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. Of his own will begat he us with the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.

1. A gift that brings divine light (1:17)

a. The nature of the gifts (1:17a-c)

"Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above." Anything that is good in us comes from God. He gives only good gifts. The Lord introduced this subject in the Sermon on the Mount: "What man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give me a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?" (Matt. 7:9-11).

Perhaps the Lord had in mind His own temptation experience in the wilderness. After a forty-day fast, when He was famished and weak with hunger, Satan came and offered Him a stone (Matt. 4:1-4) — along with the suggestion that He exercise His deity to take care of the needs of His humanity. Jesus knew that, at that moment, it was the good and acceptable and perfect will for Him that He be hungry, and He quoted the Word of God to the devil to prove it.

God gives only good gifts. All that is good in our lives comes from God. God is good, and He alone is absolutely good. Far from being the source of temptation to do evil, God is the Source of all that is good.

b. The nature of the giver (1 :17d-e)

God is unchallengeable. He is "the Father of lights," and He is unchangeable: "with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning." God's first work in creation was to command the light to shine out of darkness. "Light, be!" He said, and light was. Later, He commanded the sun, the moon, and the stars to shed their light upon the earth. Fallen man, in his abysmal folly, soon forgot the One from whom all light comes, "the Father of lights," and substituted the sun, the moon, and the stars themselves as objects of worship. In Egypt, for instance, the reigning pharaoh was believed to be the son of the sun, the incarnation of Ra, the sun god. The Babylonians invented astrology and the worship of the stars. Abraham himself came from Ur, a Chaldean center of moon worship.

The great stars that burn and blaze by the countless billions in the sky are merely the handmaidens of the living God. David knew! He sang, "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork... There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard"(Ps. 19:1, 3). The starry heavens have well been called "God's oldest testament." Psalm 19 is a great Hebrew hymn designed by the Holy Spirit to compare God's testimony to Himself in the stars with His testimony to Himself in the Scriptures.