Dale Johnson: I’m thrilled to have with me today Dr. Keith Evans. He’s professor of Christian Counseling at RTS Charlotte. He’s also been in academia for nine years, teaching at a seminary prior to his time at RTS. He was a pastor for seven years in Lafayette, Indiana, which is near Purdue University.
He’s married to Melissa, and they have four girls. Keith, great to have you on the podcast today. Looking forward to our time together.
Keith Evans: Thank you so much. Looking forward to it as well, Dale.
Dale Johnson: Now, Tricks of the Tempter, here coming up soon, you’re going to be presenting as a plenary speaker at our ACBC annual conference, Ancient Paths: Soul Care in Past Places [1], and this is going to be a topic that you’re presenting on. So, I don’t want you to give away everything, but I do want to talk to you about it, because this is such an interesting topic: Tricks of the Tempter.
And the Puritans wrote extensively about this idea of temptation. Give us some ideas as to why the Puritans considered this topic and wrote so extensively on it.
Keith Evans: We tend to think in contemporary context that temptation is just “should I click on that link,” or “should I lay hold of that substance or alcohol,” or whatever the case may be, whatever the immediate temptation is. But, Puritans wanted us to understand that temptation is so much broader than that.
How we think, what we love, our conscience and what our conscience is comfortable with or not comfortable with. It’s a much broader topic. So, you’ll read these tomes on temptation, unpacking it. It’s like a directory of temptation and all these different headings and how to resist those particular types of temptation. That might sound a bit strange to our modern sensibilities. Why do we want to focus so much on that?
Our mentality was, of course, to pastor well, to shepherd well, to counsel well. That if we understand areas of weakness or inclination to certain things, then we will be able to not only resist those things, but to put on the biblical alternative and to cultivate the fruit of the spirit, cultivate the life of the spirit in contrast to these areas of temptation.
So, one of the things that the Puritans talk about is that the temptation isn’t inherently like a bad thing. It’s a way that God instructs us; that He permits us to be tempted because it’s a type of refinement for us. He’s not testing us to see are we as children or something like that, but to test our faith and to show it to be true. It teaches us to rely on Him more. It teaches us to be more compassionate toward others as well.
Think about how Hebrews talks about the temptation of Christ, that He’s tempted in every way we are yet without sin. That’s to show His compassion toward us. He’s a compassionate high priest, sensitive toward us in all of our weaknesses and so forth. So, temptation has so much more of a robust idea as the Puritans were writing about it than just “don’t do this” and “don’t do that.”
Dale Johnson: I love it. I’m going to be speaking at the same conference on John Flavel and his perspective on keeping the heart. This is actually one of the areas that he describes as to how we’re to keep our heart.
We’re supposed to be active in fighting against these temptations, which are readily available. I appreciate what you alluded to. I thought of James chapter 1, where the same word being used, trial and temptation, in that concept of what God does. He cannot tempt us to sin, but what God does in a concept of testing or trial, versus what the evil one does in trying to lure and entice us away.
So, I want you to dive a little bit deeper. You alluded to something that I think would be important as you talked about the Puritans and sort of what they meant by this concept of temptation. You talked about that it’s maybe broader than what we think of in the modern day. It’s broader than just a simple lure to obvious sins, because that’s kind of how we classify temptation. So, talk about how the Puritans distinguish here.
Keith Evans: So, the Puritans talk about the three great enemies, the world, the flesh and the devil. And in our circles, we have a pretty good corner market on the flesh as far as we’ve thought a lot about sin and about total depravity and what all that means and our hearts being desperately wicked. But one pastor actually said that we have such a neat and tidy bow on the flesh that we tend to forget about the world and the devil, these three great enemies that pastors of old have written much about.
So, temptation is more than just a pull toward outward sin. It’s also the ways that, again, the world, the flesh and the devil seek to entangle us in all kinds of different things. For instance, prosperity might be a particular stumbling block, might be a particular temptation or adversity that we might be prone to grumbling and complaining and not necessarily see it as the Lord refining us. Or temptation toward distorted thoughts about God.
One of the things that the Puritans talk about is that Satan paints God with Satan’s brush. He tries to make God in our minds look like Satan himself. For instance, Satan might infiltrate one of God’s institutions to try to invalidate that institution. The church is a beautiful place and faithful shepherding and teaching is a beautiful gift and design of God. But if Satan can infiltrate that with one of his wolves, what’s that do in the heart of God’s people?
It moves us away from thinking the church is a beautiful place. We start thinking the church is a horrible, distorted place. So, these are some of the ways that the Puritans are talking about. Another illustration is to invalidate the beauty of the family, of the home, if Satan can paint husbands with his own brush. Then we start thinking, “I don’t know if I believe in marriage,” or “I don’t know if I believe in this whole father thing. All fathers are terrible.”
The way in which temptation moves us away from the truth and toward lies and deceit and deception. Subtle shifts in our conscience of tolerating things and being okay with these things that the Lord Himself would call sin, but we’re getting a little bit more tolerant. We’re getting a little bit more splashy in those areas. Again, the Puritans are seeing all of these concepts under the banner of temptation.
