Genesis 9:16: “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.”

September 24th, 2022 by Pastor Ed in devotional

God’s promise to never destroy mankind by a flood again is recorded in the sky. Here the rainbow is a new beginning, a new sign of the new covenant God was making with the earth. The physics of rainbows is very interesting. Ordinary white light, like that from the sun, is made up of many different colors, all of which have a different wavelength. Normally, when we see light from the sun, it appears colorless. In 1637, Rene Descartes first mathematically calculated the effect. However, Isaac Newton added practical application when he discovered in 1666, as he passed regular sunlight through a prism (a triangular piece of glass), that the prism split the light up into a band of colors. The band of colors is called the spectrum, which appears in the order of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.

When it rains, the air is filled with raindrops and these raindrops act like prisms. If sunlight passes through the raindrops at the proper angle (between 40 and 42 degrees) it is split into its spectrum, which makes up the colors of the rainbow. On a flight from Israel one time, as we were passing through a rainstorm, there was a remarkable sight out the plane’s window. It was a huge rainbow that went completely around our plane for 360 degrees. It struck us that looking down from heaven, God looks through circular rainbows into our lives. To people below, all we can see are storm clouds, but flying above the clouds, we get to see the rainbow from the same perspective God does. We should apply this perspective to our life. When the storm clouds come, we should rise above them by faith. Paul reinforced this truth in Romans 8:28: “And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.”

In Genesis 9, God promises, “I will remember.” An important part of the Good News is that we serve the God who makes and keeps promises. Lewis B. Smedes wrote powerfully on this topic:

Yes, somewhere people still make and keep promises. They choose not to quit when the going gets rough because they promised once to see it through. They stick to lost causes. They hold on to a love grown cold. They stay with people who have become pains in the neck. They still dare to make promises and care enough to keep the promises they make. I want to say to you that if you have a ship you will not desert, if you have people you will not forsake, if you have causes you will not abandon, then you are like God.

What a marvelous thing a promise is! When a person makes a promise, she reaches out into an unpredictable future and makes one thing predictable: she will be there even when being there costs her more than she wants to pay. When a person makes a promise, he stretches himself out into circumstances that no one can control and controls at least one thing: he will be there no matter what the circumstances turn out to be. With one simple word of promise, a person creates an island of certainty in a sea of uncertainty.¹

“LORD, make us like You a little more today, please.”

¹Lewis B. Smedes, “The Power of Promises,” A Chorus of Witnesses, edited by Long and Plantinga (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1994), p. 156–157.