What is God saying in the snow? That’s what we want to talk about now. So I invite you to turn in your Bibles, if you have one, you can just listen if you don’t, to Job 38:1–4.

Do you remember the story of Job, how he suffered so deeply? He questioned God’s wisdom in allowing so much into his life, and his friends gave him bad advice until a young man, Elihu, stood up and gave good advice. And then when Elihu was done, after chapters 32 to 37, God spoke.

What is God Saying in the Snow?

God’s approach to Job is, strangely, to call his attention to nature. And the purpose of the first chapters of God’s speech is to basically say, “You’re not such a hot shot. You don’t know much. Humble yourself.”

Let me read the first four verses and then jump farther down. I’m reading the first several verses of Job 38 just to give you the flavor of what God is up to.

Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind and said: Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Dress for action like a man; I will question you, and you make it known to me. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding.

The implication surely is, “You weren’t there, and therefore, you don’t know much.”

Now, jump down with me to verse 22. God keeps on asking him question after question in this way.

Have you entered the storehouses of the snow, or have you seen the storehouses of the hail, which I have reserved for the time of trouble, for the day of battle and war?

1. He commands the snow to humble us.

Now, my first answer to the question, what is God saying in the snow is: God is saying to Bethlehem and to the Twin Cities and to Minnesota, humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God. “You didn’t make it snow. I made it snow,” God said. “You couldn’t stop it from snowing. And I wouldn’t let you, if you thought you could. I made it snow. I stopped the state. I control this world. If you had any ideas that you were in charge here, take note, I rule. Humble yourselves under my hand.”

I think that’s the first point God wants us to hear from Job 38, echoing off of the snow outside. He is saying. “Have you entered the storehouses of the snow? Have you seen the storehouses of the hail? You haven’t entered in. You haven’t taken charge. You don’t run these skies. You don’t control the wind, and where I positioned the clouds. I do that. Minneapolis, get on your face before me. I am God.”

We are absolutely dependent on God for everything. Jesus said in John 15:5:

Without me, you can do nothing.

He gives to all men life, and breath, and everything (Acts 17:25).

Turn with me to James 4. There is a word about arrogance in James, which is the opposite of humility. Arrogance shows itself in our lives in a surprising way. It has to do with snow, and whether or not you get to where you’re going..

James 4:13–16 says:

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.

Now, what’s the arrogance in this text? The arrogance is thinking on Thursday that you know what’s going to happen on Friday. That’s arrogant. It’s not a small thing, when you’re asked a question if you’re going to do something to say: “I plan to,” or, “I intend to,” or, “Lord willing, I will.” You don’t always have to put it into words, but it ought to be in your head because God rules Friday on Thursday — we don’t. It is arrogant. It is just shot through the human race to think that we’ve got tomorrow in charge. We plan it out.

The men’s retreat is going to be about God’s purposes and a man’s plans; what a great lesson we have just had about a man. The mind of a man plans his way, but the Lord directs where he goes on Friday, Saturday (Proverbs 16:9).

So the first word spoken by the Lord last Thursday night was, “Humble yourselves, Minneapolis. Open your eyes to the fact that I’m in charge. And if you do anything this very afternoon, it’ll be because I ordain it and work it.”

Rod, Land, or Love

Secondly, turn with me back now to Job 37. Let’s read about a thunderstorm here, starting at verse one, thunder and rain and snow.

Job 37:1–13 says:

At this also my heart trembles and leaps out of its place. Keep listening to the thunder of his voice and the rumbling that comes from his mouth. Under the whole heaven he lets it go, and his lightning to the corners of the earth. After it his voice roars; he thunders with his majestic voice, and he does not restrain the lightnings when his voice is heard.

God thunders wondrously with his voice; he does great things that we cannot comprehend. For to the snow he says, ‘Fall on the earth,’ likewise to the downpour, his mighty downpour. He seals up the hand of every man, that all men whom he made may know it. Then the beasts go into their lairs, and remain in their dens. From its chamber comes the whirlwind, and cold from the scattering winds.

By the breath of God ice is given, and the broad waters are frozen fast. He loads the thick cloud with moisture; the clouds scatter his lightning. They turn around and around by his guidance, to accomplish all that he commands them on the face of the habitable world. Whether for correction or for his land or for love, he causes it to happen.

Now, literally some of you have different translations here, but let me give you the literal translation. It says: “…whether for the rod, or for his land, or for love.” It’s three distinct phrases, no matter what other translations do by way of paraphrasing to fit them together. It’s three things— the rod, land, and love. So let’s take them one at a time. These are three words, three things God wants to do through that snow. He commanded it to happen for three purposes.

