The Lord’s Prayer – Part 8-Lead Us Not Into Temptation

Hello and welcome to today’s podcast. Today we have come to what will be the final section of the LP. Up to this point we have talked about how we should shift our approach to the LP. And how it mirrors that of the Israelite’s exodus form Egypt. And how there is so much more to this prayer than a mere model for us to repeat. And how it is actually Jesus’ way of calling us out bondage to death, depravity and divorce form God. It is a radical calling for us to partake in the expansion of His kingdom. But the last part of this prayer has some very interesting aspects to it. This is the part of the prayer that is the last line of Luke’s shorter version: “Lead us not into temptation,” or peirasmos (peirasmo/j)” (Matt. 6:13; Luke 11:4). Of all the petitions in this prayer, this one is by far the most difficult to understand.

This is particularly true of the traditional English translation, which at first blush seems to imply that God somehow “leads” human beings into “temptation” to sin, and that humans should ask him not to do so. Both common sense and the New Testament itself make clear that this cannot be the proper interpretation. The letter of James says that God “tempts (peira/zei) no one” (James 1:13–14). And most commentators agree that temptation to sin is not what Jesus means in the Lord’s Prayer.

The key to understanding the petition lies in grasping the dual meaning of the Greek word peirasmos, traditionally translated as “temptation.” Although this word can mean “temptation” to sin, it is also quite frequently used to refer to “testing” or “trial.” When this latter definition is taken into account, Jesus’ instruction makes much more sense: he is teaching the disciples to pray that they be spared future “testing” or “trials” in which they would have to undergo tribulation, suffering, and maybe even death.

The significance of this interpretation for our study is that the Greek word for “trial” not only has ties to the Exodus from Egypt. Although this connection is regularly overlooked by commentators on the Lord’s Prayer, the terminology of “trial” or “testing” (peirasmo/j) is used at least three times in the Pentateuch to refer to the period of plagues and tribulation that preceded the first Exodus. The third of these is the most significant, since it not only ties the time of “trial” or “testing” both to the Passover and to a future time of tribulation in which Israel will be delivered from Exile:

Deuteronomy 7:18–19 ESV

18 you shall not be afraid of them but you shall remember what the Lord your God did to Pharaoh and to all Egypt, 19 the great trials that your eyes saw, the signs, the wonders, the mighty hand, and the outstretched arm, by which the Lord your God brought you out. So will the Lord your God do to all the peoples of whom you are afraid.

Deuteronomy 29:2–3 ESV

2 And Moses summoned all Israel and said to them: “You have seen all that the Lord did before your eyes in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and to all his servants and to all his land, 3 the great trials that your eyes saw, the signs, and those great wonders.

Deuteronomy 4:27–34 ESV

27 And the Lord will scatter you among the peoples, and you will be left few in number among the nations where the Lord will drive you. 28 And there you will serve gods of wood and stone, the work of human hands, that neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell. 29 But from there you will seek the Lord your God and you will find him, if you search after him with all your heart and with all your soul. 30 When you are in tribulation, and all these things come upon you in the latter days, you will return to the Lord your God and obey his voice. 31 For the Lord your God is a merciful God. He will not leave you or destroy you or forget the covenant with your fathers that he swore to them. 32 “For ask now of the days that are past, which were before you, since the day that God created man on the earth, and ask from one end of heaven to the other, whether such a great thing as this has ever happened or was ever heard of. 33 Did any people ever hear the voice of a god speaking out of the midst of the fire, as you have heard, and still live? 34 Or has any god ever attempted to go and take a nation for himself from the midst of another nation, by trials, by signs, by wonders, and by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, and by great deeds of terror, all of which the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes?

Taken together, these texts suggest that the biblical notion of “trials” or “testings” (twsm; peirasmou/j) could be easily connected with the plagues of the Exodus—the greatest of which was, of course, the death of the first-born son in the Passover (see Exod. 12). Moreover, these “trials” could also serve as a prototype for a future time of “tribulation” that would take place “in the latter days” when God would restore Israel by gathering them in from “among the Gentiles” (see Deut. 30:1–8). In other words, there would one day come a new Exodus, in which God would once again redeem his people through a time of peirasmos accompanied by signs and wonders: that is, through a period of suffering and death that would inaugurate the age of salvation.

Now, of course this all depends on what your view of how God will ultimately wrap this thing up at the culmination of history. But certainly the design patterns are there with the connection to the OT with what Jesus is doing.

In short, the Lord’s Prayer is nothing less than a prayer for the fulfillment of all God’s covenant promises to Israel and the world, as contained in the Old Testament and inaugurated by the new Exodus of Jesus’ own passion, death, and resurrection.

The other connection with the notion of trials is with the temptation of Jesus in Matthew 4 and Luke 4. Then again in the garden scene and before Caiaphas and Pilate. In fact Jesus’ whole public career was marked by “trials” of one sort or another—by what he, and the evangelists, saw as a running battle with the powers of evil, whether in the form of possessed souls shrieking in the synagogues or angry souls challenging in the marketplace. The fact that Jesus was not spared these trials, but had to face them at their fiercest, suggests a clue as to the meaning of this controversial clause, which we will talk about in a second.

