My reaction to a rainbow was TOO MUCH for this poor bemused fellow beside me.
What’s the most common drawing kids tend to make? They grab color after color after color and arc them into rainbows.
When my best friend got married in the fall, massive rainbows bookended the ceremony. As you can see from the above picture, I was flooded with joy and excitement. The God who had been answering my prayers throughout her whole wedding was revealing himself even more plainly. Plus, of course, rainbows are beautiful!
The rainbow in the Bible appears to Noah as a sign of God’s first-ever covenant with man. Then it appears again in Revelation, described as encircling the throne of God.
I always thought God basically decided to redecorate the throne room of heaven based on this thing he made on earth and liked. Like when you’re Christmas shopping for someone else, find something cool, and you’re like, “I’ll take two!”
But since I’m hand-copying, all the exact wording stands out a lot more. And the actual wording of Genesis 9:13 is: “He set HIS rainbow in the clouds.”
I think I’ve had it backwards. God had his rainbow in his throne room from eternity, and then he decided to share it with earth. MEANING we have a literal bit of heaven shining above the earth to look up at!!
Like, if my parents were to be like, “Man our couch is comfy” and then decide to SEND ME ONE custom-sized for my tiny NYC living room, just to give me a bit of home for my own home — but, you know, eternal and supernatural and way better than that.
Connected to this, I realized — it may never have rained before the flood. Now, of course, I can’t know for sure. But all that’s said about rain is this passage in Genesis 2:5–6 that clearly explains: “There was no rain upon the earth… But there went up a mist from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground.” Additionally, it seems that there was no rainbow before (a perfectly natural phenomenon if it rains) and Noah is applauded for believing things he’d never seen. It’s dubious to conclude for sure. But it turns out a lot of scholars argue that rain never existed before. A ton of people told me that they’ve heard this already, in fact.
MEANING God may have changed the whole way we receive water! In the new world and new life after the flood, he made it come straight from the heavens and he marked it with a bit of Heaven shining, colorful and lovely. Like the dove showed us, we had new life to look forward to; the rainbow implies that this was a heavenly life, and as in the flood and rainbow, our home passes away to a heavenly home.
The more I read the Bible, the more I see these reflections and images and artworks straight from heaven. But the remarkable thing is — God uses human hands to construct heavenly artworks! He doesn’t just paint the rainbow; he gives instructions for the temple through Moses, commissioning craftsmen and artists to produce representations of what we’ll literally see in heaven.
But the rainbow is God painting Himself. SO the fact that God shone something straight from Heaven down over my friend’s wedding WAS cause for excitement! Even if that poor groomsman was not aware.
