It
is raining today, a needed refreshment of the parched earth. If the sun peaks
through the clouds before the rain ceases, we can expect to see a rainbow. I
have always been fascinated by rainbows. No matter how many times I see them,
they never become old hat. They always manage to capture my attention.
Sometimes they are vivid, sometimes faint. Most often there is a single rainbow
across the sky, but on rare occasions there will be two.
This
morning in my devotions, I read the story of the rainbow in Genesis 9. After
the great flood, God promised Noah that He would never destroy the world in
that way again. As a sign to Noah and to every subsequent generation, God gave
us the rainbow. It is intended to be a sign of the grace of God.
And God said, "This is the sign of the
covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a
covenant for all generations to come: I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and
it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. Whenever I bring
clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember my
covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again
will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. Whenever the rainbow
appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant
between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth."
Genesis 9:12-16
People
have always been fascinated by rainbows. They have been incorporated into myth
and legend, story and song. Scientists have studied the conditions that cause
the rainbow to appear. They discovered that as the light passes through the
droplets of water, they act as prisms, which separate the white light into its
colorful component parts. The colors of the rainbow are always in the same
order because they represent the spectrum of light as we know it.
Because
we can describe how a rainbow is formed, many people have dismissed the
Biblical account of its creation. In our scientific world, we have done this
with many things. Because we are able to describe a process or explain a
phenomenon in scientific terms, we think that we no longer need God in the
picture. In our arrogance, we have assumed that we have unlocked the secrets of
our world and mastered them. But have we really?
Just
because we can describe something or explain how something works does not mean
that we fully understand it. It does not mean that we have discovered the final
word on a subject. All we have done is stated the obvious. The real question
that needs to be answered is, why do things act the way that they do? Someone
might answer, the rainbow is caused because of the refraction of light. That is
true, but why does the refraction of light always result in a rainbow? Being
able to describe something does not explain its origin, it only explains how
something works.
What
the story in Genesis 9 makes clear to us is that it is God who created the
phenomenon that we observe in our world. The rainbow didn’t just happen, God
made it happen. The best that science can do is answer the question “How”. It
can never fully answer the question “Why”. We can describe in detail how a
rainbow is formed, but we cannot answer the question, why is it there in the
first place?
All
of the phenomenon that we marvel at in our world are there for one purpose, to
point us to the one who created them. Paul made that crystal clear in Romans
1:20. For since the creation of the world
God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been
clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without
excuse. Let he who has eyes to see, see!
The
rainbow is an enchanting, marvelous display. It causes us to pause and stare,
in part because it is not always there. It often marks the end of the storm.
The rainbow is worth marveling at. But it is only a sign, a reminder that God
so loved the world that He sent a Savior.