Full Circle

            Recently I’ve been studying Revelation chapter 4.  John starts this chapter out by saying, “After this I looked….” After what? After Jesus had given him the letters to the seven churches.  So to have a better perspective of chapter 4, it is important to go back to chapter 1 verse 19.  Jesus said, “Write, therefore, what you have seen, what is now and what will take place later.”

           ‘What is now?’  Chapter 4:2-3, “At once I was in the Spirit, and there before me was a throne in heaven with someone sitting on it.  And the one who sat there had the appearance of jasper and ruby.  A rainbow that shone like an emerald ENCIRCLED the throne.” Encircled is the key word here.  Though rarely seen, all rainbows are full circles.  They are mostly seen in their fullness by pilots or sometimes around the sun if the lighting is just right. We normally see them as an arc because the bottom half is usually blocked by our horizon and due to the angle you are looking at the rainbow. Rainbows are also actually an optical illusion, thus impossible to approach. Sorry to burst your bubble of one day finding that pot of gold.

            Back to my point about ‘what is now’ in Revelation.  John is seeing the throne room of God.  Not just as it is now, but like it always has been.  When God showed Noah his rainbow as a covenant sign, it’s possible that he saw a full circle rainbow, because in Genesis 9:14 it says, “Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds…” When God gave Noah this sign, it wasn’t just a reminder to never flood the earth again, but it was God bringing heaven to earth.  So it’s definitely not certain that Noah would have seen a full circle rainbow, but interestingly enough, all the water had dried up before the appearance of the rainbow, so this tells us that it wasn’t raining any more and fun to think that the first rainbow could have been a full circle rainbow. 

            Why am I even talking about this? Well, I received a revelation by learning that all rainbows are full circles, whether we see them or not.  Much like God’s promises.  We don’t always see the fulfillment of his promises right away because he has not allowed us to see things at the right perspective yet.  Since God has always had a full circle rainbow around him in his throne room along with colors of jasper, emerald and ruby and seas of glass and weird creatures; it gives me more faith to believe that his promises always have and always will come full circle.