Behind the noun peirasmos — the testing in the Lord’s Prayer — stands its verb: πειράζω (peirazō), to test, to try, to put to the proof. It’s the same root, doing the same wide work, and like the noun it has been flattened in English into the single word tempt. That flattening hides most of what the verb actually carried in the first century.

Peirazō covers the full range of putting someone or something to the test. It can mean the trying of faith under hardship, the proving of character through ordeal, the probing of a teacher to see whether he’ll stumble — and, yes, in some contexts, the luring of someone toward wrong. English Bibles have rendered it tempt in many of these places, but tempt in the modern sense — being enticed by something attractive to do something sinful — is only one corner of the word. More often the verb is closer to test or try in the broad sense: to subject to a trial that will either prove or break.

The book of James shows the breadth in a single short passage. James opens by telling his readers to consider it pure joy whenever they face trials of many kinds, because the testing of your faith produces perseverance (James 1:2-3, NIV) — trials to be welcomed, hardship that builds endurance. Then, a few verses on, he warns: When tempted, no one should say, “God is tempting me.” For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone (James 1:13, NIV). Same word group, opposite shades. James can speak of testing we should welcome and of tempting God never does, in the same chapter, because the underlying word holds all of that range and the meaning is fixed by context.

The verb shows up in the loaded, end-times sense too. Paul, in 1 Thessalonians 3:5, frets that the tempter — using peirazō — might have tested his readers beyond what they could bear. The picture there isn’t a small moral slip. It’s the pressure of persecution and hardship that could prove too much for ordinary faith, and an adversary working through it. The verb, like its noun, ran from the daily to the catastrophic.

Holding the verb and the noun together is what keeps the Lord’s Prayer honest. When Jesus taught his disciples to ask not to be brought into peirasmon, he was using the noun whose verb James uses for the trials we’re told to welcome and the testing God himself does not perform. The Father who, as James says, tempts no one is the same Father asked, in the prayer, to spare his people the testing that would break them — and to keep them through every trial that comes.