Did you wake with excitement about the fresh snow this week? Our daughters needed no motivation to come downstairs—before 7am they were already begging to go out and play. The first snow of the season came down gently and so beautifully. Will this be a snowy winter? Is there more, heavier, colder snow to come? 

Snowfall is a regular reminder to us to look to who governs the snow. We can regard passages like Job 37–38 which describes God as creating storehouses from which He delivers the snow to the earth and in Psalm 147:16 God uses His snow to serve as a blanket over the earth. While God uses the freezing precipitation to demonstrate His anger against sinners, casting down hail and ice from the heavens in a mixture of literal and figurative destruction, surely that is not the only purpose of snow. 

The gentle blanket of snow at the return of another season, the Lord reminds His people of passages like Isaiah 1:18 and Psalm 51; the pure, pristine, and perfectly white blanket is observable witness of what only God can do. The soul of man requires a new and permanent season of hope. By the hand of God’s only begotten, Jesus Christ, we come to the Father to be purged of darkness and corruption—made pure, and our souls white as snow before the throne of God’s power. By the Divine revelation that communicates these truths we are to have a whole new perspective when we see the snowfall. God has gently cast this picture before us that we may look to Him and use the day as a reminder of His sincere work of grace, not merely to change the seasons, but His work of changing hearts.

As our daughters joyfully look to the coming winter, our prayer for such excited children and for our community is to be pointed to the work of Christ even in the gentle and graceful blanket God bestows upon Northern Pennsylvania.

Pastor Chris