Until we are born again, the only temptation we understand is the kind mentioned in the book of James: “Each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed” (1:14). After we are born again and become Jesus’s brothers and sisters, we are lifted into a different realm, where we begin to face the kinds of temptation our Lord faced during his human lifetime. Before our spiritual rebirth, our Lord’s temptations and ours moved in different spheres. His were the temptations of God-as-man, while ours were merely the temptations of man.
Once the Son of God was formed inside us through the Holy Spirit, the Spirit began to detect certain of Satan’s temptations—temptations which we, on our own, could never recognize. Satan doesn’t tempt believers to sin; he tries to lure us away from what has been put into us by our spiritual rebirth, in the hopes that we’ll no longer be of value to God. He tempts us to change our point of view, so that we’ll no longer see things from Christ’s perspective. Only the Spirit of God can detect this as a temptation of the devil.
What happens in temptation is that an outside power comes to test
the things we hold dear within us, the things that define our personality. This explains the way in which our Lord was tempted. Within his person, he held the fact that he was to be the king of humankind and the savior of the world, and these are precisely what Satan came to test him on. Jesus went through the temptation and “did not sin” (Hebrews 4:15), emerging from the battle with his personality intact. If we will commit ourselves to him, his Spirit will take us through every temptation in the same way, and we will emerge from the battle victorious
