No temptation has taken you except what is common to man. God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted above what you are able, but will with the temptation also make the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.
1 Corinthians 10:13 (WEB)
in its setting: 1 Corinthians 10:6-14
1 Where we are
Zul is twenty. He locked up the shop at ten, and he is halfway to the bus stop when his phone buzzes with a name he deleted eighteen months ago. Long weekend. Where you at. He has not replied. He has also not put the phone away. He stands still on the pavement outside a shuttered shop while people walk round him. What holds him there is not the high. It is that those men knew him before he had to explain himself, and none of them ever asked how many clean months he had. He is afraid that if he deletes this too, nobody will come looking for him again.
2 What the passage is doing
Paul is writing to a church in a busy port city, and some of them are sure they are past all this. So he takes them back to the desert. Israel ate the bread God gave and drank the water God gave, and still stood there craving the food of Egypt. Some did not survive the craving. Then Paul says it: nobody is tested by something unheard of, God is faithful, and with the test he makes an exit road, so you can hold on.
ἔκβασις
ekbasis · a way out, an exit road
Ekbasis is built from ek, out, and a verb meaning to walk. It is a walking-out word, the kind used for the mouth of a mountain pass — the one place the ground lets you through. English "escape" sounds like vanishing. This is nothing so grand. Someone has gone ahead and left a road, and it is narrow, and it is there, and it is walked on foot.
3 Taking it with you
Notice what the promise is not. It is not that you are strong enough. It is that God is faithful, he puts a door somewhere in the room. Jesus stood in a real desert, hungry, and offered a shortcut by a voice that sounded friendly. He knows what it is to be wanted for the wrong reason. He went to the cross for the man who replies to the message, not only for the man who deletes it. You were wanted before you were clean, and you are wanted tonight either way. The door is usually small — the bus that comes, one call, the next ten minutes.
A prayer you can pray
God, you know the name on my screen and what it is offering me. I do not want to be forgotten. Thank you that I was wanted before I was clean. Show me the way out of this next ten minutes, even if it is something small. Let me walk through it. Keep me till morning. Amen.
Soli Deo Gloria — to God alone be the glory.
