What does it mean that every good and perfect gift is from above (James 1:17)?

Then in opposition to lust, and shewing the action of God, which is not to tempt, but, on the contrary, to produce good, James tells us that "every good and perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. Of his own will begat he us with the word of truth, that we should be a kind of first-fruits of his creatures," v. 17, 18. As I have said, he owns grace as the sole and divine source of the good that is in us, as born of God, and that through faith, since it is by the word of truth. By it we are born again; it is a new life, and that by the will of God. We belong to the new creation; we are its first-fruits. Immense blessing! which belongs not only to a new position, though it is that, but also to a new nature which makes us capable of enjoying God. James does not speak of righteousness through grace, but of an entirely new nature, which comes from God.

God, then, far from originating temptation is the Source and Giver of every gift that is good and perfect. The Apostle is very emphatic on this point; he would by no means have us err as to it. Verses 16 to 18 are another short paragraph, in which God is presented to us in a very remarkable way. Not only is He the Source of every good and perfect gift but also of all that can be spoken of as light. The light of creation came from Him. Every ray of true light for the heart or conscience or intellect comes from Him. What we really know we know as the result of divine revelation, and He is the "Father" or "Source" of all such light. Man's lights are very uncertain. The light of "science" so-called is very variable. It burns brightly, it dies down, it re-appears, it flares up, it goes out finally extinguished by an oncoming generation which feels sure it knows more than the outgoing generation. With the Father of lights, and hence with all light that really comes from Him, there is no variableness neither shadow of turning. Blessed be God for that!

(Vv. 16-18). In contrast with the evil that comes from the flesh, every “good gift” and “every perfect gift” comes from God. The Greek word for “good gift” refers to the giving, the word for “perfect gift” to the thing given. All that is good both in the manner of giving as well as the thing given comes from God. He also is the father of lights. In the physical world it was He who set the “lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth.” He also is the source of all spiritual light. No darkness comes from Him. He is not only good and pure light, but all goodness and all light come from Him; and with Him there is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. He does not change with our changing circumstances or our varying moods.

It is an urgent matter here that, as beloved brethren, we do not err. On the one side, the temptation to evil proceeds from our own fleshly lusts: on the other side, all that is good and wholesome comes from above, not from ourselves, but is the gracious gift of the Father of lights. Surely this involves every various ray of the spectrum; for every color of the light is a beautiful symbolization of some precious attribute of God and Father, who deals with us in perfection of wisdom and goodness. And in Him is no variableness, but absolute, undeviating consistency; and no shadow of turning, no suggestion of change in His character of pure goodness.

Now we come to the other side. "Do not err, beloved brethren. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above." We have had the evil traced to its source, which is the fallen nature of man, no doubt wrought on by Satan, but without here bringing the enemy before us. We shall find this by and by, in James 4; but here he simply looks on man's nature, and then he raises his eyes to God. "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning." The first point therefore in the mind of the Holy Ghost here is to vindicate God at all cost, and this entirely apart from us. As evil comes from us, so all that is good comes from God; and not only is God the spring of every good — every good giving and every perfect gift being all from God — (the manner of it as well as the thing itself that is given); but, besides, there is no change in God, the creature in its best estate is nothing but change.

Thus there is a most complete vindication of God's moral glory in this verse, contrasted with man in his weakness, and ruin, and evil. But he goes farther, and asserts — and asserting, too, in the most admirable manner — the truth of the sovereign action of grace. He has claimed this for God already; but now we come to see the application to us. It is not only, therefore, that God is good, but that He is a giver, and this of nothing that is not good, and of all that is good. Stainless in His holiness, and invariable in His light, God is active in His love; and as the fruit of this energetic sovereign love He does not bless merely, sweet as it is from Him. Blessing is altogether short of that which we know now in Christianity-of that which even James treats of, according to his very broad and comprehensive epistle. In the bright day that is coming God will bless the creature. In the dark day that man calls "now," God more than blesses — far more than blesses — those who believe. We are ourselves born of Him: He communicates His nature to the believer. He does so unsought, and surely undeserved. Undeserved! Why there was nothing but evil: he had shown this immediately before. There was nothing good from man's nature as a fallen creature,-nothing but good from God.

