A Christian ministry has unveiled a permanent light display to “take back the rainbow” from the LGBT movement, which adopted the symbol in 1978. The ministry pointed to the Genesis 9 account of God giving the rainbow as a sign after the flood of Noah.
“The Ark Encounter is lit permanently at night with a rainbow to remind the world that God owns the rainbow & is a sign of His covenant,” tweeted Ken Ham, president of the Christian ministry Answers in Genesis (AiG). His ministry launched an “Ark Encounter,” a life-size Noah’s Ark theme park, in July 2016. Ham’s tweet included a picture of the Ark.
The @ArkEncounter is lit permanently at night with a rainbow to remind the world that God owns the rainbow & is a sign of His covenant pic.twitter.com/U0dmKnXV2v
— Ken Ham (@aigkenham) July 18, 2017
“Christians need to take back the rainbow as we do [at] Ark Encounter — God owns it — He decreed it’s a sign of His covenant with man after the Flood,” Ham added in another tweet.
Christians need to take back the rainbow as we do @ArkEncounter -God owns it-He decreed it's a sign of His covenant with man after the Flood pic.twitter.com/cNR51zTbPX
— Ken Ham (@aigkenham) July 18, 2017
In late June, Ham posted an article about the rainbow on his blog. He noted that select McDonald’s restaurants offered rainbow-striped french fry boxes and Facebook offered a special “pride” reaction in the shape of a rainbow flag. Such signs really celebrated “man’s rejection of God and his Word,” Ham argued.
The AiG president insisted that Christians are not “against” gay people. “We are not ‘against gay people’ any more than we’re ‘against’ people who lie or commit adultery,” he wrote. “As believers, we are called to love all people, recognizing we’re all created in God’s image, yet are all sinners in need of forgiveness and grace” (emphasis added).
Ham pointed out that Christians “can be against sinful behavior … without being angry with the people themselves.” Rather, what AiG wants is for people “to recognize that they, like us, are sinners desperately in need of a Savior, and that Savior is Jesus Christ.”
The AiG president added that companies like McDonald’s and Facebook, “and sadly even our government and public schools, are imposing their religion on the culture.” He rightly noted that “if McDonalds offered boxes with crosses on them for Easter or if Facebook had an empty-grave reaction to celebrate Christ’s Resurrection, people would be furious, and they would say these companies were imposing Christianity on others.”
Ham argued that people don’t understand this “because they’ve been brainwashed to believe LGBTQ is a civil rights issue when in reality it’s a morality and religious issue.”
The AiG president ended his article by citing Genesis 9:12-16, the passage in which God promised that “the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.”
“When you see the rainbow being hijacked for something it was never intended to represent, I encourage you to use it as a conversation starter to direct people toward the message of judgement of sin, but also of the mercy and grace offered by our Ark of salvation, the Lord Jesus Christ,” Ham concluded.
Despite this lengthy message — and the fact that the rainbow as a sign of God’s covenant predated its use as an LGBT symbol by at least 3,000 years — LGBT activists on Twitter mocked Ham for embracing the LGBT symbol.
“That is ABSOLUTE GAYEST BOAT and I LOVE IT. #LoveWins” tweeted John Gidding, a Turkish-American architect, television personality, and former fashion model.
https://twitter.com/JOHNGIDDING/status/888043790593921029
“That’s a gorgeously gay boat,” writer Laura Shortridge tweeted.
That's a gorgeously gay boat
— Laura Shortridge-Scott 🏴 (@DiscordianKitty) July 20, 2017
“Gayest monument to anti-science pseudo-Christianity ever! Impressive! Well done!” tweeted Richard Cosgrove, a freelance copy editor in London.
https://twitter.com/rcosgrove/status/888110700920307716
Perhaps ironically, these LGBT activists merely proved Ham’s point about imposing their secular sexual religion on culture.
Cosgrove’s attack on Ham, that his organization supports “anti-science pseudo-Christianity,” referred to AiG’s hardline stance on interpreting the book of Genesis.
Christians disagree on whether the seven “days” in Genesis 1 should be taken as literal 24-hour periods. Ham and his organization argue that the Earth and the entire universe are no more than 6,000 or 7,000 years old. This view is known as “young earth creationism” (YEC).
Others dispute this, arguing that God reveals himself in both the Bible and the book of nature — science — and that geology clearly reveals that the Earth is billions of years old. Red shift in observing the stars has suggested the universe is 13.7 billion years old.
Among Christians who accept this “old earth” view, there are two general camps: those who embrace a limited theory of evolution (as guided by God), and those who reject it. Contrary to the arguments of leaders like Ham, Christians have debated these issues for centuries, with even the great early church writer St. Augustine suggesting a non-literal reading of Genesis 1.
Whatever the merits of his ideas on science, Ham is correct that the rainbow was a Jewish and Christian symbol long, long before the LGBT movement.
The rainbow flag was designed by Vietnam War veteran and drag queen Gilbert Baker. Until 1978, the gay movement was represented by a pink triangle, the symbol used by the Nazis to identify homosexuals. Baker’s flag had eight colors: pink for sex (at the top, of course), red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, turquoise for art, indigo for harmony, and violet for spirit at the bottom.
The flag’s elevation of sex over spirit suggests an utter rejection of Christian morality, where sex — while a good thing in the covenant of marriage — is subordinate to morality, the love of God, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
While some Christians argue that the Bible is not incompatible with the LGBT movement, it clearly condemns homosexual activity and teaches that God made people male and female. Ken Ham may not be right on science, but his suggestion that Christians reclaim the rainbow for God is a solid one, no matter how much LGBT activists mock it.
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