ἐκπειράζω (ek-pi-rad'-zo): The infernal counterpart to peirázo and peirasmós—Hypertesting, an attribute of false communities which seeks not to reveal and refine but to destroy

[Reading time: 12 minutes]

In our four posts on the word, peirasmós, we have found that testing in the Christian life is not only necessary to reveal the state of our heart (Deut 8:2-3), but it is also critical to refine it through the fires of trial which we are able to endure only as we remain with Christ in His peirasmós.

The two-fold nature of each living word of Scripture

We now turn for a brief moment to what may be called the infernal counterpart of peirázo and peirasmós—ekpeirazo. As we have found in these word studies thus far, each word has a kind of life of its own. And as we begin to trace its life through the Scriptures, we find that it can always be applied in one of two ways:

It either reveals the pathway of life that operates within the Kingdom of God or it shows how life can be disfigured and distorted within the kingdoms of this Fallen Age. That is to say, there is a true application where the word reveals the life of the Godhead operating in His people; while, at the very same time, there is a false, contrived counterpart, which is only able to imitate and mimic the true.

The way of the later is darkness, deception and death.

With this introduction, we move into a study of ekpeirazo, which, we will find, operates fluidly within this later realm of deceptive, contrived, and ultimately, destructive community life.

Etymology & Definition

From ek (out of) + peirázo (to test)-> “to test out to an extreme,” or, more simply, to “hyper-test.”

4x in the NT

Summary Synthesis

The first use begins with Satan himself, who reveals to us the demonic pathway of hypertesting. And this type of testing, as we quickly find, is aimed solely at deceiving, distorting, dismantling and destroying. First it is he himself who tests Christ “to the extreme” in the wilderness trials before the inauguration of His public ministry.

And Christ meets his distortions with the Word rightly applied.

Its next use then demonstrates how Satan’s infernal methods operate, not in the pagan world of darkness, but in the religious systems of the world—in a “teacher of the Law,” who hypertests Jesus so as to both trap and entangle Him in the pathway of “justifying himself.”

Here again, Christ pushes the “expert” in the Torah to move beyond mere words to the application of the Living Word into the depths of his own person.

And thus, in each of Christ’s responses to the infernal hypertesting, He displays to us first, that it exists, second, how it operates, and finally, how we are to respond. In regard to the first, Jesus makes very clear that hypertesting occurs most often in the realm of church life where “theological” words, accurate though they may be, are divorced from the life of God and weaponized against the faithful.

And this pathway of right words, not applied to oneself but to others only, produces the fruit of accusation and division within a community.

Christ’s responses to such methods show us how we ourselves are to confront then overcome them. And this begins with applying the Word rightly to ourselves first—no one else.

And this leads to the final use, which takes us from Christ’s hypertestings to to the wilderness testings of Israel. And here we find in the narrative of the plague and the bronze serpent the final two steps. When we first apply the Word rightly and honestly to ourselves, we are brought to understand the darkness, deceitfulness—the venomous poison—operating in our own hearts.

And this poison will destroy us, our families, our communities, our churches.

Yet, when we confess the sickness, in Hawthorne’s words, of this Bosom Serpent, and then look to the crucified Savior, “lifted up”, we find in Him the potential for the real and enduring healing of our entire person. For He is the only One Who Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree, receiving all the horror of it, all the poison of the serpent, into the depths of His own person to the degree that “He Who knew no sin became sin for us.”

And there in His broken, bleeding, crucified body, lifted up for us to see, the curse was broken, and the pathway to healing opened to all who are vitally united to Him.

Detailed Analysis

Satan’s hypertesting of Jesus in Mt 4 and Lk 4

This word first occurs in Satan’s “hypertesting” of Jesus in the wilderness aimed, as noted above, at His total destruction. It appears in the devil’s test of Jesus (the second in Matthew’s Gospel; the third in Luke’s) when he directs Jesus to “cast” Himself” down from the Temple.” In this we see the demonic distortion of Psalm 91’s promise that God will “give His angels charge over [Him]…lest [He] dash [His] foot against a stone” (Ps 91:11-12; qtd. in both Mt 4:6 and Lk 4:10-11). And to this distortion that the Gospel will magically protect us [from, we might say, the reality of poor decision-making], Jesus responds by quoting Deuteronomy 6, so to both reveal the misapplication of the Word and, as it were, set the record straight, untangling it from the distortion of the fallen realm.

