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James 1:13 says God cannot be tempted with evil (*apeirastos kakōn*). But Deuteronomy 6:16, Exodus 17:2, Matthew 4:7, Luke 4:12, and Acts 15:10 all assume God can be tempted — the command 'do not tempt God' presupposes the act is possible. And Hebrews 4:15 says Jesus, identified as God by orthodox Christology, was tempted in every way.
People have answered this in several ways; GEBible presents them as equal peers.
Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man.
Cited passages
Let no man say when he is tempted, “I am tempted by God,” for God can’t be tempted by evil, and he himself tempts no one.
One of God's commandments is "Don't tempt God." This commandment wouldn't be necessary if it is impossible to tempt God. Ye shall not tempt the Lord your God. Deuteronomy 6:16 When the people complained about the lack of water, Moses accused them of tempting God. Wherefore the people did chide with Moses, and said, Give us water that we may drink. And Moses said unto them, Why chide ye with me? wherefore do ye tempt the LORD? Exodus 17:2 Malachi says that people who do wicked things tempt God. They that work wickedness ... tempt God. Malachi 3:15 Jesus quoted the commandment "Don't tempt God" when he argued with Satan. Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. Matthew 4:7, Luke 4:12 Peter accused those that require Gentiles to be circumcised of tempting God. Now therefore why tempt ye God, to put a yoke upon the neck of the disciples, which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear? Acts 15:10 And Judith warns the leaders not to tempt God. Who are you that tempt the Lord? Judith 8:11 And Jesus (whom many Christians believe is God) was tempted. Then was Jesus led up of the spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. Matthew 4:1 Jesus ... Being forty days tempted of the devil. Luke 4:1-2 Jesus ... was in all points tempted like as we are.
Cited passages
Having then a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let’s hold tightly to our confession. For we don’t have a high priest who can’t be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, but one who has been in all points tempted like we are, yet without sin.
Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan, and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness for forty days, being tempted by the devil. He ate nothing in those days. Afterward, when they were completed, he was hungry.
Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.
They came to her, and she said to them, “Hear me now, O you rulers of the inhabitants of Bethulia! For your word that you have spoken before the people this day is not right. You have set the oath which you have pronounced between God and you, and have promised to deliver the city to our enemies, unless within these days the Lord turns to help you.
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward a genuine contradiction
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
James 1:13 is categorical in the Greek: *ho gar theos apeirastos estin kakōn* — 'for God is *apeirastos* of evils.' The adjective is rare (effectively a New Testament *hapax*) and morphologically ambiguous: a verbal adjective in *-tos* can be read passively ('untemptable,' incapable of being tempted) or, less commonly, actively ('not tempting,' inexperienced in evil). Most commentators (Allison, Johnson, Moo, Davids) take it passively with the genitive *kakōn* as 'with respect to evils,' yielding 'God cannot be solicited by evil.' Note that the very next clause supplies the sense: *autos de oudena peirazei* — 'and he himself tempts no one.' James is operating in the register of moral enticement to sin, the context being the source of *peirasmos* in a believer's life (vv. 12-15), where temptation is traced to one's own *epithymia* (desire), not to God.
Against this the catalogue of 'do not tempt God' texts is real and uses the cognate vocabulary. Deuteronomy 6:16, *lōʾ tĕnassû ʾet-YHWH* ('you shall not test YHWH'), from the root *nsh*; Exodus 17:2 (Massah) uses the same root for Israel's testing of God; the LXX renders these with *ekpeirazō/peirazō*. Jesus throws Deuteronomy 6:16 at the tempter (Matt 4:7; Luke 4:12), Peter charges the circumcision party with 'testing God' (*peirazete ton theon*, Acts 15:10), and Judith 8:11-12 rebukes the elders for putting God to the test.
The harmonization defended by Moo and Davids is a lexical one, and it is sound. *peirazō* (like Hebrew *nsh*) bears two distinct senses, both registered in BDAG: (1) to *test/try/put to the proof*, and (2) to *tempt/entice toward sin*. The 'do not tempt God' texts uniformly belong to sense (1) — humans presuming to put God on trial, demanding he prove himself, provoking him to act (Massah: 'Is the LORD among us or not?'). James 1:13 belongs to sense (2) — God being enticed *toward evil*, which James explicitly qualifies with *kakōn*. These are not the same act. To say 'God cannot be lured into sinning' and 'humans wrongly put God to the proof' is no more contradictory than to say a judge cannot be bribed while litigants nonetheless try his patience. The shared root masks two different relations.
The genuinely unresolved pressure point is Christological, and the entry is right to press it. Hebrews 4:15 states that the high priest 'has been tested in every respect as we are, yet without sin' — *pepeirasmenon de kata panta kath' homoiotēta chōris hamartias*. The verb is *peirazō*, and the temptation narratives (Matt 4:1; Luke 4:2) describe Satan's solicitation of Jesus, which slides toward sense (2). If the incarnate Son is *homoousios* with the Father (Nicaea/Chalcedon), and the Son was 'tested in every respect,' then on the surface the *apeirastos kakōn* of James and the *pepeirasmenon kata panta* of Hebrews sit in tension. The orthodox resolution is the two-natures distinction: the Son was genuinely tested according to his assumed human nature, while the divine nature remained impassible and unsusceptible to sin — and Hebrews' own *chōris hamartias* ('without sin') signals that the testing never issued in, and on the classical view never could issue in, sin. On that account James and Hebrews are describing the same person under different natures, and the *kata panta* is qualified by the immediately following *chōris hamartias*.
Whether one regards that as a clean resolution or a sophisticated patch depends on one's prior commitments. As a matter of lexicon and immediate context, James 1:13 and the 'tempt not God' texts are not in contradiction at all — they use *peirazō*/*nsh* in different senses, as Allison and Johnson grant even while noting James's debt to Hellenistic-Jewish ideas of divine impassibility (cf. the Wisdom tradition and Philo). The Christological strand is where a critic can still find a seam, but it is a seam the two-natures doctrine is precisely engineered to close, and it requires importing later conciliar Christology to make the Son's testing a problem for James in the first place.
Where the critical reading lands: largely harmonizable on lexical grounds (two senses of *peirazō*); a residual Christological tension that orthodox two-natures theology absorbs but does not erase.
Sources for this reading