Many years ago, an elderly lady went back to an area she and her family had once owned. On this final visit, she called on a young family whose parents she had been friendly with. She left the mother a package of old jewelry pieces, saying, “These are for your little girl to play with.”
The little girl was too young then to even remember the elderly lady and eventually, all the bits and pieces were used on dolls and toys and were finally lost.
Except one piece.
It was a necklace, completely whole and unbroken. Somehow, the little girl kept it and when she herself was old, she took it out of her box of treasures and began to wear it. She said it held memories of three people, the elderly lady she did not remember, her own mother and now, her own life. Whenever she puts it on, she said, it is as though she binds the three together in a loving embrace.
Even more significantly, she said it reminds her of the love her Lord pours out to her because God Himself has a necklace. He pours out his love through it to everybody in the whole world, and He tells us about it in the first book of the Bible. Whenever He brings His necklace out to share it with us, He binds it around us to hold us and our world to Himself.
It will not wear out, or get lost, or even get damaged through careless use, nor can we discard it because it is no longer in fashion. It belongs entirely to God.
It is the rainbow.
He put it up in the sky after Noah came out of the ark,and He promised Noah that the rainbow was a sign to Him and all who followed, that He, God, would never again cover the world with a flood. But it has another deep significance.
After his conversation with Noah, God looked at the rainbow and God said, “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.“(Genesis 9:16) His everlasting covenant is in Genesis, chapter 1, where He created us in his own image to have ‘dominion over’ a perfect world and now the rainbow is His symbol that His word is still true.
God, who has deepest compassion on all that He created, looks at the rainbow spread across a world that is today full of violence and corruption, and it reminds Himself of His own everlasting covenant.So, in response to the disaster of sin, and planted in the first book of the Bible, He places His rainbow necklace around us to bind us to Himself and to remind Himself in a way that is visible to us, of His eternal covenant.Then in the last book of the Bible, “…a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne…and there was a rainbow round about the throne.” (Revelation 4:2-4)
So next time you see a rainbow, remember it is the most expensive piece of jewelry ever designed.It was handcrafted personally by our God, and it is the symbol of the eternal covenant.