Dale Johnson: That’s so helpful, because as we think about as we keep progressing toward the Day of the Lord, the Bible makes clear that what’s going to happen is that people are going to call evil good and good evil. Exactly what you’re describing is that they’ll look at the character of God and they’ll be convinced in their minds that what He is or who he is and what He does is in the category of evil. That’s how He paints this brush of God in trying to understand Him as Satan himself. That’s very interesting.
As I think about what temptation does, you mentioned this a little bit earlier, it does reveal something about us, right? We either see faith coming out in various ways or we see our falling into the flesh, being tempted and overcome where sin is birthed in the heart, as James 1 describes. We learn something about ourselves. Keith, as I think about counseling, lots of counseling is really just trying to understand ourselves, understand who we are, the context of the situation that we’re in, why we respond in different ways like we do. These topics, believe it or not, have been talked about long before modern psychotherapeutic approaches were around. The Puritans were describing some of these things.
I want you to talk a little bit about self-knowledge and what role this concept plays. Now, I understand people get overly zealous in scrutinizing themselves and so on, but I want us to balance this in some particular way. What role does self-knowledge play in perceiving this unique approach to temptations that believers face?
Keith Evans: So, one of the ways that the Puritans speak about these three great enemies, the world, the flesh and the devil, is that they love to sail with the wind. Not sail against the wind, but whatever is easiest, whatever is the lowest hanging fruit, whatever is the greatest inclination to that person. They’re going to go with that as far as seeking to lure and tempt us away.
To use an illustration, if you were to set recreational drugs in front of me, I’m not going to be tempted toward that. I’m like, no, get this out of here. It’s very easy to throw that away and not be tempted in that direction. But there are some folks, because of their either current experiences or their past experiences, if you were to put them in the exact same situation, to resist that would be very difficult. They might actually even be trembling in resisting that particular temptation.
That’s just a simple illustration to say that there are certain things that, you know, we’re inclined toward or certain proclivities. And the three great enemies that the believer faces, the world, the flesh and the devil, are going to capitalize on that. So, let’s trot that out a little bit.
The conscience that is tender. That’s a good thing, actually, that the Lord would gift us with having a tender conscience. Yet, the temptation then would be toward excessive scrupulosity and being overly fixated upon every jot and tittle. Well, that’s a particular type of temptation that isn’t going to tempt the person who has a very broad or wide conscience. Then they might be more easily tempted toward licentious living or just carnal living or whatever the case may be. If somebody’s personality is a bold personality, maybe they are more easily tempted to presumption, to presuming upon the Lord. Or if somebody is timid, that they would be more easily tempted toward despair.
So, we have to know our own personality, our own disposition, our own weakness, our own inclinations. But here’s the application to counseling. Puritans were just good counselors. They were there long before kind of the modern expression of the biblical counseling movement. They’re some of the early proponents of biblical counseling. They’re seeking to know their people. Like that’s really the application for it.
One of the reasons why they are proposing this isn’t just so that we would know ourselves, but so that we would be able to know our counselees. Those who we are caring for, those who we are walking with, that we would be able to bear their burdens.
We do need to know ourselves. But, we also need to be able to know those who are in front of us and be able to apply God’s Word in the particular ways that our dear friend, our brother, our sister that we’re walking with is particularly tempted.
Dale Johnson: Keith, that’s so interesting. And I’m not sure exactly where you’re going in your plenary or even on this podcast. But, as I think about some of the things you’re describing, one of the Puritans that’s been very, very helpful to me is Thomas Brooks in his book, Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices [2].
People may be hearing you describe the Puritan thinking, how helpful it was. And people say, “yeah, it’s very helpful for me to know how terrible a person I am.” Certainly they had before their eyes the Word of God, and it demonstrates just how deep our depravity runs. It can be depressing when you’re reading things like that.
People think that’s all the Puritans offered. It’s sort of like they think reading the Puritans is like reading Romans 3 without getting to chapter 5. As you read Romans 3 and you understand how wicked a person we are because of the depravity of sin. Then we get to Romans 5 and we see the beauty of what Christ Himself has done and what faith in Christ provides in terms of peace with God. The Puritans were no stranger to the concept either. I think what makes their remedies that they offer so beautiful, Keith, is because they helped us to understand just how broken and desperate we are without the treasure of Christ.
So, I want you to give some sense of the way not just Thomas Brooks, but other Puritan authors really gave us a sense in moving toward remedy. And part of the reason I think they help us to see deeply the wickedness in our own heart and the things that lie in the shadows of our own heart and the intensity of knowing ourself and keeping our heart was to seek appropriate remedy for the things that truly ill us. Talk a little bit about how the Puritan authors approach this concept.
Keith Evans: Thomas Brooks’s book, Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices [2], is not the only book that the Puritans wrote on temptation and their remedy. It’s probably the most well-known and maybe the most easily accessible. But you’ll just be reading through a Puritan book on a totally different topic and then you’ll encounter one of these directories of temptation and their remedies. But Thomas Brooks packed it nicely in a single package and you can find it in modern English and so forth. So it’s more easily accessible and it’s a well-known one.
