The Rainbow Covenant: A Meditation on Genesis 9, for the 9th Sunday after Pentecost

Rainbows are fairly ubiquitous today.  30 years ago or more, the rainbow was often used in children’s story books, and in school classrooms for memorizing the color spectrum.  Today it has been adopted by certain political and social action groups as a banner for various sexual identities or causes, often abbreviated with the ever growing acronym:  LGBTQ…  Given the manner in which our day and place use the rainbow as a symbol or sign, it is worth remembering what God gave the rainbow to be.

In the early ages of the earth, after the Creation and the Fall, the world fell into such horrible and rampant evil that God destroyed every living creature which breathed air through a great and terrible Flood.  This Flood, the evidence of which remains on mountains all over the world and in massive jumbled fossil beds from Montana to Africa and Asia, was a judgment of Almighty God upon a fallen humanity which so polluted His good earth with their evil that He wiped them out.  We’re not told how many people there were on the earth at the time of the Flood, but we know that only eight souls survived, preserved in the providence of the Ark by God’s good and gracious will.  This Flood was a near total calamity, and absolutely justified by the evil propagated by God’s creatures against their Creator.  Alone on the Ark were the survivors of God’s wrath, and as they stepped out of that saving Ark into the world which had just been judged, God had a few things to say to them all.

After discussing murder and the created order of man to the animal kingdom, God addressed the fear of the Law which must have reigned in the hearts of Noah, his family, and the animals he tended.  No one on the earth either before or since, had seen that level of God’s wrath revealed upon the whole of creation.  For all the atrocities we have recorded in the volumes of histories across the world, the great murderous atrocities of atheist regimes in the 20^th century, or the great burgeoning atrocities of militant Islam at the start of the 21^st century, no one has seen the level of devastation rightly descended upon the whole of mankind like Noah and his cohort did.  The Law of God was written in the countless corpses of innumerable creatures, now settled into their earthen graves for later generations to dig up and ponder.  In the face of such judgment which would alone shatter the minds of men, God speaks a Word of Gospel hope to the world.

Never again would God judge the world this way through water, and never has He done so.  He made a covenant with Noah and the whole earth, and sealed it with the sign of the rainbow.  From that time on, the rainbow—God’s Bow—would be a sign of both His devastating Law and His life giving Gospel.  It would be a reminder of the price of evil, the depths to which man can descend, the righteous fury of the only true and holy God, and the preservation which alone comes from His grace.  The rainbow became God’s Word in physical form, left as a real and tangible reminder of His covenant with the whole world.

Remembering what the rainbow actually is, we should shudder at the use to which it is put by so many today.  Taking the sign of God’s judgment and grace and using it to celebrate wickedness is nothing short of a demonic fist in the face of God.  Exactly what are we trying to communicate, when we use the rainbow to trumpet our disregard for the order of creation or the complimentarity of the sexes?  What message do we wish to send to our God, when we use the rainbow as a sign for discarding the sexual ethics He established in creation, and which we can read plainly even in Natural Law?  What precisely do we think God will see, when we put His Bow upon our churches as a sign that we have in our new wisdom called good what He has irrevocably called evil? 

But more than political action committees, campaigns, courts, groups, and even churches, what is it you are saying to God, when you take that rainbow upon yourself and use it promote sodomy and gender confusion?  Have you placed the rainbow over your Facebook cover photo or the bumper of your car as a sign of support for homosexual marriage?  And if you have not personally flown God’s Bow as a banner for evil, have you even begun to conceive the horror of this popular rebellion against our holy God, and pleaded with your neighbor to avoid His wrath which is surely coming upon us all?

Of course, in all and every way, we have failed in this.  We have honored neither God’s Law nor His Gospel, and we have been guilty in either our action or inaction.  We have failed to remember the holiness of our God, the depth of our sin, the righteousness of our judgment, or the grace of our salvation.  We have dishonored the Bow of God’s covenant, and for that we deserve a fate worse than a watery death—we deserve the fires of hell.

There was, however, one Man who saw a judgment far greater than the judgment Noah saw.  As Christ hung upon the Cross for the sins of the whole world, He not only saw, but in His own flesh received the eternity of hell which was due to every sinner ever to live upon the earth.  His eyes beheld tortures far beyond the woeful wounds of Roman crucifixion, far worse than the panicked gurgling of a billion drowning souls; and yet He willingly gave Himself into this judgment as a ransom for us all.  For every evil doer from Adam to our own day, and every day to come:  for the genocidal maniac, for the despot, for the idolater, for the letch, for the glutton, and even for the desecrators of God’s rainbow covenant, Christ has entered into our eternal judgment that we might live by His grace.  He has built for us His Holy Church which has become for us our Ark of salvation from the fires to come.  He has sealed us in His covenant by the waters of Holy Baptism, spoken His Word of Absolution to us through the Office of the Keys, and fed us upon His own life giving Body and Blood through His Holy Supper—all everlasting signs of this greatest and final Covenant.  We are a people saved by His grace through faith in His vicarious sacrifice for us, alive by His Word and sustained by His providence.  Enlivened by His Holy Spirit we are reconciled to His Father through His most holy Cross.

The sign of God’s covenant in His Bow is good indeed, but it points us forward to a greater covenant:  the Gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ by grace through faith in Him alone.  Here in this covenant written in the blood of Jesus, we find His Word which calls us to faith and repentance, to forgiveness, life, and salvation.  Here there is forgiveness for all who will repent and believe.  The Lord has judged once by water, and shall judge again by fire.  Do not be consumed by the wickedness of this perverse and twisted generation, dancing as marionettes upon the devil’s strings until the yawning mouth of hell opens to swallow them all.  Repent of your mocking of the most holy God, that you might not die under His Law, but live according to the grace of His Gospel.  That final judgment of fire is coming for us all, more surely than the waters of Noah’s Flood came upon the whole ancient world.  Receive the refuge of Christ’s forgiveness against those coming flames, and rest secure in the grace He pours out by His Word through the Ark of His Holy Church. 

Repent.  Believe.  Live.

Amen.