James 1:17

Every good gift and every perfect gift The two nouns are different in the Greek, the first expressing the abstract act of giving, the second the giftas actually bestowed. The perfection of the one flows from the goodness of the other. The "perfect gift" carries our thoughts beyond all temporal blessings which, though good, have yet an element of incompleteness, to the greater gifts of righteousness and peace and joy; the gift, i. e. of the Holy Spirit, which is the crowning gift of all. Singularly enough, the axiom, if we may so call it, falls into the cadence of a Greek hexameter, and it is conceivable that it may have been a quotation from a poem, or possibly from an early Christian hymn. Like instances of metre are found, besides the direct quotations in 1 Corinthians 15:33; Titus 1:12, in the Greek of Hebrews 12:13 and Revelation 19:12. The whole passage reminds us once more of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:11) and of the parallel promise in Luke 11:13.

is from above The perfect gifts come then, as the new birth of the soul comes, from Heaven, not from Earth (comp. John 3:3, as in the margin), as does the true wisdom (chap. James 3:15; James 3:17). The prominence of the word and the thought in the Epistle is one of the links that connect it with the Gospel of St John, in which a like prominence is traceable (John 3:7; John 3:31; John 19:11).

from the Father of lights The plural is used to express the thought, that light in all its forms, natural (as in the "great lights" of Psalms 135:7), intellectual, spiritual, is an efflux from Him "who is light, and in whom is no darkness at all" (1 John 1:5). This axiom as to the Divine Nature was also common to the two great teachers of the Church of the Circumcision, as it was to the teaching of the Apostle of the Gentiles, when he describes the children of God as being also "children of light" (Ephesians 5:8). There may possibly be a reference to the Urim and Thummim, the "lights" and "perfections" which symbolised God's gifts of wisdom in its highest forms (Exodus 28:30; Leviticus 8:8; Deuteronomy 33:8). Comp. also Psalms 48:3.

with whom is no variableness The noun is primarily a scientific term (our English parallaxpresents a cognate word) as expressing the change of position, real or apparent, of the stars. Here it is apparently suggested by the word "lights," which primarily conveyed the thought of the heavenly bodies as the light-givers of the world. They, St James seems to say, have their changes, but not so their Creator and their Father.

shadow of turning i.e. shadow caused by turning. The latter word, from which we get our "trope," and "tropic," is applied, as in the LXX. of Job 38:33; Deuteronomy 33:14, to the apparent motion of the lights of heaven, and so to any changes. The former is also a quasi-scientific term, applied to the effect produced on the sun's disc by the moon in an eclipse. St James does not appear to use the terms with any very strict accuracy, but the fact that he employs them at all, and that they occur nowhere else in the New Testament, is in itself interesting as connecting him with the form of wisdom described in Wis 7:17-20, which deals with "the alterations of the turning of the sun" (the two terms are nearly identical with those which St James uses) and "the change of seasons." Science, he seems to say, deals with the mutability of phænomena. Faith, and therefore Wisdom, rest on the immutability of God.