I will betroth you to me in faithfulness,Īnd you shall know the Lord. I will betroth you to me in righteousness and justice, love and compassion. No one put it more simply than the prophet Hosea, in words that Jews still say every weekday morning at the start of their prayers: That word ‘covenant’ is a key word in the Hebrew Bible, our Old Testament, where it occurs more than 250 times. There’s surely a conscious echo here of the rainbow that Noah saw after the waters subsided following the flood (Genesis 9: 8–17), a sign of God’s covenant love and faithfulness for his creation. In the words of Psalm 19, ‘The heavens are telling the glory of God and the firmament proclaims his handiwork’.įor me there’s one picture that speaks particularly powerfully when St John uses the imagery of a rainbow around the throne. The Victorian art critic and historian John Ruskin saw the whole earth as sacred: ‘Wherever we are moved by the beauty and power of nature, God has let down a ladder for us from heaven’. We can sense some of that glory of the Creator God around us, in all that is good or beautiful or noble – a creation imbued with love. Instead the words convey a sense of sheer awe and wonder, boundless light illuminating every corner and before which no one and nothing is hidden or concealed. We note that there is no personal picture or description of God. For St John is really using words to describe the indescribable the language is bound to fall short before the all-powerful Creator God in whom we live and move and have our being – the God who was, and is and is to come. There’s no need – and perhaps it might even be a mistake – to try to ascribe exact meanings to every specific detail of what’s mentioned, as if there were a secret key to decode it all in detail. There’s an abundance of signs and symbols which stretch our imagination.
THE BIBLE EXPERIENCE COMPLETE TORRENT TORRENT
We have a torrent of them in the vision of St John the Divine in Revelation – trumpets, thrones, winged creatures and more. This Sunday both our epistle and gospel are inundated with images. A torrent of images to describe the indescribable Stephen Adam, 24 February 2019