2008-04-28

Trial vs Temptation

In the study of the Book of James using Concept-Mapping (the concept map of James 1:2-15 is shown below), I was suddenly drawn to the fact that Trial and Temptation are quite different.A mind-map version, drawn earlier a few months ago, is shown below for comparison with the Concept Map version:From the passage, it is clear that Trial is from external to train you to be a better person, to be complete and to obtain the Crown of Life eventually. Temptations comes from internal - from our lusts, and their purpose is to make you worse off by leading us to sin and death eventually. I tried to find out from the Original Greek words - trial is G3986 and tempt is G3985. However, whether the Thayer or the Vines concordance treat both roughly the same. In fact, for G3986, the frequency of translation and use are: temptation (12), testing (2), trial (3), trials (4) - are used. It depends on the context to tell us which is which. G3985 - did (1), put (1), put to the test (2), tempt (2), tempted (13), tempter (2), test (6), tested (2), testing (7), tried (2), trying (2). We have then have to depend on the context to differentiate them.

In James, the differences between trial and temptation are made clear.

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