Prologue — The Rainbow

Every time you see a rainbow, you are seeing a weapon of war, pointed upward, away from you. You probably didn’t know that. Neither did I.

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You have seen it on children’s bedroom walls. Felt-board Sunday school. Coffee mugs. A pleasant arc of color given to children as the resolution of a frightening story. The flood is over, everybody survived, and as a kind of cosmic punctuation mark, God hangs a rainbow in the sky.

By adulthood it has become something like a signature from a God who is pleasant and far away.

These are not two different words that happened to get the same English translation. They are one word. The rainbow is only intelligible as a covenant gesture to readers who know what qeshet does everywhere else.

In Genesis 9, God places his qeshet in the cloud. It is a weapon, and it is pointed away from the earth, up toward the sky, toward no one. The gesture has a name in every culture that has ever known war. It is a ceasefire. A warrior laying down his bow in the presence of the enemy, pointed away, not at him, is signaling that the fighting is over.

That is what you have been looking at in the sky your whole life.

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God is making one of those agreements here, but the terms run entirely from his side. Noah contributes nothing to what follows. He does not negotiate. He does not perform. He does not promise anything in return. God simply announces: I will establish my covenant with you… neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood. And then he gives the sign.

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What happens in verse 16 is the part that does not usually make it into the Sunday school version.

And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.

God looks at it. Not you. Not Noah. God looks at his own sign to remember his own commitment. The bow is installed in the sky as God’s self-binding oath. He sees it, and it recalls to him what he has sworn. The God who made the sky built a reminder into the sky for himself.

For this is as the waters of Noah unto me: for as I have sworn that the waters of Noah should no more go over the earth; so have I sworn that I would not be wroth with thee, nor rebuke thee. For the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed.

The Noahic covenant is not a preliminary sketch superseded by what comes later. Later covenants invoke it as their floor.

The sign of ceasefire is still up there. Still in force.

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The qeshet does not stay in the cloud after Noah.

Centuries later, Ezekiel is in exile in Babylon. The northern kingdom has already fallen; the southern kingdom has followed. Jerusalem is gone. The temple is destroyed. The people are scattered across a foreign empire, and the dominant theological framework of the age has no coherent explanation for any of it — the framework that said if Israel kept the law, God would remain in the temple and the nation would stand. That framework failed when it mattered most. The God who was supposed to protect the house of worship had apparently permitted it to be burned to the ground.

Sound familiar.

In the middle of that wreckage, Ezekiel sees a vision. It is one of the stranger passages in the Bible: a storm from the north, four living creatures, wheels within wheels spinning in every direction, and at the top of all of it, a figure on a throne of sapphire, surrounded by fire, and then by light, and then, at the outermost edge (the thing that frames the entire vision), this:

As the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud in the day of rain, so was the appearance of the brightness round about. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD.

The bow from Genesis 9 is the outermost signature of the divine presence. The covenant token from Noah has become the halo of the enthroned God. God shows up in exile and the first thing you see surrounding him is the ceasefire sign. The framework failed; the God who made the framework is still there, still wearing the same pledge he made to every living creature after the flood.

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Then John sees the throne room.

And, behold, a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne. And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald.

Three chapters later, in Revelation 10, a figure comes down from heaven:

And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire.

The bow is no longer in the sky. It is on the head of the figure descending.

Trace the movement across the whole canon: laid down in the cloud over Noah (Genesis 9) → halo of the enthroned God in exile (Ezekiel 1) → corona of the eternal throne (Revelation 4) → worn by the figure descending from heaven (Revelation 10). The qeshet travels in one direction through the entire sweep of scripture. Always with the descending God. Always marking the same thing: the war is over. I am not here to destroy you. I am coming down.

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This is the shape of the book you are about to read.

Every chapter is a variation on the same movement. The God of the Bible is not the one sitting still while you climb toward him. He is the one who comes down. Who enters the story. Who crosses the distance. Who puts his weapon in the sky and then, at the consummation of all things, wears it on his head as he descends. The spine of the whole scripture runs from top to bottom, not bottom to top.

You will find in the pages ahead that some of what you were handed is not what the text says. Not because the text is difficult. Because it is simple, and simple things are easier to obscure than complex ones. The discovery is usually waiting right on the surface, in the word you have been reading past for years. A weapon where you expected a decoration. A treaty where you expected sentiment. A God who binds himself where you expected a God who judges from a distance.

If you were handed a God who is perpetually angry, scanning the horizon for reasons to condemn, whose approval is always just out of reach, look at what he did after the flood. He could have left the bow strung. He put it down. He pointed it away. And then he built a reminder into the sky so he would see it every time the clouds gathered, and remember what he had sworn.

He still looks at it.

The bow never moved from where he laid it down. Neither did he.