God's Rainbow—A Discourse on Substance and Symbol (Genesis 9:11-13)

Meditations on Genesis #23

Genesis 9:11-13

And God said, “I establish My covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of the flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between Me and you, and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth.”

I typically try to steer clear of sweeping, absolute terms, but I believe there are some instances where even hyperbole falls short of the intended expressiveness, and the following statement is one of them:

All of life is sacramental.

It seems obvious in the Scriptures that Almighty God has created objects and operations both as things and as symbols. That is, everything has at least a double meaning. Consider the words of Christ for reference and of the way He so deftly pointed to perceivable, natural phenomena as signs of immaterial spiritual truths. Like when he confounded Nicodemus with the analogy of discipleship as a second birth, and then further puzzled Nicodemus by likening the Spirit’s invisible movements to the wind. And the way He appropriated Himself to Peter in laymen’s terms by saying, “Follow Me, Peter—I’ll make you a fisher of men.” And the way He compassionately exposed the thirstiness of that Samaritan woman and then answered her need by offering Himself as the Well of living water. And think of all those allegorical statements of being, like “I am the Bread of Life,” and “I am the Vine,” and “I am the door,” and “I am the Good Shepherd” and “I am the Light of the world.” And all those unforgettable parables, like the one where He compared the unfathomable Kingdom of Heaven to an infinitesimal mustard seed, or the one where He described God’s love as a shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine lambs to find the one that got lost, or the one where He painted the picture of redemption through a story of a prodigal son returning home and being lavished with mercy. This is sacramental language. This is the poetry of God through earthly motions. Mustard Seeds, wells of water, human thirst, childbirth, sheep, fatherhood—all these are real, tangible, earthly things. That is, each has its own unique, God-given purpose and function in our fallen world. But each is also an invitation to ascend on the wings of the material into the transcendent realms of the spiritual. That’s why there’s no disparity between the literal and the allegorical in the life of faith. In Christianity, the substance and the symbol are two sides of the same canvas.

Ah, but there’s a catch to all this. There’s a fine print section in the footnotes of this reality that our humanistic, prideful hearts don’t like to admit. It’s this: that if God is the creator and sustainer of all substance and symbol, then we finite, fallible human beings have zero agency to alter what things are and what they represent. Definition is a divine art, not a human one. Which is another reason why I like the term ‘sacramental’, despite the baggage it perhaps carries with it, because it implies more than mere sign and signifier; it implies the act of our participating in God’s gift by faith. That is, even if God has placed countless revelations of Himself all around us, at our very fingertips, and even down at our feet, we must partake of them. We must choose to reach out our hands and receive what God has revealed. Failure to do so will not only end in our missing out on the meaning, but, more devastatingly, it will end in our replacing and defacing the meaning. Which is precisely what we’ve done with God’s rainbow. We’ve drained the natural symbol of its sacred intent, keeping the form of the object, but eradicating its given motive. And we’ve threaded flags of our own, draping them in our front lawns and church yards and town squares, thinking them a progression from the old pagan ways, when, in fact, they’re a perpetuation of the old pagan ways. The only difference is that ancient idolaters carved their idols out of wood, and we carve ours out of canvas.

When Noah and his surviving family looked up in the sky after months of incessant rain and darkness, they saw a rainbow for the very first time—I imagine they were the very first persons to ever witness the marvel. A banner etched into the heavens, with seven bold colors all woven together in equidistant bands, each unique on its own, each undiminished, but each grafted into the other: a paradox of individuality in unity. Oh, how the sight must take Noah’s breath away! How effervescent these colors must seem to eyes that have become well acquainted with darkness. But for all that this rainbow can and will represent to Noah and his family, God sets it apart for a special symbology. This is a colorful bow of Mercy, replacing the black skies with fluorescent hues: a vow to never destroy the earth with a flood again. Oh, and that word ‘destroy’ is the significant word here, isn’t it? Because there will be another global flood, even deeper and wider than this one. And Heaven will once again open His vaults thousands of years after this. Except that in the second outpouring, there won’t be a mixture of brine and sulfur, but a mixture of blood and water. In the second outpouring, the rains won’t flow from storm clouds but from a Savior’s veins. In the second outpouring, the earth won’t drown under currents of holy retribution, but it’ll be baptized forevermore in the currents of redeeming Love.

*I took the above photograph a year ago at my church, after a heavy storm passed through, and the contrast between this divine rainbow and the manufactured rainbows I see in church yards on daily commutes could not be starker. Ponder the potency of Providence, friend. Reflect on the fact that even when we human beings distort and exploit a symbol, and signify our own intentions by it, and ingrain manufactured motives into every fabric of society, every now and then a storm hits home and leaves in its wake a real stratospheric marvel, shimmering over our heads with red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet bows of sacred majesty and meaning, and we see them for what they really are: unbreakable strands from an unbroken vow.