Remember God’s Mercy

I fell in love with the word encantada during my first year of Spanish as a freshman in high school. It captured a sense of beauty in a way English words never quite seemed to convey, and I insisted on using it. Nothing could deter me, not even my teacher, who informed me that mucho gusto was more appropriate. 

Today, I find delight in the reminder that, at heart, I am still the same adolescent girl because I am in love with yet another word. Like encantada, it is a word rarely used in contemporary English. It’s “covenant,” and it reveals the merciful nature of our God every time it appears. It is worth paying attention to. The beauty we find in today’s verses should call us to take a closer look at the mercy of God at work, and the ways it points us to an even greater salvation that would follow.

God chose to save humanity through Noah’s lineage when He saw how evil humans had become. In preparation, He instructed Noah to build an ark that would preserve pairs of every living thing made of flesh. Continuing on, the Lord shared that His protection would extend to all living creatures through a covenant He would enter into with Noah (Genesis 6:18). 

Covenant is a big deal. We often conflate covenants with contracts, but when we do, we fail to communicate the gravity and grace covenants hold in contrast to contracts. The bow that God placed in the sky as a symbol of His covenant with Noah in Genesis 9 continues to give us a glimpse into the unmerited mercy we encounter through God’s gift to the earth. Millennia and millennia after He entered into a covenant with Noah, the rainbow is still showing us the love our Lord has for us. 

God’s covenant with Noah was ultimately fulfilled in our Lord Jesus Christ. The symbolism of the bow in the sky still speaks to our Savior’s strength in every way. God’s mercy consistently reminds us of the restraint only a holy and loving God could reveal in a relationship with rebellious and resistant people. The bow points to the ultimate restraint God showed through the covenant by refusing never to flood the earth again. But it is symbolic of something so much larger. Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross also demonstrates the restraint our Savior exercised when He chose to take our sin on His body. 

Jesus assumed responsibility for our rebellion so that our relationship with God could once again be restored, and there are symbols all around that help us remember it. Today, the rainbow is one of those symbols. It helps us remember God’s saving grace every time we witness it emerge through the rainy skies, and it is my prayer you recognize the Lord’s mercy the next time you meditate on its beauty.