Our Rainbow Rebellion: The Next Level

God gave Noah the rainbow sign,
No more water but fire next time,
Pharaoh’s army got drownded . . .
Oh, Mary, don’t you weep.

Mary, Don’t You Weep

Introduction

Most of us are aware of the high-handedness that was involved in the choice of the rainbow as the flag of the sexual revolution. To make the rainbow represent every manner of sexual deviance and perversion is the very definition of effrontery. In the Great Flood, God had judged the entire world for her great wickedness, and in His mercy He promised afterward that He would not use that particular form of judgment again. As a surety of this promise, He gave us the glorious sign of the rainbow.

So then to take that seal of extended grace and forgiveness and turn it into the logo and brand for ongoing sin and rebellion against Him is about the most churlish and spiritually stupid thing you could think up to do. That was a challenge that our generation decided to accept.

The great judgment that had been visited on the earth had been brought about by an impudent mixture of lust, pride, and a crazed ambition. The Lord’s brother Jude tells us that the Flood was because the antediluvian people had sinned in just the same way that the residents of Sodom and Gomorrha had sinned—and he describes it as “going after strange flesh.” At Sodom, it was a homosexual version of going after strange flesh, and with the antediluvians it was the intercourse between the celestial sons of God and the daughters of men. Homosexuality, lesbianism, sex dolls, bestiality, and sex with gods—all of it, strange flesh.

There was certainly lust involved—the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful (Gen. 6:2)—but there was also the lust of an exalted and unhinged ambition. The whole thing was a venture into a bizarre sort of genetic engineering, a desire to build a race of supermen. God had created man, and man in his fallen state wanted to rival God and do Him one better. God created man, and man would create Nietzsche’s Übermensch.

God had barred the way back to the tree of life (Gen. 3:24), and yet man still wanted to live forever—but on his own terms. In His mercy, God has provided a way back to the tree of life, but it has to be through the gospel of Christ, which is the only true way (Rev. 2:7; 22: 2, 14). But such gracious terms are intolerable to the pride of man, who wants to seize the fruit from that tree in his own strength, and who is willing to go to grotesque lengths in order to do it.

So this first level, the one we generally recognize, is where we see our generation’s willingness to defy God. That is bad enough, prideful enough. But remember that the only thing pride knows how to do is overflow the banks, and so defiance of God must always, inexorably, lead to a claim to be God. And that is the next level. It is a level of insanity, of course, but it still remains the next level.

Ownership of the rainbow is rebellious man’s claim to have finally seized the serpent’s promise—ye shall be as God (Gen. 3:5).

The Signature of Deity

In Scripture, the rainbow represents more than God’s promise not to inundate the world again. It is also a mark of God’s presence. It is the signature of Deity. It is a numinous indicator of His presence. We see this in multiple places of Scripture.

When Ezekiel saw the likeness of God’s glory, there was a rainbow there.

And when the apostle John was given a vision of the throne of God, there was a rainbow there, surrounding that throne.

And in Revelation 10, there are various good reasons for taking the mighty angel described there in that place as an appearance of the Lord Jesus Himself—and one of them is the rainbow. His face is shining like the sun, as the Lord was described earlier (Rev. 1:16), His feet are compared to brass burning as in a furnace, as earlier (Rev. 1:15), and the rainbow that was earlier said to be around the throne is now around His head. A new feature is that He is described as being clothed with a cloud, but we should also remember that the Lord appears on a cloud later in the vision (Rev. 14:14). But the key here is the rainbow. Pay attention to the rainbow. He is the Lord of rainbow, and the Lord of the rainbow is the Lord.

Absurdities and Atrocities

I am not usually accustomed to quoting Voltaire in any positive way, and I do not intend to get into the provenance of the quote and whether or not he actually said it, but there is something that is attributed to him that is too apropos here to pass up.

The absurdity here is the leap from a “finite creature who bears the image of God” to a “finite creature who actually thinks he can come to occupy the place of God.” And it doesn’t matter how great that finite creature is, as finite creatures go. The distance between any finite creature and the triune God of Scripture is an infinite distance. This means that a very powerful but created demigod is as far away from the Creator as is a midge with delusions of grandeur. God is not one of us, only bigger. He is not Zeus.

One of the basic tenets of all sane and grounded theology is the recognition of a Creator/creature divide. I used the word “distance” to describe it, but that is an inadequate metaphor. The difference between the Creator and the created is a difference in kind, a qualitative difference, not a quantitative one. It is an infinite distance but not measured in miles.

But this difference is one that the proud heart does not want to accept or embrace. But to embrace it is the foundation of all moral sanity. And why such rebellion?

The proud heart blurs the distinction between God and man, which is an absurdity. In our day, this absurdity is in fact leading to atrocities—specifically, in this area, we are talking about the atrocity of surgically mutilating impressionable young teens, leaving them maimed for life, and allowing and encouraging them in a decision like that, while at the same time not allowing them to buy beer. But the half life of alcohol is measured in hours. The half life of castration, or of a double mastectomy, is . . . well, there is no half life. You kind of just did it to them.

When you think about the behavior of all these people—going topless at a White House event, for pity’s sake, it makes you realize that we are dealing with two kinds of people. We are dealing with the people who are out of control, and who want to be out of control, on the one hand, and on the other hand, we have the people who are like the hapless Aaron—the people who are not deranged themselves, but who were too timid to do anything about it.

These two types of people are together the makers of mayhem. The disturbed people who actually think they have a rainbow around their head are not going to be saddened when it all comes to light that these atrocities are in fact atrocious. To maim and destroy was the whole point—the satanic idea of creation downward into the Void. The people who will in fact have the regrets will be all the ostensibly sane people who enabled all of these horrors, and cheered them on—whether through timidity, or gullibility, or concern for reputation . . . something really lame. I am talking about the put-together upper-middle-class suburban mom who so supportively drove her daughter to her mutilation appointment. Two years later it dawns on her that she didn’t fix anything, and nothing can be done to repair her botched attempt at fixing things.

Conclusion

For anyone to think that they could somehow rig up a system that would enable them to somehow clamber across that chasm between God and man—a chasm that shouldn’t properly be called chasm because the opposite side of it is an infinite distance away—is a form of moral lunacy.

And because the absurdities we have bought into are blasphemous absurdities, it should come as no surprise that we are now confronted with blasphemous atrocities. When the reckoning comes, it is going to be really ugly. But however ugly, it won’t be as ugly as the idol people are currently gyrating around.