Does God Ever Tempt us?

You may have heard it said that “God tests but does not tempt.” Such conviction is usually based on a well-known verse: “No one, when tempted, should say, ‘I am being tempted by God’; for God cannot be tempted by evil and he himself tempts no one” (James 1:13 NRSV). A question for me that begs an answer, "Is there really a difference between testing and tempting?" Can we even say that God only tests but never tempts? ‌

In Genesis 22:15, God tests Abraham with a command to offer Isaac as a sacrifice. The Hebrew verb for “test” is נָסָה (nasah), which also can be translated to “tempt,” to “try,” or even to “train.” The verb represents a “process of verifying if something is true or not”; an “attempt to determine the veracity or quality of something.”