Читать книгу New Daily Study Bible: The Letters to James and Peter - William Barclay - Страница 21

PUTTING THE BLAME ON GOD

James 1:13–15

Let no man say when he is tempted: ‘My temptation comes from God.’ For God himself is untemptable by evil and tempts no man. But temptation comes to every man, because he is lured on and seduced by his own desire; then desire conceives and begets sin; and, when sin has reached its full development, it spawns death.

BEHIND this passage lies a Jewish way of belief to which all of us are to some extent prone. James is here rebuking those who put the blame for temptation on God.

Jewish thought was haunted by the internal conflict that is in every individual. It was the problem which haunted Paul: ‘I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members’ (Romans 7:22–3). Every man and every woman was pulled in two directions. Purely as an interpretation of experience, the Jews arrived at the doctrine that in every individual there were two tendencies. They called them the Yetser Hatob, the good tendency, and the Yetser Hara, the evil tendency. This simply stated the problem; it did not explain it. In particular, it did not say where the evil tendency came from. So Jewish thought set out to try to explain that.

Ben Sirach, the writer of Ecclesiasticus, was deeply impressed with the havoc that the evil tendency causes. ‘O inclination to evil [Yetser Hara], why were you formed to cover the land with deceit?’ (Sirach [Ecclesiasticus] 37:3). In his view, the inclination to evil came from Satan, and the defence against it was an individual’s own will. ‘It was he [God] who created humankind in the beginning, and he left them in the power of their own free choice. If you choose, you can keep the commandments, and to act faithfully is a matter of your own choice’ (Sirach 15:14–15).

There were Jewish writers who traced this evil tendency right back to the Garden of Eden. The story is told in the apocryphal work The Life of Adam and Eve that Satan took the form of an angel and, speaking through the serpent, put into Eve the desire for the forbidden fruit and made her swear that she would give the fruit to Adam as well. ‘When he had made me swear,’ says Eve, ‘he ascended up into the tree. But in the fruit he gave me to eat he placed the poison of his malice, that is, of his lust. For lust is the beginning of all sin. And he bent down the bough to the earth, and I took of the fruit and ate it.’ In this view, it was Satan who succeeded in inserting the evil tendency into human beings, and that evil tendency is identified with physical lust. A later development of this story was that the beginning of all sin was in fact Satan’s lust for Eve.

The Book of Enoch has two theories. One is that the fallen angels are responsible for sin (1 Enoch 85). The other is that human beings themselves are responsible for it. ‘ Sin has not been sent upon the earth, but man himself created it’ (1 Enoch 98:4).

But every one of these theories simply pushes the problem one step further back. Satan may have put the evil tendency into men and women; the fallen angels may have put it into them; men and women may have put it into themselves. But where did it ultimately come from?

To meet this problem, certain of the Rabbis took a bold and dangerous step. They argued that, since God has created everything, he must have created the evil tendency also. So we get Rabbinic sayings such as the following. ‘God said, It repents me that I created the evil tendency in man; for had I not done so, he would not have rebelled against me. I created the evil tendency; I created the law as a means of healing. If you occupy yourself with the law, you will not fall into the power of it. God placed the good tendency on a man’s right hand, and the evil on his left.’ The danger is obvious. It means that in the last analysis we can blame God for our own sin. We can say, as Paul said: ‘It is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me’ (Romans 7:17). Of all strange doctrines, surely the strangest is that God is ultimately responsible for sin.