Lead Us Not into Testing

I. Three Times "Here I Am"

God calls, and an old man answers with one word: here I am.

Then comes the command that has silenced every age since: take your son, please, your only one, whom you love, Isaac, and go to the land of Moriah1 — and offer him there on one of the mountains that I will name to you.2 The next morning he saddles the donkey. It does not say what he thought that night; it says that he rose early.

Three days they walk. The servants stay behind with the donkey; the wood lies on the boy's shoulders, the fire and the knife the old man carries. Then comes the second call, and now it is the boy: "My father." And Abraham answers his son with exactly the word he gave God: "Here I am, my son."3

"Look, the fire and the wood — but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?"

The answer is one sentence, and it is the whole chapter in one sentence: "God will provide Himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my son." And the two of them went on together.

Twice the narrator closes like this, with the same words — before the boy's question and after it: and the two of them went together.4 The hardest conversation in Genesis has broken nothing between those two. They are still walking side by side.

On the mountain the altar is built, the wood arranged, the boy bound and laid on it; the hand with the knife goes up. And then the third call, double and urgent — "Abraham, Abraham!" — and for the third time the same answer: here I am.5

Three times "here I am" in one chapter: to God, to his son, and again to God. And the middle one he says to the child he is about to bind.

That is what keeps this father upright in the testing — not an explanation of God's ways, but availability, upward and downward at once. The heaviest command ever given to a father does not pull him away from his child: the child calls, and he is there.

II. The First Word for Love

"Your son, your only one, whom you love."

In that phrase the verb to love appears for the first time in the Bible.6 The first word for love in Scripture describes a father who loves his son, and it stands in the sentence in which he is asked to give that son up. The language of the Bible teaches love at its heaviest from the very start.

God will provide Himself the lamb — literally it says: God will see it for Himself. That answer, given to his son on the way, becomes the name of the place at the summit. When the ram hangs by its horns in the thicket and the boy has been untied, Abraham names the mountain after the verb of his own answer: YHWH Yireh — the LORD will provide; so that people say to this day: on the mountain of YHWH it will be provided.7

One honesty belongs here: Abraham promised a lamb, and what God gave that day was a ram. The promise was Abraham's; the provision was God's, and it turned out differently from the promise — not less, but different.

So the heaviest testing in Genesis does not end at an empty altar but at a Name. The place where a father had to be able to give up everything is from now on named not after the knife and not after the fear. It is named after the providing. Under that name stand a father and a son who went up together — and are both still there.

III. Lead Us Not into Massah

The verb of testing begins on Abraham's mountain. Then it goes on a journey: bitter water at Marah, bread from heaven in the Wilderness of Sin, and no water at Rephidim.8 Three of the first four testings in the Bible are about eating and drinking.

At Rephidim the testing gets an address. The people quarrel with Moses there and ask the question that puts into words everything a testing is: is YHWH in our midst, or not? And Moses names the place after it: Massah — Testing.9 It is the boy's question on the mountain — where is the lamb? — but he asked it of his father and walked on, together; at Rephidim the question has become a reproach.

When Scripture began to speak Greek, something happened to that place name: the translators translated it. In their Deuteronomy the place is called in full ὁ Πειρασμός, with the article, as a proper name. The psalm that recalls Massah made it a common noun — "the day of testing in the wilderness" — and Hebrews quotes that psalm word for word.10 The place name has become a word. And that word stands in the sixth petition.

Lead us not into Massah — that is how this petition sounded to anyone who read his Bible in Greek. Not as a request for a softer life, but as a request about the route: not to that place, not to the spring where the question lives whether You are in our midst at all.

And when the Son Himself was tested in a wilderness, He took his middle answer from exactly this dossier: "you shall not test the LORD your God" — the Massah verse, from the section where the wilderness journey is explained.11 He Himself had 40 days of hunger behind Him — and where the people started quarreling over their thirst, He answers with the lesson Massah left behind.

IV. The God Who Tests No One

There is a sentence in the New Testament that seems to strike this petition out.