2. He commands the snow to discipline us.

Let’s take the first one: rod. This is correction or punishment or rebuke. It t could be to his enemies and it could be to his children. Dean was out shoveling with Abraham, or Ben, or whoever it was, and one of them came in and told me Dean’s interpretation of what happened Thursday night. He said it was Halloween, and the Lord looked down and saw that there were some churches praying against the magic and the witchcraft that goes on in this city, even on Halloween.

And so, after they were praying that God would stop it and undo all the black magic, God said, “All right, I have an idea how to do that. I’ll dump 28 inches of white snow on all that black magic.” And I don’t doubt that that was part of it. God had some things He wanted to punish; some things He wanted to stop.

But, the snow also caused us to change our plans. Maybe there would be a witch saying the same thing that I’m saying this morning. Maybe they would think the snow was a curse on us so that we couldn’t have church this morning.

If you turn to Hebrews 12:5–6, it says:

…do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him. For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives

And so, whether the rod in God’s hand, Thursday night and Friday, was the rod of punishment for His enemies, or the rod of discipline and chastisement in love for His children, we must interpret according to which group we’re in. If you’re a child of God this morning, you may take all the interruption of your plans as God’s loving chastisement. Frustration has a chastising effect in our lives, and he means for us to experience that. So that’s rod.

3. He commands the snow to rebuke us.

He also uses the snow to speak a word of rebuke. Again, it says in Job 38:13, “for a rod or for his land.” Now, what does that mean? I think that the third word that the Lord wants us to hear is “Land, be blessed; land, work; land, be moisturized; land, be warmed.”

I was out shoveling the front walk yesterday morning and I wondered what it was going to be like. I don’t know if your walk was like this, but my walk was, oh, 12, 13 inches because of the way it was blowing. And [inaudible 00:13:01], contemporarily an ally of Britain and numerous other European countries and was driving the Russian troops back. And I just want you to imagine what the world would have been like had Hitler succeeded in taking the entire USSR for his own. Do you know what stopped him? The Russian winter. They fought well, and they won until the winter set in, in December of 1941. And it ended. God ended it. Got stopped Hitler with the snow and the cold on the Russian frontier.

And now we say, "Well yeah, but it didn’t stop communism." Well, give Him time. God does things in His own time and His own way. And now communism has its bad suit.

The other way that the snow causes love is by creating in us feelings that we might not have any other way. Why do people sing songs like I’m dreaming of a White Christmas, or I suggested to some this morning at a certain point in the service and Dean said, "Should it be, Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow?" I said, "No. We’ll save that for another time, Dean." But, why do we sing songs like that?

Why did Robert Frost write this poem? I bet all of you have read this poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.

Whose woods these are, I think I know. His house is in the village though. He will not see me stopping here to watch His woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer to stop without a farmhouse near. Between the woods and frozen lake, the darkest evening of the year. He gives his harness bells a shake to ask if there is some mistake. The only other sounds, the sweep of easy wind and snowy, downy flake. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep."

The snow did that. The snow did that, and the snow does it here. That’s the love of God on your life. So that’s the fourth thing God is saying, feel loved.

The fifth thing He’s saying is, “Echo back my excellency, O world.” We read Psalm 148. I think it would be good to just look at two of those verses again.

Psalm 148:7–8 says:

Praise the LORD from the earth, you great sea creatures and all deeps, fire and hail, snow and mist, stormy wind fulfilling his word!

Now, do you see what he’s saying? He’s looking down at the snow and he’s saying, "Praise the Lord, snow." He looks into the ocean and he sees big giant squid. And he says, "Praise the Lord you giant squid and you blue whales. Praise the Lord."

Now, what does he mean? They don’t have voices. He means, I think, "Echo back to me, my excellence. Let me behold in you how things are working and how marvelous is all the things that I have made. Just mirror back to me for my own enjoyment what I have done. Praise the Lord all you works of creation." God’s wisdom and power are echoed in the snow.

I got out my encyclopedia and read the article on snow last night, which is not a very inspiring thing to read. It’s just so scientific. And yet, if you’ve got a mind at all to care about what God does that scientists spend their time putting labels on and think they’ve accomplished something, then you do discover some amazing things.

I thought it was just sort of folklore that every snowflake is different, but this scientific article said that evidently it was true. It would be hard to prove, wouldn’t it? No test tube would ever work to prove that every snowflake is different, but they said that it’s likely the case. There are needles, and there are columns, and there are plates, and there are little things called graupel, which I have no idea what that is.

The remarkable thing that just was full of symbolic significance for me was that just like with raindrops, every snowflake forms around a speck of dust. I thought, "Hmm, dust, yuck. I don’t like dust, and yet I like snow." Every snowflake is God’s encasement of dirt.

