“The rainbow shall be in the cloud, and I will look on it to remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.”
The world had become so wicked that God put all living things to death except Noah, his family, and the animals that he took aboard the ark. After the flood, God gave Noah a promise that He would never send a worldwide flood again. The sign of His promise was the rainbow. Even today when we look at a rainbow we can remember the promise that God made concerning a flood that will never drown every living thing. The rainbow gives us a message about the nature of God. It is a message about the sovereignty of God. What do I mean by “sovereignty”? I mean that God is in charge of everything all of the time. There is nothing that God cannot do. There are plenty of things that God will not do, because part of His sovereignty is His holiness. God created everything; He knows everything; He is in charge of everything all of the time. The reason that God could make a promise like the rainbow promise is that, in His sovereign majesty, He knows that if He does not want it to flood it will not flood. There are also plenty of things that God allows to happen in His sovereignty. A good example is God’s dealings with Israel. His promise to them in the Old Testament was that if they would obey Him and live by His will, they would do well. They did not, so they went into Babylonian exile. Of course, there is a lot more to the story, and the story has not ended, but the point is that God allowed Israel to be defeated at that time because they disobeyed Him. We should rejoice in the sovereignty of God. It is comforting to go to bed every night and wake up every morning to a world in which God is in charge. It is a message about the power of God. I want you to think about the flood for a moment. It was not just forty days and night's of rain that flooded the whole earth over the tops of mountains; it was that God unleashed the water under the earth. Here is what the Bible says about it: “On the seventeenth day of the second month – on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.” (Genesis 7:11b-12) Only God has the power to unleash all of the power of nature for such a cataclysmic occurrence as the flood. Human beings are capable of a lot of harm, but even the most powerful human being could not unleash all of the waters of the heavens and the earth at one time. We should rejoice in the power of God, because it is through His power that we are able to be saved and to serve Him. It is a message about the grace of God. If the message stopped with the sovereignty and power of God, and those two things were all that characterize Him, we would need to be really afraid. But the rainbow also tells us about the grace, mercy and love of God. He looked with pity on the world and promised that He would never again send that kind of flood upon the earth. We can trust our sovereign and powerful God, because He is a God of grace. His grace is seen throughout the Bible. This doesn’t mean that everything that God brings about is positive. What it means is that God is working everything to the good of His people. According to Jeremiah in his Lamentations, that it is because of the mercies of God that Israel was not consumed, “because His compassions fail not.” (Lamentations 3:22) This was written even while Israel was being taken into Babylonian Captivity. In the final analysis, God will work out everything for all time in His grace. What a great promise and what a great cause for rejoicing. I’m sure that this is not all that the rainbow tells us about God. These are things that are uppermost in my mind about the subject. Bro. Joe
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AuthorDr. Joe Beauchamp is the author of this blog and website. Categories
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