HEBREW WORD STUDY – RAINBOW – QASHATH קשת Qop Shin Taw

Genesis 9:16: “The rainbow shall be in the cloud, and I will look on it to remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.”

“The questions are often more beautiful than the answers.” Paul Williams on his song “The Rainbow Connection.” 

After the flood God made a covenant with every living thing on the earth. God promised that he would never again destroy the world with a flood. What he fails to tell us is why He will never again destroy the world with a flood.  Did He make a mistake?  Did He regret the destruction? When I was a child my Sunday School teacher said He would not destroy the world with a flood but with fire the next time.  That sent a cold chill up the spine of this little Sunday School scholar. I remember thinking as a small child would think. “I guess water was just not enough to do the job so the next time He will use fire to make sure the job is done right.”

This is an anniversary of sorts for me.  For you see fifteen years ago I was trying to enjoy Thanksgiving alone and I was struggling with a crisis of faith. I grew up in a fundamentalist church where I learned what I was assured was truths of God.  Then as a teenager I encounter other Christians in High School who came from different denominations in my Youth for Christ/Campus Life club.  Some of them talked of prophecy, speaking in tongues and baptism of the Holy Spirit. These were called truths which my denomination said were not truths.  Then I went to Moody Bible Institute where one year I had a roommate who was Mennonite and he told me some truths of God that didn’t seem like some of the truths I was taught. Then in seminary I had roommates from California, you know the land of fruits and nuts.  They spoke of truths that I thought were not truths but our Seminary professors said we had to decided for ourselves what the truth was.  I won’t get into the things I picked up working on my PhD.  

After Seminary I began a quest to learn what the truth really was and I spent a minimum of three to four hours a day studying the Word of God in Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic.  I taught Old Testament and Hebrew in a Bible College where I spent even more hours in study of God’s word.  I had students coming in with their brand of truth, everything from dispensationalism to covenant theology.  I suppose one of those was the truth but both could not be truths. 

As I sat there alone on Thanksgiving at the age of 55 pondering my pursuit of the truth of God during my life I was reading the story of Noah and I thought how simple it was for old Noah. There was no theology in those days, no doctrine, no dogma, arguments over who had the truth of God or not. There was just Noah and God and the one truth that Noah knew was that there was a true God out there and he sent him a rainbow as a promise to never destroy the world again with a flood.  That is when I asked myself the question, “Why did God promise to not destroy the world with a flood again?”  But now I was armed with many years of research and a doctoral dissertation on the Esoteric Structure of the Hebrew Alphabet.  As my ministry partner calls it, God’s built in commentary on His Word.  Every letter in the Hebrew alphabet has a meaning and there are those who believe that if you put the meaning behind each letter in a Hebrew word it will reveal to you a hidden or built in commentary on that word.

So, I took the word for rainbow as it was written in Genesis 9:16, qashath and applied the built in commentary.  I asked the question as to what does the word rainbow  or qashath really teach us as to why God will not destroy the earth with a flood?  The first letter of the word is the Qop which is a letter representing a sacrifice.  God is promising to send a sacrifice to show the meaning of the second letter, the Shin which is the passionate and fiery love of God.  This sacrifice when coupled with the fiery love of God will lead us to the last letter the Taw which represents Truth.  God will one day send a sacrifice of pure love to redeem us and the world of the sin nature that has come into this world.

Jesus said: “I am the Way the Truth and the Life.”  John 14:6.  Like Pilate I asked; “What is truth?”   Jesus answered He was the Truth. He was that sacrifice of God’s passionate love and in Him is the truth.  About that time I heard Kermit the Frog (I paid my way through college as a ventriloquist so I was a Muppet fan) sing his song: The Rainbow Connection.”  I never sought to find out what the writer of that song, Paul Williams, thought the rainbow represented.  As an artist I believe he wanted the listener to relate to the rainbow in his or her own way.”  To me the rainbow was the heart of God and I wanted to make that rainbow connection, to connect with the heart of God for in that I knew I would learn the truth.  

It has been 15 amazing years and I still have not found the other side of that rainbow, the real truth of God. That is what faith is all about. There are things we will never understand in this world, but one day when we leave this world, we shall know.  I believe God has allowed me to enter His heart, however, to feel what He feels.  To learn the beauty of my questions and the promise of all the answers I will one day receive. 

After 15 years, the time has come for me to invite others to join me on this journey into God’s heart. What will you experience when you enter His heart?  It will be like His heart is speaking to your inner most soul.  His heart will tell you of wonders that you have never known, great secrets that are yet to be told.  You will feel as if you are watching the grave of a seed as it springs into life, grows and blooms into a beautiful flower as if being resurrected from its final burst of beauty in the fall when it suddenly falls silent in the winter’s chill until it’s rebirth in the spring.  You will learn the secret code of the message in the wind.  You will interpret the words of a bubbling brook.  You will understand the meaning behind the cooing of a dove, the chirping of a song bird or the chatter of a squirrel. You will be able to hear the heart beat of a forest as you walk alone in the early autumn.  You will hear sounds that you would never hear in the natural, like that of the clouds as they flow through the summer sky or the sun as it shoots out is first rays of light to declare a new day. You will find in the inner chambers of God’s heart  an orchestra of life with all its great sounds pulsating in perfect harmony.  And that is where the beauty of God’s unanswered questions will lie until that day when all the answers will burst forth in one glorious revelation of God as you enter His Kingdom, when you finally pass through to the other side of His rainbow and make that rainbow connection.

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