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.