Daily Manna · Day 163 · June 12
Perfect Gifts
“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.”
Who do you thank for a good week?
James asks it in a hard setting. The letter is addressed to the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad, Jewish believers pushed out of Jerusalem and living in other people's cities. Its first paragraph is about falling into divers temptations, and later chapters concern labourers whose wages were kept back by fraud and believers dragged into court by the rich. Nobody here is having a comfortable year, and that pressure changes what the sentence can mean.
Because James is not claiming your circumstances are good. He has just insisted that God tempteth no man, and the whole argument is about where things originate. Father of lights means the maker of sun, moon and stars, which were the ancient world's only clock, and the nature of those lights is that they move. The sun swings, the moon phases, shadows crawl across a yard all afternoon and the temperature of a room changes with them. The one who made them does none of that. There is no angle from which he turns cold on you.
So trace one good thing from this week back past the person who handed it to you. Then thank that person anyway. Gratitude that stops at the courier never reaches the address it was posted from.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 163 is In His Own Eyes (Judges 21:25).