In 1978, Harvey Milk, a prominent gay politician and activist, commissioned Gilbert Baker to create a visual symbol for the gay community. Baker designed a rainbow flag with eight colors. The flag was flown at the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade and quickly became a symbol of pride and visibility for the LGBTQ+ community (Morgan, 2017).

Of course, the LGBTQ+ community was not the first community to claim the rainbow as a symbol. God gave the rainbow to Noah and his family following the flood as a promise that he would be merciful in his judgment.

I have set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh. And the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” (Gen. 9:13-16)

The rainbow ought to remind us that God is merciful, but he is also just. The flood was God’s judgment on the wickedness of humanity. Those whom God created in his image had chosen to pursue evil.

The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.” (Gen 6:5-7)

What did it look like for humans to be steeped in wickedness? The story preceding this declaration tells us a tale of twisted sexual desire. “When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose” (Gen. 6:1-4). What is going on in this story? Many interpreters believe the “sons of God” are angels who left their assigned positions of authority and wed women (Jude 6). This, no doubt, is bizarre.

Many have struggled to interpret this peculiar passage. But the interpretation seems to be clear. The phrase “sons of God” occurs four other times in scripture (Job 1:6, 2:1, 38:7; Dan. 3:27). Every occurrence refers to angelic beings (Cook, 2020).

The angelic realm is a challenge for the Western mind, but the permissive sexuality isn’t. We moderns have an emaciated view of the supernatural. We raise our eyebrows at the idea of sexual union between humans and angels. But we certainly understand a culture in which whatever form of sexual outlet we desire is validated.

While the text at first appears to place the onus for this unholy union on the angels, the consequences make it clear that God also holds human beings responsible. The focus of the passage is the wickedness and evil in humans’ hearts, and this is what provokes God to bring judgment. Sins of all types had taken hold in their deepest parts. The previous chapters show the wickedness of pride (Gen 3:6), blame shifting (Gen. 3:12), anger (Gen. 4:5), envy (Gen. 4:7), wrath (Gen. 4:8), lust (Gen. 4:19), and self-righteousness (Gen. 4:22-23). In two short chapters, it’s clear that “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick” (Jer. 17:9).

The Noah story serves as a caution against disordered desires. Unless God transforms my heart, what I want will only and always be twisted. The Apostle Paul puts a fine point on it when he writes,

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. (Eph. 2:1-3)

The rainbow ought to remind me that If God can deliver his people from even the strangest forms of sexuality, he can deliver us from anything. In his mercy, God does not leave us as we are, trapped in our destructive passions. Paul continues, “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved…” (Eph. 2:4-5).

Every time a Christian sees a rainbow, we ought to pause, reflect on God’s great mercy, and praise God that he has borne the punishment for our sin. In Sally Lloyd-Jones’s The Jesus Storybook Bible, she concludes the flood story writing, “God’s strong anger against hate and sadness and death would come down once more – but not on his people, or his world. No, God’s war bow was not pointing down at his people. It was pointing up, into the heart of Heaven.”

Our culture has appropriated the rainbow as a symbol that our desires define who we are, and that those who are compassionate affirm those self-ascribed identities. The gospel reminds us that when our desires are our identity, we are on the path of self-destruction, holy offense, and inevitable judgment.

But through the lens of Scripture, the rainbow reminds us that the Lord is “a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty” (Ex. 34:5-6). God is merciful, but his forgiveness has a cost.

The rainbow is not God’s rubber stamp on our desires. The rainbow is God’s promise that in his mercy, the war bow of heaven now points not at us, but himself.