The Bow Hung in the Sky

Noah and his family had lived inside the ark for more than a year. Now the ground was dry, and God had told them all to come out.

The big door swung open, and out they came: elephants thudding down the ramp, sheep bleating, rabbits hopping off in every direction at once. Birds burst into the bright air. (A year is a long time to share one boat with every kind of animal. Think of the hay, and the smell.) Noah's three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, stood with their wives on solid ground and stamped their feet just to feel it hold.

Every person and every animal on the land outside the ark had died in the flood.

First Noah built an altar of stones. He took some of the animals and birds God called clean and burned them on it as an offering. (An offering said, "Everything we have came from you, and we belong to you.") The smoke curled up into the sky, and the Bible says God smelled it and was pleased.

Then God said in his heart, "I will never again curse the ground because of people, even though their hearts lean toward wrong from the time they are children. As long as the earth lasts, there will be planting and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night."

God blessed Noah and his sons. "Have children," he told them, "and fill the earth." He told them every person is precious, made in God's own image, so anyone who killed a person would have to answer for it.

Then God spoke to Noah and his sons again. "I am making a covenant with you," he said, "and with your children after you, and with every creature that came out of the ark. Never again will a flood destroy the earth."

"This is the sign," God said. "I have set my bow in the clouds. Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the bow shows in them, I will see it, and I will remember my promise."

And there it was across the wet sky, red and orange and yellow and green and blue and violet, one bright stripe on top of the next.

Japheth was looking at the rainbow, but God had said he would be looking at it too. (God never forgets anything. Still, he put his promise up where he would see it every time the clouds rolled in, like a note stuck on the fridge, and he let Noah's family read it too.)

After that, whenever clouds rolled over the earth, the bow came back, and the flood never did. But the rainbow promise told what God would not do. It did not yet tell how he would mend hearts that lean toward wrong.

So God kept making promises. He made one with Abraham, one with Moses, and one with King David, and each one pointed a little further ahead, toward someone still to come.

Long after Noah, a man sat at supper with his friends in an upstairs room and made another covenant. This time the sign was a cup. "This cup is the new covenant in my blood," he said. "Do this to remember me." The next day he gave himself to God as an offering, one that pleased God more than any smoke from Noah's altar, and the sky over his cross went dark.

His name was Jesus. In heaven, the Bible says, a rainbow circles the throne where he is.