Two gardens and two meanings of temptation
In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden God tempted God.
The first garden is Eden, where the serpent questions God's command and the woman and man eat (Genesis 3:1–6). The second combines Matthew's account of the agony at Gethsemane (26:36–44) with John's explicit description of the place of arrest as a garden (18:1). These are biblical materials arranged into Chesterton's antithesis; neither evangelist says that God tempted God.
His preceding quotation reproduces Matthew 4:7 in the King James Version: Jesus rejects the devil's proposal that he jump from the Temple and require divine rescue. In that setting, tempting God means putting him to the test. Gethsemane presents a different ordeal: Jesus asks that the cup pass, then submits his will to the Father's. Chesterton moves from a forbidden demand for proof to the extremity of an ordeal voluntarily endured. The verbal reversal makes the divine sufferer present on both sides of the sentence, but should not erase the difference between these situations.
Other New Testament passages sharpen that distinction. James 1:13 denies that God is tempted by evil or entices anyone to it; Hebrews 4:15 describes Christ as sharing human temptation without sin. These do not supply Chesterton's striking formula. They help delimit it: the passage is most securely read as a dramatization of the incarnate Son's ordeal, rather than an assertion that God solicits his own wrongdoing.
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