Overcoming Temptation: Knowing Your Identity

Excerpt from Tempted and Tried, author - Russel D. Moore


The first step in the cycle of temptation is the question of your identity.  James told the poor and beaten down to "boast in his exaltation"  and told the prosperous and the up-and-coming to glory "in his humiliation" (James1:9-10).  Why?  James understood that temptation begins with an illusion about the self -a skewed vision of who you are.  The satanic powers don't care if your illusion is one of personal grandiosity or self-loathing, as long as you see your current circumstance, rather than the gospel, as the eternal statement of who you are.  if the poor sees his poverty as making it impossible for him to have dignity, he is fallen.  If the rich sees his wealth  as a denial that "like a flower of the grass he will pass away," even "in the midst of his pursuits (James 1:20-11), then he is undone.


Temptation has always started here, from the very beginning of the cosmic story.   When the Bible reveals the ancestral fall of the human race, it opens with a question of identity.  The woman in the Genesis narrative was approached by a mysterious serpent, a "beast of the field" that was "more crafty" than any of the others (Gen. 3:1).  and that's just the point.  The woman, Eve, and her husband were created in the image of God (Gen. 1:26-27).  They were living signs of God's dominion over everything except God and one another.  This dominion was exhaustive, right down to "every creeping thing that creeps on the earth"  (Gen. 1:26).


But here she was being interrogated by a "beast of the field" that questioned God's commands and prerogatives.   Without even a word, the serpent led the woman to act as though he had dominion over her instead of the other around. He persuaded her to see herself as an animal instead of as what she had been told she was--the image-bearing queen of the universe, a principality and power over the beasts.


As the same time the serpent was treating his queen as a fellow animal, he also subtly led her to see herself as more than an empress--as a goddess.  He auditioned her for her role as deity by leading her to act like a god, distinguishing autonomously between good and evil, deciding when she and her fellow were ready for maturity, evaluating the claims of God himself.  The snake prompted her to eat the fruit of the tree God had forbidden to her.  The tree somehow carried within it the power to awaken the conscience to "the knowledge of good and evil" (Gen. 2:17).  The serpent walked the woman along to where she could see herself as if she were the ultimate cosmic judge, free from scrutiny of her Creator's holiness.  At the very beginning of the human story was a question: Who are you?


(pages: 28-29)