James 1:13

The context

James opens with a paragraph on trials: count it joy when you meet them, because testing produces endurance and endurance a completed work. Verse 12 blesses the one who remains steadfast. Verse 13 then turns, and the turn is the point — the same word is now doing a different job.

The letter is wisdom literature in Christian dress: short imperatives, vivid images, attention to how speech and desire work. Chapter 1 runs from trials to temptation to the source of sin, and ends with a call to be doers rather than hearers.

The words

Peirasmos means trial, test, or temptation — one word for all three. That is why the paragraph can move from external pressure to inward enticement without changing vocabulary, and why translators must choose where the Greek did not.

"God cannot be tempted" renders apeirastos, a rare word built from peirazō with a negative prefix; it occurs nowhere else in the New Testament. Some take it as "incapable of being tempted," others as "beyond the reach of evil's attraction." The word's rarity is why the discussion continues.

Verse 14 supplies the positive account. Desire, epithymia, is described with two participles: dragged out and baited, imagery from hunting and fishing. Desire is not passive here — it does the pulling. Verse 15 traces the sequence from desire to sin to death.

What this passage establishes

It establishes that God is not the source of enticement to sin, and that temptation originates in the person's own desire. The claim is narrow: it denies one sentence people were saying, "I am being tempted by God."

What it does not establish

It does not deny that God tests. Genesis says God tested Abraham, and James has just told his readers to endure trials. The distinction between testing and tempting is real, but drawn here by purpose rather than vocabulary, since one word serves both.

It does not explain how sovereignty and desire relate. The verse says where enticement does not come from. It does not say how the desire doing the enticing got there.

It does not say temptation is sin. Verse 15 puts sin where desire conceives and acts. Being tempted is distinguished from consenting, which is why the passage reads as comfort as much as warning.

How the church has read it

Augustine's account of concupiscence — desire that persists and pulls after baptism — is the classic attempt to take verse 14 seriously without making God its author, and it shaped the Western doctrine of sin. Calvin used the verse in his treatment of providence to deny that God is the author of sin. Reformed and Arminian writers both appeal to it while disagreeing about how bound the will is.

First pass, written October 2026. Corrections welcome.

Cited in these answers

• How could Jesus have been GENUINELY tempted if He could not sin?!
• If those who die as infants go to Heaven, why doesn't God kill everyone in infancy in order to maximize the number of those in Heaven?
• Your all-powerful God created the devil and evil - simply to set up "the fall." He did this KNOWING that most souls would ultimately suffer eternal punishment. You call this a good God? I call it evil.
• If Jesus is God and God cannot be tempted, doesn't it follow that Jesus cannot be tempted? Yet Matthew 4 presents the temptation of Christ — another biblical contradiction, isn't it?

Part of Scripture, Opened — the exegetical layer behind every citation on this site. Scripture quotations are from the ESV.