1"Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth." These are the words God spoke to Adam and Eve in Genesis 1, now spoken to Noah and his sons on ground the flood has scrubbed clean. It is a new beginning, but the passage will not let it read as a return to Eden. The animals will now fear humanity where before they were simply named by it. Meat is permitted for the first time, 3"Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you," a concession to a harder world. One restriction comes with the permission: 4"you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood." Life belongs to God even when he gives it to humanity as food, and the rule keeps that in view. Even the blessing lands differently on people who have a flood and a fresh grave behind them.
In the middle of this fresh start sits a sober sentence: 6"Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image." It is a serious sentence, and it stands on the image of God, which is why violence against a human being carries a weight nothing else does. In chapter 4 Cain asked, "Am I my brother's keeper?" and no answer was recorded. Genesis 9 gives one. Yes. Every human life bears God's likeness, and every community shares responsibility for guarding it.
Then comes 9"Behold, I establish my covenant," and its scope is wider than any covenant to follow. It is made 10"with every living creature that is with you," every animal that walked off the ark, spoken over the earth itself and not only over Noah's family. It asks nothing of Noah in return. God binds himself, once, to something he alone will keep.
Then the sign: 13"I have set my bow in the cloud." The Hebrew word is the ordinary word for a weapon, the bow a hunter or soldier carries. God is hanging up an instrument of war and pointing it away from the earth, aimed into the clouds and no longer down at what he has just judged. What he says he will do with it is more striking still: 16"I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant." God binds himself by a sign to hold himself to his own word. Noah looks at the sky too, but the remembering that counts is God's.
The same rainbow appears around the glory of God in Ezekiel's opening vision (Ezekiel 1:28) and around the throne in John's (Revelation 4:3). The sign of the promise surrounds the one seat in the universe from which final judgment will come.
When you see color in the clouds after a storm, remember who is doing the remembering. The promise holds because God keeps it, and it never depended on how well the rest of us do.
Prayer
Father, thank you for laying down your bow over us, for binding yourself to a promise that asks nothing of us in return. Thank you that we carry your image, and that every life around us matters enough to guard. When we see color in the clouds after a storm, let it remind us that you are the one remembering. In Jesus' name, amen.