And God said, “This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations. I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth. And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: And I will remember my covenant, which is between you and me and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh.”

Genesis 9: 12-15

Coming out of a session at the gym this evening, we were treated to a glorious sight; two rainbows, one bright and one just on the edge of sight stretching across the eastern sky, the biggest rainbows I have ever seen. In the west, where the sun was setting, the sky was painted a lovely, deep, yellow-orange color, edged in pink and streaked with bluish clouds. It was raining, just enough to get into your eyes and make you blink and waste another second you could have spent staring at the rainbow. A couple of people pulled out phones and snapped photos. They exclaimed over the beauty of the thing for a few moments, and then ducked into their cars and drove away. Why couldn’t we just take a minute or two out of our lives to stare at the thing?

As we drove home, the rainbows faded into deep blue storm clouds and the sky began to darken. The great splash of orange in the west became a dark peachy color, blotched with purple patches where the clouds showed through. I wondered if I was the only person who had remembered the promise in Genesis 9. ‘I do set my bow in the cloud…’ Not to be preachy, but it’s a pretty great promise. And not only does God’s ‘bow’ exempt us from any more worldwide floods, but the iridescent spectrum in the sky is also, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful things in the world. I wonder what an atheist thinks when he sees it? Does he mutter to himself, ‘All beauty is meaningless,’ and turn back to whatever he was doing? Does the evolutionist think, ‘Ah, the result of countless of photons streaming through the water molecules! The breaking white light into the full spectrum of visible light!”? I don’t think so. People just don’t live like that. At least, they aren’t supposed to. So, the next time I see a rainbow, I think I’ll try to remember that it’s not just a lovely natural phenomenon; it’s a token of a covenant.