Why Does God Allow Satan to Tempt People?

Job: Satan Acts Only as Far as God Allows

The book of Job opens in the court of heaven. The sons of God come to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan comes among them. The LORD asks him where he has been, and points to Job as a man who fears God and turns from evil. Satan answers with an accusation: “Doth Job fear God for nought?” (Job 1:9). Job’s piety, he says, is bought with blessings. Take them away and Job will curse God.

The LORD gives Satan leave to act, and the leave has a limit:

And the LORD said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thine hand. So Satan went forth from the presence of the LORD.

Job 1:12

When the first trial fails and Job still blesses the name of the LORD, Satan asks again. The limit is moved and a new one set: “Behold, he is in thine hand; but save his life” (Job 2:6). Satan can do nothing to Job without permission, and he cannot go past the line he is given.

Job himself never hears this conversation. He suffers without knowing why, and his friends insist that he must have sinned to deserve it. At the end of the book God says that the friends were wrong about him (Job 42:7). Job shows that God permits the adversary to test a righteous man. It also shows that the people around a sufferer cannot read the reason for his suffering.

Jesus and Peter: “Satan Hath Desired to Have You”

The same arrangement appears on the night Jesus was betrayed. At the Last Supper he told Peter:

And the Lord said, Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat: But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren.

Luke 22:31–32

In the Greek, the “you” Satan asked for is plural. He wanted all the disciples, to shake them as grain is shaken in a sieve until they fell away. The “thee” Jesus prayed for is singular. He prayed for Peter by name.

Satan asked, and Jesus answered with prayer. Peter still denied Jesus three times that night. But his faith did not fail in the end. He wept, he was restored, and he went on to strengthen his brethren, as Jesus had said he would. The sifting was real, and so was its limit.

Testing and Temptation: One Word, Two Intentions

Scripture gives a reason for the permission again and again, and the reason is testing. God tests his people to show what is in them, and the testing has real outcomes. Genesis 22 opens by saying that “God did tempt Abraham” (22:1), where the Hebrew word is the ordinary word for putting someone to the test. When Abraham raised the knife over Isaac, the angel stopped him: “now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me” (22:12). Moses told Israel that the forty years in the wilderness had the same purpose:

And thou shalt remember all the way which the LORD thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep his commandments, or no.

Deuteronomy 8:2

The New Testament speaks the same way. Peter tells persecuted Christians that their trials are “the trial of your faith,” to be “found unto praise and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 1:7). James says that “the trying of your faith worketh patience,” and that the one who endures “shall receive the crown of life” (James 1:3, 12). In Revelation the risen Christ tells the church at Smyrna, “the devil shall cast some of you into prison, that ye may be tried” (Revelation 2:10). The devil does the imprisoning. The purpose is that they may be tried. The Lord who tells them so has permitted it.

The Hebrew of Genesis 22:1 and the Greek of James 1:13 are both words for putting to the test. What separates a test from a temptation is the intent of the one doing it. God tests to prove what is in a person. The devil tempts to make a person fall. The same event can be both at once.

Scripture shows this most plainly when David numbered Israel. Second Samuel says that the LORD “moved David against them to say, Go, number Israel and Judah” (2 Samuel 24:1). First Chronicles tells the same story this way: “And Satan stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number Israel” (1 Chronicles 21:1). The verb is the same in both. One writer names God’s purpose, and the other names the agent who carried it out.

The Wilderness: Led by the Spirit, Tempted by the Devil

The clearest case of all is the temptation of Jesus. Matthew writes, “Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil” (Matthew 4:1). The Spirit of God leads Jesus to the place where the devil will tempt him. God intends the testing; the devil intends the fall.

The tempter opened with the words “If thou be the Son of God” (Matthew 4:3). Each of the three temptations offered Jesus a way to act for himself, apart from his Father’s word, and each time Jesus refused. Luke says that when the devil had ended all the temptation, “he departed from him for a season” (Luke 4:13). Hebrews says that Jesus “was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15).

The one who was tested proved what he was. The tempter, who wanted something else, was used. That is the pattern the rest of Scripture follows on a smaller scale with Abraham, Israel, Job and Peter.

God Tempts No One: James 1:13–14

Any reader will raise the obvious objection, and James raises it himself:

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.

James 1:13

James has just said that trials test faith and that enduring them wins the crown. Here he denies that God entices anyone to do evil. Both statements stand together. God permits testing, and God never draws anyone toward sin.

The next verse names where the pull toward sin takes hold: “But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed” (James 1:14). The tempter offers, and the desire within a person answers. James then traces where yielding leads: “sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death” (James 1:15). Temptation from outside does not remove a person’s responsibility. The choice is still his own, and so is the sin.

