81: Reflections on James, Part 2: Trials and temptations

The first thing that James launches into after a brief greeting is the encouragement to consider trials a pure joy, because they lead to perseverance, which leads to maturity and completeness.

A few verses later, he says,

When tempted, no one should say, "God is tempting me." For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.

It's a sort of neat parallel here:

trials -> perseverance -> completeness
temptation/desire -> sin -> death

But how is this to be understood? How can there be a trial which is not also a temptation? Maybe we just need to remember that every circumstance, good or bad, put us in a situation where a new path to sin has opened up, but that this is not the same thing as calling the circumstance itself a temptation.

But, to turn it around, how is a temptation not a trial? Why should we consider trials pure joy, as they are the means to our perfection, and yet abstain from attributing temptation to God? If one verse later he says,

Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights,

then what exactly is a trial? Can we attribute those to God, since we are told that they are grounds for rejoicing and since they complete us? Are they now a good gift or not?

I am probably understanding all these terms wrong. I can agree that a trial is not, in itself, a temptation; but I can't imagine a temptation that is not a trial. And if I am to give thanks for trials "of all sorts", then that would include temptations. Do I thank God because I'm being tempted, and yet make sure not to attribute the temptation itself to Him? Should we really say that the devil does God's dirty work?

The other difficulty I'm carrying with me all my life is that of "my own desires". If my own desires lead to sin and from there to death, it would be better to not have any desires, wouldn't it?

I have been suspicious of my desires all my life, because of passages like these. But in trying to abolish my desires I did not grow closer to God. It tortured me. And my encounters with God have had with them a certain character of liberating my desires, not destroying them. What little I know about the joy of the Lord was actually recognized through my desires, and not by abolishing them.

So how to make sense of this passage? Is it simply a difference between my "evil" desires and my "regular" ones? That, too, is a distinction I'm not ready to make. Any desire in me is to some extent "normal" or even "good" and to some extent tainted, and not in a way that is easy to differentiate. Evil is mixed in thoroughly, like sugar dissolved in water, so that I cannot draw a line through my desires to say, "this line separates the normal desire from the evil one."