That’s the way God is, I think. He looks down and He doesn’t just look at dust and say, "Oh dust, yuck. There is no purpose for dust. I can’t do anything with dust. Let’s just get rid of dust." Instead, He looks at it and thinks, "I think I’ll make snow. I’ll make snow out of dust." I just think that’s marvelous. I think that’s the praise of the Lord echoing back to Himself.

The sixth thing the Lord says in the snow is, come together. Now, I said this already at the welcome. Let me just say it again. I was shoveling yesterday morning and I had more contact with my neighbors in a half an hour yesterday morning than in the previous two months. I was shoveling and people had to walk in the street instead of on the sidewalk. Everybody that walked by stopped and made a comment about the snow, a comment about not having a car, a comment about the bus, a comment about this. And so I was able to talk with everybody that came by. Snow made that happen. Snow brings people together. Shared hardship brings people together.

One old man that I’ve befriended, here at the church and in the neighborhood, came walking down the street in his slippers and in his old coat with a staff and with drool frozen on his beard and said he and his wife had no food. The check didn’t come because the mail didn’t come, so they had no stamps and could he get some help through the weekend? We gave him a bag of groceries and he went happily on his way. He said, “Now, we got food in the house. Thank you, Reverend.”

And then there were the people to push out because 18th street wasn’t plowed and boy, you want to make Jesus known, you can just send your 14 year old out... no. I mean 16, 16 year old. It was great to see Benjamin running back up and down the street. So God means for us to come together in some real special ways.

I’m almost done now. The seventh thing that He wants us to hear is, a remnant will do. Here is what I mean by that, you remember about six years ago when we got totally snowed out the first Sunday of December and didn’t have any service at all? We needed about 30 or $40,000 to Sunday to meet budget. And so, God took away one of our Sundays.

Steve Roy wrote the article in The Star about Gideon. Remember the story of Gideon? The Amalakites, again, lined up like locusts, hundreds of thousands of them. He has 22,000 men, and God says, “That’s too many. So tell all of them that to feel a little bit afraid to go home,” and about 10,000 go home. He said, “Still too many.” He found a way to test them. And so, He got it down to 300. He said, “That’s good. That’ll do. That’s how many I want to use — the remnant.”

I got a letter from David Buck down in the Abilene, Kansas jail. He’s doing time there for rescuing in Wichita. He made a comment that was an overstatement. I wrote him a letter and I want him to be encouraged, more encouraged than his statement allowed. He said, “Abortion, I think won’t come to an end until the whole church is willing to really sacrifice.”

I wrote back and said, “It’ll never happen, ever.” You can’t say that only battles will be won by every lukewarm pew sitter getting hot. It’ll never happen. There will always be lukewarm, selfish people in the church, who aren’t the least interested in sacrificing anything for anybody. But, a remnant wins.” That’s what I wrote to him. I said, "It doesn’t take the whole church. It never has taken the whole church. It won’t take the whole church to finish The Great Commission. It’ll take a remnant, a faithful, red hot, wild-eyed, sacrificing remnant will finish the various jobs that need to be done. So don’t be discouraged if you look around, David in the churches of America and see a lot of self-satisfied people who just want to be comfortable and secure and not take any risks at all for anything, let alone saving babies from being chopped up in pieces."

The word about the snow is a remnant will do on Sunday morning. They don’t need everybody here. A remnant will do for whatever cause that needs to be done. If the remnant is white hot, if the remnant is alive, if the remnant has seen God and loves Him, the remnant will win Gideon victories when the snow cups are forces.

And finally, the eight thing which leads us to the table now is I think the Lord is saying be still. Be still and look at the symbols all around you of purity. "Come, let us reason together," says the Lord. "Though your sins be like scarlet, they shall be as wool. Though they be red like crimson, they shall be as white as snow."

One of the reasons the snow is out there, and one of the reasons you got socked in on Friday was so that you’d be still and know that He is God, and think, and pray, and look at the word. And so, I want us to close the service at the Lord’s table with a sense of stillness. I want you to go to the table now asking the question, how have I been loved in these days? How have I been disciplined in these days? How have I been humbled in these days?

Lord, until Pastor John said this, I haven’t even asked you what you’ve been saying. I’m sorry, but now I’m asking. What do you want to say to me? Because I think that when something this amazing happens to this many people, it’s the Lord wanting to say some new things to you. I think the Lord in stopping the city and stopping you is not doing it in vain. It’s sure not so that you can watch more television. I promise you that. It’s so that you can pause and fill up that extra time and that new sense of unusualness about the days with God.

A listening ear is what we need right now as we close this service. And so, I’m going to invite Dean to come and lead us in a song that’s a prayer in that direction. And then we’ll come to the table and enjoy remembering what the Lord did to make our sins as white as snow.