He declares to Satan, ”It is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God. to the test (ἐκπειράσεις [expeirazo], Mt 4:7 & Lk 4:12).’

And why, we may ask, are we not to put the Lord to the test?

In our lengthy study of of peirázo and peirasmós, it became very clear to us early on that God is the only One Who truly knows not only what we need in our often chaotic lives in this fallen realm but also how to use trials and testing in the exact right way at the exact right time to form us more and more into children of the coming Kingdom—children of the New Creation, formed after the image of His Son.

Satan, on the other hand, shows us at the very outset that he desires to take this prerogative away from God, using testing as a means to deceive us into destructive behavior that we undiscerningly justify through the misapplication of Scripture. Or, to put it another, darker way, the devil hypertests, distorts and deceives so as to form us more and more into the image of Hell itself (Ps 9:17).

Hypertesting in the Parable of the Good Samaritan

The next use in the Gospels moves from how Satan himself tests Jesus to how he operates through his infernal community in this age to destroy Him. And fascinatingly enough, we see these demonic operations at work not in some kind of pagan realm of darkness but in the community of light itself, in the religious system of Israel. Even more, it comes to us from the lips of one known to be an “expert in the Torah” (νομικός [nomikos; from nomos—”law”]). Luke writes that “a certain lawyer stood up to test” (ἐκπειράζων [ekpeirazo]) Jesus saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” (Lk 10:25).

Yet before Christ answers, we already know from the way this word has already been used up to this point that this man has no desire whatsoever to know anything about true life; he is simply trying, in the words of the Psalmist to “prepare a net” for Christ’s steps (Ps 57:6). And in doing so, he will utilize all the powers of the Law and Scripture and theology to do so, distorting all of it just as Satan before distorted the Word in the wilderness to Christ.

How, then, does Jesus respond?

He again draws us back to a right application of the Scriptures. Jesus says to this “instructor of the law,”

“What is written in the law? What is your reading of it?”

And the man actually answers this question rightly, scripturally even, as he quotes the synthesis from Deut 6:5 and Lev 19:18:

“ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind,’ and ‘your neighbor as yourself.’ ”

To this Jesus then responds, “You have answered rightly.”

Yet Christ does not leave the matter here, as if a right answer with right words alone were sufficient. He moves to the level of personal application, leading us to see that the Word must become internalized in the life and actions of each person.

So he adds the command,

“Do this and you will live.”

Self-justifying Hypertesting

This lawyer, however, does not want to apply the Word in any real way to his own life. Rather, he wants to keep the Word external to him, at arm’s length, so to speak, using it solely as a means to “justify himself” and accuse others.

So he responds by lashing back out at Jesus with his own question, “And who is my neighbor?” (Lk 10:29).

Christ responds calmly, not with a doctrinal diatribe, but with a simple parable of how a person’s enemy treats him with the love of a neighbor, while the religious elites judge him and pass him by, all the while assuaging their own guilt with a sense of false righteousness.

And after giving the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10:30-35), Jesus, as we have seen already in this encounter, refuses to leave the matter there. Rather, He goes even further, asking the lawyer one final question so as to apply the teaching to him on a deeper level:

"So which of these three [i.e. The priest, the Levite or the Samaritan] do you think was a neighbor to him him who fell among the thieves?

And again, the lawyer answers rightly, accurately:

“He who showed mercy on him.”

Yet Jesus still does not stop here, but continues, pressing the reality deeper into his person with one final word of application,

“Go and do likewise" (Lk 10:36-37).

The Final Use in I Corinthians

The life that will flow from “doing” the commands of Christ is set in stark contrast to that which emerges out of succumbing to the divisive hypertestings of the demonic realm. In the final occurrence of ekpeirazo in the NT, we are taken us back to the wilderness testings of Israel. And as we already worked through this in the fourth post on peirasmos, we will quote it then examine it from a different angle, namely that of its extraordinary OT allusion.

