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.
AVOIDING RESPONSIBILITY
James 1:13–15 (contd)
FROM the beginning of time, it has been a human instinct to blame others for our own sin. The ancient writer who wrote the story of the first sin in the Garden of Eden was a first-rate psychologist with a deep knowledge of the human heart. When God challenged Adam with his sin, Adam’s reply was: ‘The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.’ And when God challenged Eve with her action, her answer was: ‘The serpent tempted me, and I ate.’ Adam said: ‘Don’t blame me; blame Eve.’ Eve said: ‘Don’t blame me; blame the serpent’ (cf. Genesis 3:12– 13).
Human beings have always been experts in evasion. Robert Burns wrote in ‘A Prayer in the Prospect of Death’:
Thou know’st that Thou hast formed me
With passions wild and strong;
And list’ning to their witching voice
Has often led me wrong.
In effect, he is saying that his conduct was as it was because God made him as he was. The blame is laid on God. So we blame one another, we blame our circumstances, we blame the way in which we are made, for the sins of which we are guilty.
James sternly rebukes that view. To him, what is responsible for sin is a person’s own evil desire. Sin would be helpless if there was nothing in human beings to which it could appeal. Desire is something which can be nourished or stifled. It can be controlled and even, by the grace of God, eliminated if dealt with it at once. But people can allow their thoughts to follow certain tracks, and their steps to take them into certain places and their eyes to linger on certain things, and so stimulate desire. They can so hand themselves over to Christ and be so engaged on good things that there is no time or place left for evil desire. It is idle hands for which Satan finds mischief to do; it is undisciplined minds and uncommitted hearts that are vulnerable. If someone encourages desire for long enough, there is an inevitable consequence. Desire becomes action.
Further, it was the Jewish teaching that sin produced death. The Life of Adam and Eve says that the moment Eve ate of the fruit she caught a glimpse of death. The word which James uses in verse 15, and which the Authorized and the Revised Standard Versions translate as brings forth death, is an animal word for birth; and it means that sin spawns death. Overcome by desire, human beings become less than human and sink to the level of animals.
The great value of this passage is that it urges upon us a personal responsibility for sin. No one was ever born without desire for some wrong thing. And, if we deliberately encourage and nourish that desire until it becomes fully grown and monstrously strong, it will inevitably result in the action which is sin – and that is the way to death. Such a thought – and all human experience admits it to be true – must drive us to the grace of God, which is the only thing that can make and keep us clean, and which is available to all.
GOD’S CONSTANCY FOR GOOD
James 1:16–18
My dear brothers, do not be deceived. Every good gift and every perfect boon comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is none of that changeableness which comes from changing shadows. Of his own purpose he has begotten us by the word of truth so that we might be, as it were, the first fruits of his created things.
ONCE again, James stresses the great truth that every gift that God sends is good. Verse 17 might well be translated: ‘All giving is good.’ That is to say, there is nothing which comes from God which is not good. There is a strange phenomenon here in the Greek. The phrase which we have translated as ‘Every good gift and every perfect boon’ is, in fact, a perfect hexameter line of poetry – that is, a line with six stresses in it. Either James had a rhythmic ear for a fine cadence or he is quoting from some work that we do not know.
What he is stressing is the unchangeableness of God. To do so, he uses two terms from astronomy. The word he uses for changeableness is parallagē, and the word for the turn of the shadow is tropē. Both these words have to do with the variation which the heavenly bodies show, the variation in the length of the day and of the night, the apparent variation in the course of the sun, the phases of waxing and waning, the different brilliance of the stars and the planets at different times. Variability is characteristic of all created things. God is the creator of the lights of heaven – the sun, the moon, the stars. The Jewish morning prayer says: ‘Blessed be the Lord God who has formed the lights.’ The lights change, but the one who created them never changes.
Further, his purpose is altogether gracious. The word of truth is the gospel, and by the sending of that gospel it is God’s purpose that men and women should be reborn into a new life. The shadows are ended and the certain word of truth has come.
That rebirth is a rebirth into the family and the possession of God. In