The Rainbow Keeps the Covenant Out in Open Sky

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Hananiah Tore the Yoke Off Jeremiah's Neck

Jeremiah came into the Temple court wearing a yoke. Wooden bars, leather thongs, the whole rig a plow ox carries, strapped onto a man's shoulders because God had told him to put it there. The message did not need words. Babylon is coming, and this is what your neck will look like.

Hananiah son of Azzur walked up to him in front of everyone and pulled it off him.

He broke the bar across his knee. "So says the LORD. In two years I break the yoke of Nebuchadnezzar off the neck of every nation." The vessels stolen out of the Temple, he said, would be back in the same two years. It was the sweeter prophecy by a wide margin, and the crowd in that court had been waiting a long time to hear something sweet.

Jeremiah stood there with the splinters at his feet and did not argue the point. "Amen," he said. "May the LORD do exactly that."

The Rule Jeremiah Handed Him

Then he told Hananiah what the two of them had just wagered.

"I prophesy disaster. If the disaster never comes, I am still not a liar, because God says a hard thing in anger and takes it back. He has done it before and He will do it again. You prophesy peace." Jeremiah let that sit. "When God promises something good, He does not take it back. Not for sin, not for a calf, not for anything. So if your peace does not arrive, there is only one thing left to call you."

A prophet of doom can be wrong and still be honest. A prophet of comfort has no such cover. Hananiah had picked the one kind of prophecy that convicts the man who gets it wrong.

He was dead by the seventh month of that same year.

The Threats God Was Willing to Drop

Twenty generations went by after the world was made, and nobody took the knife.

Then God stood in front of Abraham and made him an offer with a floor under it. "Out of you will come seventy who go down into Egypt. Out of them, seventy elders standing in the wilderness. And out of you a man will come who lays the whole Torah open in seventy languages." Then the other half. "I am El Shaddai. If you refuse this, I say dai to the world, enough, and send it back to the emptiness it came out of." Abraham took the knife. The threat never had to land.

It happened again at the mountain. Israel poured a calf and God said, "Let Me alone. I will wipe them out and blot the name off the earth." Moses would not let Him alone. He stood in the gap and argued until he got the sentence he wanted back. "I have pardoned, as you asked." And the land that had been promised to a people who had just built an idol stayed promised. "Go up from here," God told him, "you and the people you brought out of Egypt."

The Mark the Angel Scratched on Sarah's Wall

Back at the tent by the oaks, Abraham had run in and told Sarah to hurry, three measures of the good flour, knead it, make cakes for the visitors.

She had her hands in the dough when her body started again.

Decades since the last time. She was ninety and standing over a kneading trough and the blood came back, and she understood before anyone said a word to her what it meant. The bread never reached the table. What Abraham carried out to the three men under the tree was curds and milk and the calf, and no one asked about the cakes.

One of the visitors went to the wall of the tent and scratched a line in it. "When the sun comes back around to this mark," he told her, "you will be carrying a son."

She had already given up on it. She had said so to herself, out loud, in the shade behind the door. But a year later the light crawled across the wall the way light does, slow, indifferent, and it touched the scratch, and the promise came due on the day it had been set for.

The Bow He Left Out Where Anyone Can Look

A man loves his friend while the friend is alive. Then the friend dies and the loving stops, because there is nobody left to love. That is not how it went with Abraham. Abraham died, and the blessing simply moved down to Isaac without a pause.

A king can load a friend with silver and gold and fine cloth and send him off, and a storm takes the ship, and the king can do nothing about it from shore. When the ship goes down the sailors throw the cargo over the side first, and the animals after it, and they pull the man out of the water and count that a good day's work. God does not sort the manifest that way. When the flood ended, what the verse says is that He remembered Noah and every living thing with him, the beasts in the hold counted with the man at the tiller.

So the bow went up in the cloud, and it stayed there.

Not in an ark, not in a drawer, not in the keeping of a priest who could lose it. In open sky, over a wet field, where a farmer with mud to his knees can look up at the color and say the words back: blessed is the One who remembers the covenant, and is faithful to the covenant, and keeps His word.