What a blessing we were treated to this morning. When I glanced
out the prayer window, in the flurry of children donning coats in prep for the
school dash, there, sprouting from the neighbour’s garden, was a glorious
rainbow. A full rainbow, arching over the field and planting its other foot on
the Hill of Fare. A vibrant, dazzling bow of intense colours. It remained a few
minutes, and then disappeared, leaving the landscape looking earthly, not
divine.
I know I wrote about a rainbow yesterday, but following that
early sighting this morning, I came to my daily reading. It was Revelation 4,
where I read that John’s vision of heaven included God seated on a throne which
was encircled by an emerald rainbow.
An emerald rainbow? That seems an oxymoron to me. How can a
rainbow, the splitting of white light into its component colours, be emerald,
just one colour? Turning to the 21st century guru, Dr Google, I scanned
a sermon from 1871, delivered by Archibald G. Brown at Stepney Green Tabernacle:
a sermon entitled An Emerald Rainbow.
A couple of thoughts from it have distilled in me: that the
rainbow, as a sign of God’s covenant with man, is the prism through which he
views us, and it is a prism of grace, a covenant of grace. It is the filter
through which we view him, too, through the covenant of grace. And that in
heaven, it is never separated out and broken, either into different colours or
as an arc, but instead is a complete circle. From whatever vantage point we look
at God, we see him, and he sees us, through the covenant of grace. His promise.
Jesus’ sacrifice.
May we emerge from the storms of the last year trusting in
the faithfulness of God to keep his covenant with us; may we bring rainbows of
light and promise wherever we go, trusting that even though our ‘rainbows’ are
broken and incomplete, an emerald rainbow of promise encircles the throne of
God. In him we trust and in him we put our hope.
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