The Miraculous in the Mundane – Look Up and Listen

Ever see a double-rainbow?  Most likely, if you’re over 10 years old, you have.  They are not all that rare as many people think, but there is a lesson in the double-rainbow.  Don’t be fooled by some of the pictures of double-rainbows; if the colors are in the same order, the photo was either doctored or it IS a RARE twin-rainbow.

A double rainbow in B.C., Canada

The rainbow was first seen by Noah, his wife, three sons and three daughters-in-law.  Father gave it as a sign of His covenant with them, “and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the livestock, and every beast of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark; it is for every beast of the earth. I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” (Genesis 9:10-11)

The simple reason a rainbow had not been yet seen, even though the world was roughly 1,500 years old, was that no rain had fallen; a mist would rise from the ground and water it (Genesis 2:6), suggesting a canopy of water above the atmosphere that created a greenhouse over the whole earth. (See Genesis 1:6-8.)  The Great Deluge, or Noah’s Flood, destroyed that protective canopy and allowed direct sunlight through the clouds, that had never been seen.  As the light filtered through the clouds, the rainbow appeared.

If the physics of rainbows seems to take away the mystery of God’s sign of His promise, note that just because we understand how He does something does not take away from the fact that He is the one doing it.  That Father chose to use a physical phenomenon to remind Himself . . . and us . . . of His promise should not surprise us, as He delights in using ‘ordinary things’ to show His amazing power and magnificence.  He shows His eternal power and divine nature in the cosmos (Romans 1); He revealed His care for the mistreated to Hagar by providing her an ordinary well (Genesis 21); He displayed His Presence to Moses in a bush (Exodus 3); He affirmed His mercy to an ordinary young woman in whom He created a body for the Messiah (Luke 1); and He shows up in myriads of times in our lives to protect, rescue and guide us . . . if we are just attentive to the miraculous in the mundane.  He loves using “jars of clay” (2 Corinthians 4:7) to reveal His enormous weight of glory.  “The whole world is a series of miracles, but we are so used to them that we call them ordinary things.” (Hans Christian Anderson)

Co-opted by the LGBTQMX8ZRW activists 🙄, this also does not reduce a rainbow’s beauty or significance.  “A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.” (C.S.Lewis)  The devil is not very creative and cannot seem to do anything new, so he attempts to use what God has given and ‘twist’ it just a bit to make us think it is his idea.  So love without genuine care becomes lust.  Justice without mercy becomes malicious.  Science without common sense becomes “proof” that the Creator of science does not even exist.  “Believing something doesn’t make it true.  A thing is true or not regardless of whether anyone believes it.” (Paul Little)

So what is the lesson in the double-rainbow?  If we have become jaded to a simple rainbow, or perverted it to a flag to represent something other than Father’s intention, perhaps He just wants to remind us that He is present even in our darkening age.  Against the clouds of confusion over gender, masks, vaccines, military movements and political lies, He reminds us that His love and holiness still provide beauty and meaning to our world.

As He speaks through the universe, as He has spoken most clearly through Yeshua (Jesus, the Messiah), as He has revealed Himself through prophets, priests, kings, children and women throughout the Bible, He still speaks to us today.  “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.” (Hebrews 4:7)  So look up and listen for His voice.  Find His miracles in the mundane.  He is here and He is not silent.

“So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.” Romans 10:17
Have you experienced a miracle that others thought was ordinary?  Perhaps you thought at first, “This is just normal,” only to discover later that you were part of a miracle?

Where Is The Promise Of His Coming – Part 3

“They will say, ‘Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.’”  2 Peter 3:4

As I noted in Part 1 of this series (initially titled, “The Lie, The Truth, The End and Your Choice”) we humans are a short-sighted race.  Peter realized this when he penned the words in his letter about the question that would arise in a few years.  Even in that first century that was as yet to be marked by the life and death of Jesus dividing between B.C. and A.D., philosophies of life already abounded that said nothing ever changes.

