Genesis 9:12-17 And God said: "This is the sign of the covenant which I make between Me and you, and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: I set My rainbow in the cloud, and it shall be for the sign of the covenant between Me and the earth. It shall be, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the rainbow shall be seen in the cloud; and I will remember My covenant which is between Me and you and every living creature of all flesh; the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. 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." And God said to Noah, "This is the sign of the covenant which I have
established between Me and all flesh that is on the earth."
I had a bad day today, for no particular reason at all. Sometimes I have days like that. When I wake up cranky, and all manner of foul thoughts assail me. When trying to cheer myself up with the goodness of God just seems stupid and cliched. When I would rather just simmer in my little cloud of discontent which actually made me feel like playing Dungeon Keeper, which is this game in which you play the bad guy and get to destroy the world. Along the way you also get to slap some of your minions and chickens (food for your slaves) to death. So not cute and innocent at all. I played this game in my teens and actually finished the whole game. Which is not very surprising because back then I was depressed and angry. Depression is extremely sticky. I'm not even talking about clinical depression here - just a general mood of futility and inadequacy that creeps over your head out of the blue.
I asked myself just now, "Is not God still good?" and I knew He was. But the next thought that came was, "So what? It doesn't change the way I feel now." When I checked my email I got some stupid Friend updates from Friendster telling me which of my friends had added new friends, photos, testimonials, or changed their profile. Which all seemed really dumb to me. It was only out of boredom that I clicked through someone's pictures - and what do I see? A picture of a rainbow taken at the Niagara Falls. The very same place Pastor spoke of a few months ago, where he had seen a rainbow there himself. Suddenly it all comes back to me; I had been feeling rather lost then, I had been looking for reassurance, and that had been it.
Things have changed so much since that day. I know I am different inside. I never realised it until now, but for years since I became a Christian, I was like a man who had been shown the land of milk and honey only through the windows of the house I lived in. I was told that I could go there if I was good. Until then, I could only watch and yearn. But I was never good enough. It got to a point where I thought that Christians were really just like anyone else, that we tried to live differently but yet never really were transformed by the love of God, that we lived broken still. This was what I saw in myself and others. Stories of Christians whose lives had been totally turned around by God, gradually either became like air-brushed fairytales to me, or unattainable happiness. Either they're fibbing or I just didn't have what it took. Perhaps I never would, because I was never disciplined enough.
And then this year, I heard a message new to me, and made perfect sense - that I didn't have to try to be good anymore. I had already been made good in the eyes of God when Jesus was cursed for my sake. That when God the Father looks upon me now, He sees Jesus, and this is why I am righteous, holy, and complete in Christ. That this is true no matter what I've done or what I feel like. It was as if the windows in my house had been thrown open, and light from outside now touched me, and I could smell the sweetness of the milk and honey. I could even go out and live in it, if I so wished.
Yet I am still human, and the accuser still tries to deceive and steal even when he knows he is defeated. So I have bad days where I hide in a corner of my house and forget that the windows, and door - are already open. Still He reached out to me today, in the personal way that He always does, and gently reminded me of the promise that was already mine.
(Never thought I'd say this but) I read some beautiful passages in my Media Text reader the other day:
To make a promise is to say 'yes', to make an affirmation - yes, I promise (to tell you a story, to love you forever, to quit smoking, etc.) - constituting a kind of opening to the future. A promise always marks an inauguration: in the act of promising, one promises to inaugurate a process that will lead to the fulfilment of one's promise in a time to come. [...] I could not say to my son, 'Yes, I promise to love you and look after you for as long as I live', and expect to have done with it. After saying 'yes' to my son I would have to say (without necessarily having to say it) 'yes' again and again, over and over, each and every day, throughout all the days of my life. There would never come a time (when he was 18, for instance, or 21, or became a father himself) when I could say, to him or to me, that I have kept my promise and so now 'I no longer have to love you and look after you'. It doesn't work like that; no promise does. When you say 'yes' you always have to say 'yes' again. You could never say on your wedding day to the person you were marrying, 'Yes, for now'. Vows don't have use-by-dates, even though we know many marriages end in a broken promise: they don't conclude, they just stop... [...] There is nothing prior to this inauguration; no one can be forced to say 'yes'. I could never say 'yes' to my son out of a sense of paternal obligation or because of any social pressure to feed, shelter and care for him. Class, gender, history, national spirit, cultural tradition - none of these is a condition of saying 'yes' to your child or the one you marry. To feel a duty or an obligation to say 'yes' would not be to say 'yes'. A yes that was not unprecedented, which was not absolutely originary, would not be a 'yes'. Even so, while every 'yes' is originary, it always has to go on being said, it always has to be repeated: its originariness does not fill it with presence. If when you say 'yes' for the first time you are being genuine, you have to keep on saying 'yes'....'You cannot say "yes"', as Derrida writes,' without saying, "yes, yes"' (VR, 27).*
There's no treasure at the end of the rainbow. You can't even find the end, because it has no end. If even men can understand the ongoing and unconditional nature of a promise, what more God Himself? He's placed us right beneath the rainbow, and that's where the treasure is.
*Lucy, N. (2004). A Derrida Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell: 161-167.
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good picture