But God is much more; He is the source of all good. He gives freely and fully to those who were evil and enemies. So we are here told that "every good giving and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights." In Him is no darkness at all; in the world it is so dense that, though Christ His Son was here, the true Light, and shining in the darkness, the darkness comprehended it not: so much did moral darkness exceed the natural which is dispelled by natural light. It is humbling that man, with all his boasting, should be proved thus evil. But Christ solved the difficulty, the giver of a life in Himself risen from the dead, after being made sin to annul it righteously. Thus of His will or purpose (for nothing was more remote from man or more opposed to his will) did God beget us.

There is another consideration added, full of comfort. The greater the blessing, the more is the sorrow if it be exposed to loss or change. Now in our relationship with God we are assured that the goodness displayed suffers no diminution, nor eclipse. Even the greater light that rules the day, which men adored early and long, the bright orb of the sun to which they applied the epithet here predicated of our God, is liable to the variations of nature all day long, and is the salient example, in its apparent motions, of shadow that is cast by turning. But it is not so, as here declared, with the Father of lights, Whose unchangeableness is as perfect as His goodness, and His goodness to us who deserved nothing less, still in our weakness, and still in a world of evil.

Now with regard to temptations of this last character, into which the lusts of the heart cause men to fall, it must not be said that these lusts come from God: the heart of man is their source — its lusts which lead through sin to death. Let no one deceive himself on this point. That which inwardly tempts the heart comes from oneself. All good and perfect gifts come from God, and He never changes, He does nothing but good. Accordingly He has given us a new nature, the fruit of His own will working in us by the word of truth, in order that we should be as it were first-fruits of His creatures. The Father of lights, that which is darkness does not come from Him.

Like the Apostle John, James teaches that it was God’s sovereign action that brought us into His family, for he writes, “Of His own will begat He us” (James 1:18). Man’s will is utterly excluded, for man by any act of his will could never bring himself, or any other, into the blessing of God. “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above,” whether it be in natural things, the things needed by men on earth, or divine things from heaven, and the good gift of the divine nature, which brings us into God’s family, is one of the good and perfect spiritual gifts that God has given to those who are His own.

Now we are once more brought back to a realization of how, indeed, God is for us, and who He is that is thus for us. "Every good gift and every perfect gift" comes down from Him, and there is no possibility of change, no shadow of turning, with Him. Nothing that is from Him is other than a good gift if we will only use it and value it as such. He is "the Father of lights," Himself Light; the display of this light is seen in His ways with us — a wondrous spectrum indeed, in which the glory of the light is displayed in its many-colored rays! With these we are familiar as the jewels of the priest's breastplate, the embodiment of the light in those gems upon which the names of the tribes were engravers. We have them again in the jewels of the eternal city, the perfect display of God's attributes upon which all is founded there, and which, therefore, gives indeed an eternal foundation — God displayed in His own nature; — who can change this in any one respect? How blessed to be able in faith to trace Him in this way! — righteousness is now seen, in some sense, as distinct from love, so that we may even in our folly be questioning whether love be in it. But these different rays are but the various display of that which in itself is one — love in light and light in love, never divorced from one another. Can we be even righteous in that in which we show not love? or can that be love which has not righteousness in it? Here is the nature which we have received from "the Father of lights" Himself, for "according to His own will He begat us by the word of truth," and the children manifest the Father. But what, then, must He be in all His dealings with these children that He has begotten? How can there be any contradiction, in any of His ways, to that love in which He has begotten them for Himself? And we are those, the apostle intimates, who are a kind of first-fruits of His creatures — those in whom His creative thought as to man has first come rightly to its bloom and manifestation. How wonderful a being is man in that respect, when we see him in the Man Christ Jesus, and realize this to have been God's thought from the beginning: man, with whom God dwells forever, and in whom the divine heart can find response and hold communion!

How true! How simple! How perfectly obvious! What a complete settlement of every question! If a man has anything at all, from where did it, where could it, come? Surely only from heaven. What a perfect cure for strife, envy, jealousy and emulation! “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights.” What a tale this tells of earth. What a record it bears to heaven and to God! Not one atom of good on earth but what comes from heaven. Not an atom of good in man but what comes from God. Why then should anyone boast or be jealous or envious? If all goodness is from above, let there be an end of all strife and let all hearts go up in praise to “the Father of lights.”