Basically, what the Puritans were doing is exactly what we see the Apostle Paul doing in Ephesians 4. It’s put off and put on, that we’re not just told to mortify sin, but we’re also called to be living unto something, and we’re given the biblical alternative. Again, that’s just pastoral sensibilities that’s not just “knock off your sin, you guys are a bunch of wretches” or something like that. It’s, here are the areas we might be particularly weak, we might be particularly tempted, and here’s the biblical solution to put on in response to that.
The Puritans were never unmasking the world, the flesh, and the devil’s snares without at the same time binding up the wounds of God’s people and healing them with gospel remedies. And they weren’t seeking to heal the wounds of the Lord’s people lightly of peace – peace where there is no peace, like modern psychological therapeutic methods might do.
But it’s the biblical salve for every sore or the plaster for every wound, as one Puritan said, aiming to comfort and instruct and equip all Christians, from the weakest to the strongest, with the Christ-centered means of resisting. And again, walking in the ways that the Spirit would lay before us. So again, I just think it’s wise pastoral sensibilities or wise counsel.
Dale Johnson: This is one of the things, Keith, that I love so much about the Puritans, because what they offer are remedies to these issues that we, as human beings, struggle with so deeply. Those remedies are so refreshing to me, and I think people may miss the practicality and beauty of the Puritans if they neglect to see the concepts of remedy that they offer.
So, give maybe an example that would be helpful and practical, because I want people to see how practical and useful some of these examples could be, because they’re using the same Bible, dealing with very similar human problems that we have. Give some of those remedies that we see in the Puritans that you might find especially useful in the things that we’re tempted in in the modern day.
Keith Evans: So, I’ll just mention three, and hopefully what this is aiming to do is just whet our appetite, not just whet our appetite for the conference, I hope it does that. But also whet our appetite for good literature of old that these things are not inherently inaccessible or hard to dig into.
The first one, keeping the greatest distance from sin. That might sound really simple, but the idea, of course, is that we fraternize with sin. We linger long with temptation, as opposed to, at the first outset of temptation, nipping it in the bud and getting out of there, booking it away from temptation. Whether that be in our mind, whether that be digitally, whether that be in even physical places, seeking to keep great distance, fleeing the occasion of temptation.
The Apostle Paul talks this way in 1 Corinthians 6, talking about sexual temptation, and he says to flee that, and he uses very evocative language there in 1 Corinthians 6, because to not do that would be like uniting Christ in sexual sin. To leverage, Sinclair Ferguson talks in that passage, it would be like taking the Holy Spirit by the hand and saying, come Holy Spirit, sin with me. I hope we hear just like how ghastly that is. I mean, it’s a blasphemous thought. We should be driven far away from temptation. We should be wanting to keep as far distance as possible.
The second one, seeing sin as bittersweet. Temptation always paints sin as sweet, but it conceals the bitterness. It shows the fleeting pleasures of sin, but it hides from us the cost and the consequence of sin. So, if we can understand rightly the cost and consequence of sin, like the Proverbs talk about, for instance, that if I’m willing to pursue sexual temptation, if I’m willing to put my feet on that path, like in Proverbs 6 through 8. I’m willing to pay with my life. I’m willing to pay with my reputation. I’m willing to pay with how that affects my family and my community. The Scriptures are bringing out this costliness of sin to us. That’s what the Puritans are trying to show us as well, that we often see the one without the other, the sweetness without seeing the bitterness.
Then the final one, again, just to whet our appetite, using Scripture decisively when we face temptation. You know how Christ meets temptation in Matthew chapter 4? It is written. It is written. It is written. We know the importance of knowing Scripture, quoting Scripture, having Scripture memorized. But the way that the Puritans use Christ’s abrupt response to temptation is that, again, he doesn’t linger long. He doesn’t fraternize with sin. He doesn’t wait until it’s farther down the road to nip it in the bud.
It’s immediately decisively breaking from it. At the moment we begin to be inclined in a certain direction. Father, forgive me. Please help me to turn from this. Help me to flee from this. So, meeting temptation with that decisive biblical response.
Now, I’m a professor, Dale, and I love nuance. And it was said of David Polissen that he never met a nuance that he didn’t appreciate. So, I am all for nuance. That’s great. But with regard to sin, there’s no place for nuance. Biblical, decisive, it is written, let’s be done with it. I think that that’s a really helpful application from the Puritans.
Dale Johnson: Keith, this is so helpful, brother. Not only am I excited about the conference coming up, I get eager to read more and more and to see the practicality of how useful lives devoted to God can be. And honestly, how good for us it is to live a life that’s pursuing the Lord in these types of ways.
So protective of our own hearts. Keith, thank you for your work mining the Puritans and seeing how they see Scripture and making it useful to us. So, thank you for your time today.
Keith Evans: Absolutely, thank you, Dale.