The Fall of the Rainbow

I was scrolling through Facebook the other day, rather mindlessly I’ll admit, and something jolted me into awareness of what I was doing. A rainbow of colors in a parade flashed in a short clip of a video. Curious of what this could be and thinking of the bright colors that are so attractive to the eye, I decided to look into what this parade was. It was a pride week parade happening in Houston, and as the word “pride” has become somewhat twisted into this perverted usage, let me clarify, it was not a good thing.

In a culture that has been taking something that was clearly laid out in the Bible as wrong, and declaring it alright, I feel like I’ve been slapped in the face with all this talk of LGBT rights, and I’m tired of it because I can’t even speak my mind without being told that I’m a hateful person. Reality check, saying something is wrong is generally done in quite the opposite of intent, at least I certainly am not going to sit there and correct needlessly.

However, despite all of this, I think what hit me hard on that video was that my rainbow of colors had just lost some charm for me… And given the fact that the rainbow is a God-given promise of His love and loyalty for us (Gen 9:13), His covenant between Himself and man, it struck a particular chord that I could not enjoy it without potentially being associated with support of “pride.”

Back in the early days of the Church, we took things that had pagan meanings and made them good. Very basic holidays even fashioned themselves after those pagan holidays turned to Christian holidays. The reason for doing such was very simple: to make the changes less abrupt, less harsh. Evil was swept away, and good put into its place, but the traditions that made the communities were allowed to stay with a new purpose.

It would seem that the evil one has taken some suggestion and followed course by taking good things of God and torqueing our view of them. (To be clear, the devil cannot beat God. It will not happen.) Our good and whole things are now being twisted. The bow God set on the earth as a sign of His covenant and love is being used as a sign of the unnatural and fake love, of the defiance of the very purpose God gave us in the marital covenant (“be fruitful and multiply” – Gen 9:1), and in defiance of the perfect creation that God made (“God created man in His image, in the divine image He created him, male and female He created them.” – Gen 1:27). The rainbow is becoming a sign of sin brought forth… And we’re sitting back letting it happen.

Let us remember something: we are not called to sit back and let evil take its course. We are called to hate the sin and love the sinner. So I speak not in hatred toward these people. I very much want them to be joyful in God, they are just as much my brothers and sisters as the next. But we are called to hate the sin, and as such, I cannot and will not let sin take God’s beautiful creation of the rainbow and make it a sign of evil.