’s better plan and repent for not having submitted long ago.

So at the very same time that we continue to ask our Father in heaven to “lead us not into temptation,” nevertheless we continue to rejoice when we find ourselves in that very place. Even there God is with us. Even there God is sovereign over every last detail of the situation. And even there God has a good end in mind for his beloved children.

Feel an urge welling up within you to hold onto a grudge? Sense the suicidal draw to sink into the pit of self-pity and self-hatred? Does it seem like the very breath of Satan is rushing down your neck and something within you wants to reach out and take the deceptively sweet offer he’s holding out to you? We do not cower in those moments. Job bowed and worshiped. Jesus recalled God’s word and ultimately ordered Satan to leave. And I can’t help but think that in both situations both Job and Jesus at least had a sense that the temptation raging over them was actually something to count as their joy because on the other side of the temptation their perfection, their completeness, and their lacking nothing awaited them.

So, too, count your temptations as joyful opportunities to experience an overwhelming victory over sin, allow your heart to swell with persevering faith, and look forward to how your steadfastness amid this temptation will ultimately result in a son or daughter of God who is perfect, complete, and lacking nothing. I think that’s how James would have us understand his words.

Even so, James, I’m not so sure I like what you’re getting at. I doubt Job liked it, yet I, just like him, can do nothing else but throw my face to the ground and worship God. So, Jesus, I believe, yet help my unbelief.