A few weeks ago, millions of Americans learned for the first time about a new modern religion, because of a flash flood in the desert of Western Nevada that left some 75,000 people dangerously stranded. What were 75,000 people doing in a barren desert?

Revelry in the Desert

They were at a weeklong pagan festival called Burning Man where they go live in the desert every year for a week of revelry. Elon Musk calls it Silicon Valley’s annual must-go retreat. If so, then Silicon Valley is more of a problem than you or I had imagined.

The schedule is punctuated by a host of quasi-religious rituals. The makeshift city that hosts it boasts an Orgy Dome with long lines of people waiting to enter and do exactly what its name says. (If that seems unlikely, feel free to confirm it however you like, but be aware that what you find will be disturbing. I do not care to supply a link.)

The entire complex is centered around two freshly built structures: one of them a temple, and the other some form of massive depiction of all mankind. At the end of the week, they ritually burn the temple and the “man,” which is where they get the name Burning Man.

This year they built and burned the Temple of the Heart and the 60 ft. tall Chapel of Babel, respectively. Revelers spend months preparing for it, partly because if you are not properly outfitted you could die in the waterless heat, and partly because everyone is supposed to contribute something to the affair. If that isn’t a religion, then the word religion has no meaning.

Behind the Burning Rituals

Burning rituals are fundamental to religions as different as Buddhism, Hinduism, Molech, and that of the Vikings. There is a reason: They all reject the body. The physical world on the whole is regarded with suspicion (hence the need to escape it), but specifically the human body is regarded as an enemy in which the soul is imprisoned for the time being.

Our own bodies are the great enemy of our souls, and everything fixed about them is the enemy of the spirit which longs to be free from captivity and return to somewhere or something or nothing at all. The rainbow-trans flag which adorned the wall of the Burning Man chapel serves as testament to their rejection of the sanctity of the body and of the natural order.

God Made Himself Known

But you can only go on in these denials of reality for so long before God makes Himself known.

This year He decided to visit the desert pagans with what would usually be considered to be a great blessing, hundreds of miles from the nearest water source: rain. The revelers did not, however, count it as a blessing. They freaked out instead, and ran for the hills (of the Bay Area). Most were long gone before the “big burn.”

What surprises me most about it is the gentleness God displayed. The people of Burning Man ran for their lives, but to my knowledge they weren’t seriously endangered. Funny how you can camp out in a former lake bed and somehow imagine that water could never come there again. Funnier still that you can convince yourself with 75,000 other people that you are ever truly out of reach from the hand of God.

Or maybe not so funny. The point is, God can reach you wherever you are. But there was also something wonderfully playful in the way God stole the show by making sure that the rainbow on the news was not the one in the flag from the temple. It was the gorgeous double rainbow that appeared in the sky as the clouds left the Black Rock Desert.

The Great Bow of Peace Has Divine Purpose

In our era we speak of rainbows in their purely material categories. They’re pretty to look at, but it’s all just physics, and it means nothing. In truth, however, the great bow of peace that bursts with the light of the sun has a divine purpose: God made the rainbow as a sign that He will never again flood the earth for our wickedness.

Every single rainbow you see has that meaning. When my family is out and about and we see rainbow flags, our kids joke about how they must be big fans of that covenant between God and Noah. It’s a sad situation, but sometimes if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry.

All the fearful talk from the right about new Gulags and things like that is utterly bankrupt. It overlooks the fact that God will be wherever His people are, and He will even bring humor if you are looking for it. Our God is kind to all, the evil and the good.

God Cannot Be Silenced

So there, in the barren Nevada desert, God smiled down on this vile party, these men and women gathered expressly to mock Him. First He gave them a sprinkling (baptism?), then He made a better rainbow than they could ever make. He did it on His own personal canvas in the sky, which He repopulates moment by moment with His ever-new art.

He cleared out the majority of them before the most overtly pagan event of the week. He could do that in ten thousand ways, but the water and the rainbow were marvelous. I suspect His purpose was to protect them from bringing further evil upon themselves.

It can be tempting to dismiss the effect it had, to think nobody there would have noticed, or that they simply rejected it. Such an outlook bears a strong resemblance to the godless pessimism that the Lord shook out of Elijah, after his fiery but mostly peaceful encounter with the prophets of Baal.

As usual, the newspapers reported on the Burning Man storm as an art festival that got rained out, which shows you why no one should read them to find out what’s actually going on in the world. But that’s another story. God cannot be silenced, and His glory and love are too powerful to be mocked forever.

Mike Littell is Pastor of South Dayton Presbyterian Church (PCA), Dayton, Ohio.