God, the Source of Good (1:16 f.)
The contrast is sharp. “Be not deceived”; do not wander so in your minds as to think that temptation and sin and death come from God. He is not the source of evil. Rabbi Chaninah says: “No evil thing cometh down from above.” Note Jesus in John 8:23 on “above” and “below.” James is tenderly affectionate in his appeal on this point—“my beloved brethren.” On the contrary, only good comes from God. God is good, and he alone is absolutely good (Mark 10:18).[59] In the Greek the next sentence runs like a hexameter line if one short syllable is considered long by stress of the meter.[60] We need not tarry over a fanciful straining after poetical lines in prose. Oesterley agrees with Ewald in seeing here a quotation from a Hellenistic poem. It is far more likely just accidental rhythm common enough in good prose. The scholars differ also as to how to translate the sentence. Moffatt has it: “All we are given is good, and all our endowments are faultless.”
“The Father of lights” sets God over against the worship of the sun so common among the ancients. Plato (Repub. vi. 505 ff.) compares the sun to the idea of the good. Modern science powerfully illustrates this comparison of James in bringing out what we owe to the sun in the way of light, heat, and life itself. Philo calls God “the Father of the all,” the lights (the moon and the stars) and all else in the universe. “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?” (Psalm 8:3 f.). Compare Philippians 2:15. God is not only light (1 John 1:5), but all true light comes from him—all the light that lights every man coming into the world (John 1:9).
But the sun appears to move rapidly. Watch the sun drop like a ball of fire at sunset and thus cast a deepening shadow over the earth. The sundial is one of the oldest ways to mark “the shadow that is cast by turning.” Mayor quotes Plutarch (Percl. 7) for the use of this figure for shadows cast on the dial. James is here, of course, using popular language, as we still do when we say that the sun rises and sets. But with our Father of lights there is “no change of rising and setting” (Moffatt). He “casts no shadow on the earth.” Even the polestar, we now know, whirls on in space, carrying the worlds along with it. But our God is not changeable or whimsical. He does not send now good, now ill. He knows how to give good gifts to those that ask him, yea, the best of all gifts, the Holy Spirit (Luke 11:13). What seems ill is really good if it comes from God. If one takes his stand by God’s side and looks at his life, he sees God’s plan as a whole for his own life and for God’s glory.