From the various human origin stories of ancient times, the central idea of all false religions is that we somehow have to please a god in order to arrive at a state of perfection.  Most people live their lives with no hope of eternal life, but simply anticipate that when you die, you no longer exist or get recycled for another try.  The Great Deluge (whether in the Hebrew tradition or religious myths about a local flood) is now considered an old wives’ tale, so most think the world will simply continue as it has since they were born. 

In the case of the Hebrew story of Noah (see Genesis 7–11), only eight people survived to repopulate the earth.  By the time Abram arrived on the scene, many had already forgotten the Creation and the Flood story.  Myths about the beginning of human history began to evolve and people began to worship “gods” that had nothing to do with the creation of the world.  Noah and Shem had recently died and language had been confused at Babel, so their story was not getting much traction in the widening world.  Only in Abram’s ancestry was the story of Creation and the Great Flood still told accurately.  Noah’s grandson and Shem’s son, Arphaxad, born two years after the Flood, was the most reliable source for history, although all the generations between Noah and Abram had known Noah before he died, including Terah, Abram’s dad.

Now, removed from the Flood by more than 3000 years, we have come up with new stories to explain human origins apart from any divine power or design.  Who would have thought that a first century prophet like Peter could have foretold of Darwinian evolution and its deceit of the entire world?  Even among many Christ-followers, excuses are made for accepting a directed, but billions-of-years process of selection of microcosmic changes, that have resulted in humans, butterflies, whales and cattle.

Scientific establishments are often the last to continue fighting scientific discoveries.  Copernicus and Galileo were denounced by both the Church and scientists of their day for proposing that the sun was the center of the universe and not the earth.  Louis Pasteur was ridiculed by “modern medicine” for claiming that disease could be spread by bacteria too small for the eye to see.  And in our generation Stephen Hawking and populists like Richard Dawkins refute the evidence for Intelligent Design (ID) that would destroy their ideas that the universe is a self-directed (i.e. NON-directed) cosmos with no Designer.  (Not to mention, more general acceptance of ID would put a damper on their book sales.) 

This is in spite of Darwin thinking that cells were self-contained and very simple machines that could replicate themselves.  Now we understand that the complexity of the machinery, even in parts of a cell, are so extreme as to be unimaginable that all the pieces needed could somehow come together at once, by chance, to make a living thing.  Leave any one item out (of the thousands to millions in each part of the cell), and all you get is a non-living blob that cannot reproduce.  But, of course, the scientific community continues to deny the obvious that the earth revolves around the sun . . . I mean, that life is too complex to have evolved, even over the billions of years that they fabricate to claim that this is exactly what happened.

Most important is the focus of Peter’s argument.  The idea that everything continues as it has invokes the concept that it will keep on continuing, at least for the next few billion years.  Therefore, they reason, there is no need to fear an end of all things the way burlap robed hippies and crackpots warn, carrying signs, “The End Is Near.”

So at the risk of sounding like a burlap robed hippie, I will assert again that the end IS near.  “Besides this you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep.  For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed.” Romans 13:11  If this was true in 55 A.D., how much nearer is it today?!

“The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. But the day of the Lord WILL come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed.” 2 Peter 3:10

Jesus is coming soon, and in order to be saved all one needs to do is to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, repent of sin and be baptized for the removal of your sins.  Then you can begin living a life filled with God’s provision for every need, protection from every danger, and recovery from every disease, even death!  You can live forever, and that will be with Jesus, who loves you so much He would have gone through all those miseries of His crucifixion and lousy Easter dramatizations (😉), even if you were the only one who needed Him.

It is my sincere hope that someone will read this and follow the links and consider that the truth of the Bible will lead to the only life worth living, actually the only life that will live, and that will be forever. 

If one refuses, against all evidence, to believe in the Name of the Son of God, they will not stop existing.  For that person, God who IS love, has reserved a Final Mercy, the topic of next week’s blog and the last in this series, October 16, 2021.

Maranatha.  Even so, come Lord Jesus, come.