This brief survey is enough to demonstrate that the Lord’s Prayer is by no means simply a collage of vaguely suitable material culled from the liturgical culture of Second Temple Judaism. Its shape and content remind us of the public career of Jesus at every point. And since Jesus’ public career was solidly rooted and reflected in his own life of prayer, we must conclude that the Lord’s Prayer is an invitation to share Jesus’ own prayer life—and with it his agenda, his work, his pattern of life, and his spirituality. The Lord’s Prayer marks out Jesus’ followers as a distinct group not simply because Jesus gave it to them, but because it encapsulates his own mission and vocation. And it does this in a form appropriate for his followers, which turns them into his co-workers and fellow-laborers in prayer for the kingdom.

The normal assumption is that the prayer is asking to be spared having one’s faith tested by God. But the tradition throughout early Christianity that sees the testing of one’s faith as a necessary part of discipleship—indeed, as a following of Jesus—speaks strongly against such an understanding.

Jesus believed that “Messianic Woes” were coming on Israel, and that it was his particular task and vocation to go out ahead and take the full weight of them on himself, so that the people would not need to undergo them. This would explain the repetition in Gethsemane of his command to his disciples: “Watch and pray, that you may not enter the peirasmos” (Matt. 26:41; Mark 14:38; Luke 22:46)—meaning by that command: “Pray that you may be spared this great moment of anguish; it is my task to enter it alone.” (We may note, however, that when Jesus himself prayed a somewhat similar prayer the answer was “No.”).

But it remains somewhat strange to see this as the complete explanation of “lead us not into temptation.” For if the early church came to believe that in some sense the great peirasmos had, indeed, happened to Jesus on the cross, why would they have continued to pray this clause in the Lord’s Prayer thereafter? Granted, the fall of Jerusalem, which was still in the future for those who handed on the early traditions, had been spoken of by Jesus in similarly dramatic terms, as witness Mark 13 and its parallels.

One possible answer, of course, is that in the days following ad 70 the church looked beyond the fall of Jerusalem to the final moment when God would redeem the whole of creation—and that such a futuristic vision included a final, yet-to-occur tribulation as we just talked about.

The most probable explanation, is that the “testing” is not God’s testing of his people but the people’s testing of God (cf. J. Gibson, “Testing Temptation”). One of the central charges against the wilderness generation was that they, in their unbelief, “put YHWH to the test” by challenging him to produce demonstrations of his presence with them (cf. Exod. 17:7). The particular issue, of course, was YHWH’s provision of water from the rock, which followed directly on the people’s grumbling about food and YHWH’s provision of manna.

The passage in Paul’s letters in which this theme finds expression—that is, 1 Cor. 10:9: “We must not test the Lord (or, ‘the Christ’) as some of them did”—also suggests that the early church had become used to taking “the peirasmos” in a wider sense than simply the sharply focused eschatological one. For in 1 Corinthians 10 Paul draws a close parallel between the church and the wilderness generation, speaking of that earlier generation as having been “baptized” into Moses (v. 2) and as having all eaten “spiritual food” and drunk “spiritual drink” (vv. 3–4). Their testing of the Lord—or, as the preferred reading has it, of “the Christ”—was one aspect of their many-sided failure.

when Paul speaks of peirasmos a few verses later, it is clear that he means not the Israelites’ testing of God but the “temptations” that come on God’s people, not least from the pagan environment in which they live. 1 Cor. 10:13 is the clearest statement of what peirasmos had come to mean in the early church and of how, with its Exodus over tones, it was being reapplied:

1 Corinthians 10:12–13 ESV

12 Therefore let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall. 13 No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.

Paul will not rest content with simply telling the Corinthians how to behave and chiding them if they go wrong. He will teach them to think of themselves as the people of the true Exodus, and within that framework show them how the moral struggles they face—including the temptation to devise tests to see how strong their Lord is—are the equivalent of the temptations which brought the wilderness generation to ruin.

All of what Paul speaks about—that is, which is coming from “the Satan,” include the temptation to put God to the test, also include such other sins as idolatry and grumbling. Thus “Lead us not into temptation” would then mean, in that broader context, “Do not let us be led into temptation [from which we cannot escape].” The fact that God has promised to be faithful and to provide the way of escape does not mean, in the logic of New Testament prayer, that one should not pray for it, but rather the reverse. Those who pray the Lord’s Prayer are designed by Jesus to be those who remain faithful to the God who intends to remain faithful to them—and who thereby constitute the true eschatological Israel, the people of the New Exodus.

So that concludes our look at the LP. I hope you found the perspective helpful to your daily prayer life. Understanding the context of which Jesus gave this prayer to His disciple is crucial to add to our application in our own prayer life. And realizing that it is not just some list of words to be called upon in a time of need. But more a bold proclamation of the extension of God’s kingdom and a way to lead others out of the exile of this world and slavery to sin. And back to a place of fellowship with the Creator God and father of us all!