“Nor let us test Christ (ἐκπειράζωμεν [ekpeirazo]), as some of them also tested (ἐπείρασαν [peirazo]), and were destroyed by serpents” (10:9).

In a matter of words, we are brought to clearly see the outcome of ekpeirazo: Destruction.

Yet there is in this allusion the possibility for healing.

The Plague and the Bronze Serpent

Paul is referring here, as we may remember, to the narrative of Num 21:4-8, where the children of Israel, while journeying through the wilderness around the borders of Edom, again begin to murmur against the Lord. And what begins with discouragement (21:4b) soon turns to ingratitude, with their ingratitude transforming into anger and resentful accusation (21:5).

“And the people spoke against God and against Moses:

“Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? [Distortion-> Accusation]

For there is no food and no water [Deception],

And our soul loathes this worthless bread (i.e. manna)” [Ingratitude, Anger & Resentment].

This then leads them to despise God’s providence in their lives and judge their Creator. And the result is the Lord’s judgment upon them, sending “fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and many of the people of Israel died” (21:6).

What then?

Discouragement, ingratitude, anger, resentful accusation has brought destruction and death.

Is there any way out?

Is there a judgment in mercy?

The Two-Stage Remedy

Yet they do not all die. There is a pathway to healing specifically when they embrace the reality of their sin.

And it comes in two stages.

The first is that they must confess their sin against the Lord with Moses as their intercessor (21:7).

“Therefore the people came to Moses, and said, “We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord and against you; 

Pray to the Lord that He take away the serpents from us.”

So Moses prayed for the people.”

With confession and intercession comes the means of salvation—though strange and unexpected.

And what we find in the process is that the Lord in no way “takes away” the trial. Rather, He uses it to reveal to them the reality of the venom in their own heart—“The Bosom Serpent,” as Nathanial Hawthorne calls it.

Then the Lord calls upon them to look beyond themselves, beyond the deceitfulness of their own heart, to a Reality that affirms the consuming power of sin in their lives while, at the same time, providing them a pathway to real healing.

It is a paradox—Admit the very thing that is killing you and this action will provide the remedy.

“Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a pole; and it shall be that everyone who is bitten, when he looks at it, shall live” (21:8).

Every one who is bitten, in whom the curse of sin’s power is operative, is now given a choice: Admit that you have been bitten, that you will perish from the poison of the bite, then look.

Spurgeon encapsulated this powefully when retelling his own conversion experience. Forced off the road in a bitter snow storm into an unknown church, he hears an untrained layperson begging the congregants, in the words of Isaiah, to “Look to me all the ends of the earth and be ye saved” (45:22).

The power of a look in the right place to totally transform, to renew, to bring life.

“So Moses made a bronze serpent, and put it on a pole; and so it was, if a serpent had bitten anyone, when he looked at the bronze serpent, he lived” (21:9).

John 3—The Final Word

So we close this study by moving from this wilderness testing, where, again, the children of Israel, the Church in proto-form, absolutely fails. They murmur, just as we do when pressed and tested; they accuse; filled with resentment, they judge.

Yet the Lord meets them and us in our failures.

“Only look to Me,” He says.

He strips Himself of His divinity, comes to exactly where we are, takes the poison of sin into Himself out of love and there, silent, bleeding, dying, asks that we only look.

Say nothing, but look.

And then in death, life:

”And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life” (Jn 3:14-15).

When the hypertesting causes us to doubt, to disbelieve, to distrust, we are in this final occurrence, given no “theological” words.

We are presented, rather, with a crucified Savior and asked to look, to see the One Who took the venom of the serpent, into His Own Body on the tree.”

And when we, His body on this earth, form into a genuine community in and through this crucified Christ, our lives together will no longer be marked by judgement and infernal hypertesting, but rather by the mercy of the Good Samaritan, the mercy of Christ, Who bears in Himself the horror of our sin and atones for them them fully.

May it be so!