"Let no one say, when he is tested: I am being tested by God. For God cannot be tested by evil, and He Himself tests no one."12

James resolves that appearance, in the same paragraph. He calls blessed the one who endures testing, and at the very beginning he calls it nothing but joy when one falls into all kinds of testings.13 One verse later he says where the enticement does come from: each one is tempted when he is dragged away by his own desire.14

The same noun, four verses, two meanings — and James separates them not by weight but by origin. What comes may be endured and carries a crown. What entices comes from one's own breast, and whoever blames it on God does not know Him.

And the writer had not forgotten the mountain. When he needs one person in whom faith and deeds are one, he points to Moriah: Abraham, our father, "when he offered up Isaac, his son, on the altar".15 The letter that acquits God of every enticement hangs its greatest example on the heaviest testing ever given.

And then the form of the sixth petition falls into place. It does not say "do not test us". It says: do not bring us into it — a verb of transport, with a direction in it, as if the testing were a place. And in the Greek reader's Bible it was a place: Massah was called Testing there. The first testing in Scripture was already a place: appointed by God, three days' walk away.

So the child is not asking whether the Father would refrain from something that, according to James, He does not do anyway. It asks for the route. Not by way of Massah, if possible. Not to the spring where the question rises whether You are there at all.

For that is the last thing Massah tells about itself, and it turns the matter one more notch: at that spring it was not God who tested man. It was the people who tested Him — "why do you test YHWH?", Moses asks there.16

Whoever prays "lead us not into testing" is therefore also asking this: do not bring me to the place where I will test You.

Of the man with whom the word began, no such moment is recorded: three days and a mountain long no quarreling, no asking back — only three times the same answer, upward and downward: here I am.

V. The Night in Which He Prompted It

There is one night in which this petition is not prayed but commanded.

Gethsemane. Three disciples a stone's throw away, and sleep wins out over loyalty. On Abraham's mountain the call came three times, and three times the same word came back: here I am. In this garden He comes to his own three times and finds them sleeping — their eyes are heavy, and they do not know what to answer Him.

What He says is the sixth petition, taken hold of from the other side: "Watch and pray, that you may not enter into testing." He says it again when He finds them sleeping once more; Luke has it open and close the night.17

Same preposition, same noun — and the verb from the other side. The prayer says: do not bring us into it, with God as subject. Gethsemane says: do not go into it, with the disciple as subject. So the petition has two handles, and that night shows why: there is a side of the testing that lies with the Father, and a side that lies with the child — the route, and one's own feet.

And He commands it in the hour that He Himself goes into the testing. The disciples must pray not to go in where He at that same moment goes in, praying, with the address first.18

In Luke, moreover, it is not an isolated night: after the wilderness the devil left Him "until an opportune time", and in the upper room He says to the 12: "you are the ones who have stayed with Me in my testings."19 The whole ministry there runs from testing to testing.

On Moriah a father and a son went into it the two of them together; here He goes alone, a stone's throw from the sleepers — and his concern is that the children need not go in.

VI. As Long as It Is Called Today

The letter that keeps repeating the Massah quotation is Hebrews — today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts, as in the embitterment, on the day of testing in the wilderness.21 And between those repetitions the writer hangs one small word on it:

"Exhort one another, every day, as long as it is called today, so that none of you is hardened by the deceitfulness of sin."22

The "today" of the bread petition and the "today" of Massah are in Hebrews the same word. Every day on which a child asks for bread is also a day on which a heart can stay soft — or harden. The sixth petition lives next to the fourth, as Massah lay next to the manna.

And the same letter answers the sixth petition before it is asked. "In that He Himself has suffered, being tested, He is able to come to the help of those who are tested"; "tested in all things in like manner — without sin".23 So Someone has been in Massah, down to the bottom, and He was not broken there.

Paul adds the door: God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing will also give the way out.24 Even the place called Testing has, with this Father, a door to the outside.

And Paul writes that to people of whom he has just said that the wilderness journey became an example for them — on whom the ends of the ages have come.25

And when Hebrews lists its witnesses, the old man of Moriah stands right in the middle, with the word with which his mountain began: "By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac; he who had received the promises brought his only one."26

Genesis does not tell what went on in him those three days; it says that he rose early. Hebrews tells it after all: he reckoned that God was able to raise his son even from the dead — and he received him back.