Every Good and Perfect Gift

Desire dragging us toward death was the grim end of the last paragraph. Here the letter swings the other way, to what comes down toward us from above, and it opens with a warning about getting this very thing wrong.

Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers.

The deception he has in mind is the one the last paragraph set up. If temptation comes up from inside us, we can start to suspect that the hard pull is the truest thing about our lives, and that God is stingy or distant. James says do not believe it, and then he tells them what actually comes down.

Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, with whom there is no change or shifting shadow.

Every good gift, without exception, has one source, and it travels one way, which is down toward us. James calls God the Father of the heavenly lights, the maker of the sun and moon and stars, and then he does something clever with the picture. Those lights are the very things that change. The sun moves, shadows shift and lengthen, the moon waxes and wanes. The God who made all of it does none of it. There is no version of him that is generous on a good day and withholding on a bad one. The giving is as steady as he is.

He chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we would be a kind of firstfruits of His creation.

The best gift on the list turns out to be us, or rather what he made of us. He gave us birth, which is his doing and not ours, through the word of truth. And he calls the result firstfruits, which is a deliberate word. It says we are the early part of something larger that he intends to bring in. The paragraph that began by warning us not to be deceived ends by telling us we are evidence, the first of a harvest, of how good and how steady the Giver actually is.