1. First, God gives commission to Satan, without which his hand would be sealed up under an impossibility of reaching it out against any.
2. Secondly, Opportunities and occasions do depend upon his providence, without which nothing comes to pass. Neither we nor anything else do or can move without him.
3. Thirdly, The Spirit oversees the temptation as to measure and continuance. The length and breadth of it is ordered by him.
4. Fourthly, The issue and consequences of every temptation are at his appointment. The ways of its working for our exercise, humiliation, or conviction, or for any other good and advantage whatsoever, they all belong to his determination.
So that it is not improper to assert that God and Satan do concur in the same temptation, though the ways of proceeding, with the aims and intentions of both, be directly different and contrary. Hence is it that the temptation of David, 1 Sam. xxiv. 1, and 1 Chron. xxi. 1, are upon several regards attributed both to God and Satan.
Appl. 1. This note is of use to remove those harsh interpretations which poor tempted Christians meet withal, commonly from such as have not touched their burdens with the least of their fingers. Men are apt in these cases to judge,
(1.) First, The ways of religion, as being ways, at least in the more serious and rigid practice of them, of intolerable hazard and perplexity, and only upon an observation that those who most addict themselves to a true and strict observance of duty and command usually complain of temptations, and express sometimes their fears and distress of heart about them. This is your reading, your praying, and hearing. Such preaching, say they, leads men to despair and perpetual disquiet; and upon the whole they conclude it dangerous to be religious above the common rate of those that prosecute it in a slow and careless indifferency.
(2.) Secondly, The like severity of censure do they use in reference to the spiritual state of the tempted, as if they were vessels of his hatred, and such as were by him given up to the power of this ‘wild boar of the forest’ to devour and tear. All kind of distresses are obnoxious to the worst of misjudgings from malevolent minds. The sufferings of Christ produced this censorious scoff, ‘Let God deliver him, if he will have him,’ [Mat. xxvii. 43.] David’s troubles easily induced his adversaries to conclude that ‘God had forsaken him, and that there was none to deliver him,’ Ps. lxxi. 11. But in troubles of this nature, where especially there are frightful complainings against themselves, men are more easily drawn out to be peremptory in their uncharitable determinations concerning them, because the trouble itself is somewhat rare, and apt to beget hideous impressions; and withal the vent which the afflicted parties give by their bemoaning of their estate, in hope to ease themselves thereby, is but taken as a testimony against themselves, and the undoubted echoes of their real feelings.
(3.) Thirdly, Their sins are upon this ground misjudged and heightened. Unusual troubles with common apprehension argue unusual sins. The viper upon Paul’s hand made the barbarians confident he was a man of more than ordinary guilt and wickedness, Acts xxviii. 4. David’s sickness was enough to give his enemies occasion to surmise that it was the punishment of some great transgression. ‘An evil disease,’ say they, ‘cleaveth to him,’ Ps. xli. 8. Those that were overwhelmed by the fall of the tower of Siloam, and those whose blood Pilate mixed with their sacrifices, were judged greatest sinners, Luke xiii. 4. But in inward temptations, this misjudging confidence is every way more heightened; and those that are most molested are supposed to have given more away to Satan.
(4.) Fourthly, Temptations are also misjudged to be worse than they are. They are indeed things to be trembled at; but they are not properly of an astonishing, amazing, or despairing consideration, as men are apt to think that view the workings of them at a distance.