is the meaning of the word to tempt. The Greek word is peirazein. In English, the word tempt has a uniformly and consistently bad meaning. It always means to entice people to do wrong, to seek to seduce them into sin, to try to persuade them to take the wrong way. But peirazein has a quite different element in its meaning. It means to test far more than it means to tempt in our sense of the word. One of the great Old Testament stories is the story of how narrowly Abraham escaped sacrificing his only