This question is one step in a larger account. How Atonement Works follows the tempter from the garden to the cross: how temptation became accusation, how the devil came to hold the power of death, and how Christ took it from him.

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How Other Christians Answer the Question

Christians have given several answers to this question, and they overlap. Many say that God allows temptation because he made people free. Love that is never offered a choice is hard to call love, so a world with real moral choice must include the possibility of real temptation. Others, especially in the Reformed tradition, stress that God governs all things, the devil’s actions included, and works all of them toward his own purposes. Both answers hold something Scripture teaches: people answer for their own choices, and God is never out of control.

A third view is common today, often without being stated. On the Western doctrine of total depravity, human nature since the fall is so corrupted that no one needs an outside tempter to explain why people sin. In that account the devil has little to do. Many Christians who hold it find Satan’s role in temptation hard to place, and they leave him out of their account of sin and of the cross.

How Atonement Works takes a different path here. The book argues that the older account, which gives the tempter a real part, fits the Bible better. The New Testament calls him “the tempter” (Matthew 4:3; 1 Thessalonians 3:5) and treats temptation by the devil as a standing fact of the Christian life. Paul warns married couples not to stay apart for long, “that Satan tempt you not for your incontinency” (1 Corinthians 7:5).

The Book’s Answer: An Enemy Used for Testing

Chris White’s own answer begins in the garden, and he presents it as his reading of the whole sweep of Scripture. The Bible shows the arrangement in force from Job onward, but it gives no date for when the permission began or on what terms. What follows is the book’s interpretation.

In the garden the serpent was rebelling. He denied what God had said, and God cursed him for it (Genesis 3:14–15). Jesus called him “a murderer from the beginning” (John 8:44). God did not set up the garden temptation. The serpent did, against God.

The book argues that God used it all the same. The enemy’s temptations became the testing of the people who live in this world, and through that testing God finds those who will choose to love him in spite of everything and gives them a place of honor in his kingdom. “To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne,” the risen Christ says (Revelation 3:21). When Paul writes that “all things work together for good to them that love God” (Romans 8:28), Chris White takes the garden itself to be included.

None of this makes the devil God’s partner or servant. He was not made to be a tempter. His permitted, bounded activity is what his rebellion was reduced to afterward, so that, in the book’s words, “the enemy who meant to destroy became, against his own intention, the means by which faith is proved.” God owes him nothing and has made no agreement with him.

The book also connects temptation to the devil’s other title, the accuser. Having tempted a person into sin, he then accuses the person of it, and because the charge is true, death stands behind it. The page Why Does Satan Want People to Sin? explains that link, and What Does It Mean That the Devil Had the Power of Death? sets out how the book understands his power and how Christ took it away.

What This Means for Christians Today

The first comfort in these passages is the limit. Satan could not touch Job without leave, and he could not sift Peter without Jesus knowing it and praying. Paul gives the same assurance to the church:

There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.

1 Corinthians 10:13

The second is the purpose. A trial that God permits is meant to prove faith and to end in “the crown of life” (James 1:12). Scripture gives that purpose for trials in general. It gives no key for reading the reason behind any one hardship, and Job’s friends were rebuked for claiming one. Christians are given the purpose and the limit, and they trust God with the rest.

The third is the answer to the accuser. The cross took from the devil his charge against those who are in Christ. Believers are still tempted, because the tempter is still permitted to test and the testing still counts. The question If Satan Was Defeated, Why Is He Still Active? is answered more fully on its own page. What believers no longer face is an accuser with a true charge and a sentence of death behind it. When they sin, “we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous” (1 John 2:1).

And believers can stand. “Resist the devil, and he will flee from you” (James 4:7). Peter, who was sifted and restored, later wrote the same counsel to suffering Christians: resist him, “stedfast in the faith” (1 Peter 5:9).

Where This Understanding Comes From

The idea that the devil acts only by God’s permission, and that God uses his temptations to test and prove his people, is old. Many Christians today find it uncomfortable, but older Christians did not. Jewish writers before Christ already pictured Satan this way. The book of Jubilees, written about two centuries before Christ, describes the chief of the evil spirits asking God to leave some spirits under his command, and God granting a limited portion. Jubilees stands outside the Bible, and it shows how Jews of Jesus’ day understood an adversary who acts by permission and within limits. David M. Moffitt has studied how that tradition stands behind Hebrews 2 and its account of the devil’s defeat. Early Christian writers such as Justin Martyr and Irenaeus taught that human beings keep the freedom to turn to God, and John Chrysostom read Romans 5 as saying that what came to us from Adam was mortality. How Atonement Works builds on these writers, credits them, and offers its own account of how temptation, accusation and the power of death fit together.