[This reflection was published in the weekly news bulletin of Horley Baptist Church, 25/Apr/2021]
We have known for years that the Queen is a sincere believer in the Lord Jesus as the Son of God and her Saviour, but it is only since the death of her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, that we have heard anything about his own beliefs. Royal commentators have since described him as having a deep Christian faith and as a practising Christian, with a collection of hundreds of “religious” books. A number of bishops have recalled that after a church service he always loved to discuss their sermons to deepen his own faith. As a result he planned his own funeral, not only ceremonially but spiritually too.
It was interesting that the two readings at the funeral were one from scriptures written between the Old and New Testaments, Ecclesiasticus 43:11-26, which describes the power of God’s creation. This includes the sea, which as a naval officer in World War Two would have meant so much to the Duke. The other being John 11:21-27, where before raising Lazarus from the dead, Jesus teaches Martha that anyone who trusts in Him as the resurrection and the life, even though they die, will one day rise and never die again.
The reading in Ecclesiasticus starts by saying, “Look at the rainbow and praise its Maker, it shines with a supreme beauty …”. This reminded me of a time when we visited Tilgate Park in Crawley. We arrived in a shower of rain and as we waited for the rain to stop we saw a beautiful rainbow, but not only that, we saw a most remarkable sight –the end of the rainbow. It came down to the ground in front of a large tree and as a result the tree shimmered with all the colours of the rainbow. Since then the rainbow has always meant so much to me as I “praise its Maker”; just as it meant so much in Genesis 9:12-17 where God created the rainbow as a sign of His mercy to Noah and to us as his descendants.
But it also reminded me of when Ezekiel saw a vision of God in all his glory in Ezekiel 1:27,28, “Brilliant light surrounded him. Like the appearance of a rainbow in the clouds on a rainy day, so was the radiance around him.” This again is a sign of God’s promise to show us mercy and preserve us, even in death, until Jesus comes again and raises our bodies in new and eternal life in Him.
Then we shall praise forever, the Maker of the rainbow.
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Contributed by Michael Goble; © the Author
