IT’S ONE OF the most disturbing stories of the Old Testament. A man named Abram had been chosen by God to be the father of a nation who would worship him and follow his ways. Though Abram was 75 years old at the time, God promised that he would yet have a son. Abram believed, and he and his elderly wife Sarai waited.

And waited.

And waited.

A decade later, the promise still hadn’t been fulfilled. So Sarai suggested that Abram sleep with Hagar, her Egyptian maid, to see if they could have a child through her. It was a problematic plan, but it a sense, it worked: Ishmael was born to them when Abram was 86.

Over another decade went by before God renewed his promise, predicting that Abram and Sarai, whom he renamed Abraham and Sarah, would have a son who was to be named Isaac. And finally, when Abraham was 100 years old and Sarah was 90, Isaac was born.

It’s easy to take the high ground and chide the couple for taking matters into their own hands. But to be fair, we should ask ourselves if we’d have been willing to wait patiently for 25 years for God to keep a promise like that.

But that’s not the disturbing story I’m talking about.

Sometime later, God appeared to Abraham and issued this command:

Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you. (Gen 22:2)

The Bible doesn’t say how old Isaac was at this point, but the consensus is that he was at least a young adult, able to carry the wood needed for the burnt offering. He and his father have had many years together. And the way God phrases the command deepens the pathos of what he’s telling Abraham to do. God could have just said, “Take Isaac…” But instead, he says, “Take your son. Your only son. The son you love so much. Isaac.”

God was testing Abraham’s faith. And as you may already know, Abraham passed the test. With what seems to be Isaac’s full cooperation, Abraham prepared to do exactly as he had been told. Only at the last possible second, when Abraham’s knife was poised in the air, did God intervene.

The story is a difficult and controversial one. Some complain that God was commanding child sacrifice, a pagan practice that God himself abhorred. And at the very least, to modern ears, it sounds like abuse.

I don’t know if it’s possible to make the story palatable to everyone. But the reason I bring it up is to raise a different question, the more existential one that tends to plague readers: Is God going to test my faith that way? Is God going to ask me to make that kind of a radical, unthinkable sacrifice?

Who knows what God might require of you that might be different than what he requires of me? But as one theologian has suggested, Abraham might be considered a special case: the faith of an entire nation would be built on the foundation of his faith, in a way that can’t be said of us.

Still, the Bible seems clear on one thing: our faith will be tested. And knowing this, we should pray.

WE COME NOW to the final petition of the Lord’s Prayer:

And lead us not into temptation,
    but deliver us from the evil one. (Matt 6:13)

You may have memorized that last phrase as “but deliver us from evil” — but many modern versions translate this as “deliver us from the evil one” instead, that is, from Satan. Suffice it to say that the Greek can be read either way, and Jesus himself, remember, was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. In the end, given the way evil and the devil are so closely associated in Scripture, it may not make much difference which way we go.

The other question, though, has to do with the word “temptation” in the first phrase. The New Revised Standard Version, for example, translates the phrase this way: “And do not bring us to the time of trial.” Which is correct?

The problem is that the underlying Greek can be translated both ways, as either “temptation” on the one hand, or “trial” or “test” on the other. Listen, for example, to the apostle James:

Blessed is the one who perseveres under trial because, having stood the test, that person will receive the crown of life that the Lord has promised to those who love him. (James 1:12)

That should remind us of the story of Abraham and Isaac; Abraham persevered and stood the test. In the very next verse, James adds:

When tempted, no one should say, “God is tempting me.” For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. (vss. 13-14)

James is making a clear distinction between trials and temptations. Both may be tests of our faith, but we should never say that God “tempts” us, for that would make God complicit in evil. Rather, James teaches, temptation arises from our own sinful desire.

But in these verses, James is using the same root word both ways, to refer to both trials and temptations. How do we sort this out? And what are we praying in the Lord’s Prayer?

LET’S FACE IT: life is complicated, and our faith can be tested at every turn. Circumstances can test our faith: how will we respond, for example, to the bad news we just got from our doctor? And to be clear, viewing this as an opportunity to trust God does not oblige us to believe that God gave us cancer just to see how we’d react.

And our faith can be tested when our desires try to carry us away. That’s the distinction James is trying to make. If we struggle with an alcohol addiction, for example, we can’t open the liquor cabinet and say that God is tempting us to drink. No, James says, that’s on you.

Against that background, we can take “lead us not into temptation but deliver us from the evil one” as another big-picture prayer. We live in a world in which there is a constant cosmic and spiritual struggle, one that we know God will eventually win. Indeed, the New Testament picture is that God has already won in the death and resurrection of Jesus, but we still have to wait for the victory to be complete, leaving room for more and more people to hear and receive the gospel.

In the meantime, whatever tests and trials may come, we pray that God would deliver us from the devil’s ways, so that we can be faithful disciples of the kingdom of heaven. Thus, whether we’re praying for our daily bread, or for forgiveness, or for strength and protection in the face of trials and temptations, we pray in a way that acknowledges our utter dependence on God in all things, even in faithfulness itself.

BEFORE WE MOVE on, let me give voice to a question you may be asking yourself. In the prayer, Jesus clearly teaches us to pray for forgiveness in the context of forgiving others. And after the prayer, he circles back to say that we must forgive others to be fully and finally forgiven ourselves. Then why does the verse about temptation and evil seem to interrupt that flow?

Maybe, just maybe, it’s because Jesus knows that the refusal to forgive is one of the strongest temptations, because the devil will fill our minds with all the reasons we shouldn’t have to forgive.

May God deliver us from that, too.