Pastor Lynn's thoughts on:
Storehouses of Snow, Feb.13th, 2010
Have You Entered the Storehouses of the Snow? (Job 38:22)
The book of Job is seldom read in its entirety (all 42 chapters). People sometimes are surprised to find Job wasn't all that patient. And who can blame him for voicing despair, anger, and anguish in the midst of unbelievable suffering? Well, actually his "friends" do. "You don't, get it, Job," they say. "God is just. God makes no mistakes. You'll be better in the end for having suffered. Or maybe your piety is just an act, and your heart is evil, and God is teaching you a lesson." They have a million reasons or excuses for suffering.
Job would have been at home in our modern world with those who often find "religious" answers to life's problems and pain unsatisfying. He demands answers from God - and incredibly, after pages and pages of debate (and sometimes rants) from Job and his friends, God speaks.
Job 38:1 simply records, "Then the Lord answered Job out of the storm." I don't know what "the storm" means (maybe it's the personal, emotional, psychic storm that describes Job's personal existence). Maybe there's something to be learned from the fact that when Job shut up (probably from exhaustion), that God speaks. But the fact God speaks out of the storm seems in itself to suggest that hope inhabits life at its deepest level.
I should point out that God doesn't "answer" Job in the sense of addressing his questions. On the contrary, God "answers" with a barrage of questions that in the end leave Job speechless. One gets the idea that maybe words like "transcendence" and "eternity" suggest a certain distance between present pain and ultimate healing that cannot be easily traveled by the human mind.
Now these reflections go well beyond the scope of a newsletter, so let me come back to one of those questions God asked Job:
Have you entered the storehouses of the snow? (Job 38:22)
This is an existential question, not intended for a meteorologist. It is the kind of question you ponder when shovels and snowplows fail to clear your city, when piles, mounds, and mountains of snow everywhere make it abundantly clear that there is no storehouse down here big enough to handle a few days of delivery from God's storehouse.
The snow is real - I've hoisted my shovel and spun my wheels. But the question is metaphorical. It's about arrogance and limits. It's about unraveling our illusion of control. Maybe rediscovering that the gift of time transcends busyness, and that there is a beauty that descends from above which transforms the ordinary landscape.
No, God, I haven't entered the storehouses of the snow, and that very question provokes a greater one. If the storehouse of your snow is so vast, is not the storehouse of your love even greater? "As high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is God's love ... as far as the east is from the west, so far has God removed our transgressions from us."
I only know of one verse about the storehouse of the snow, but the Bible as a whole is about the storehouse of love. It says simply that "God is love" (I John 4:16). "God so loved the world that God gave His only Son ..." Jesus' life and His willingness to die for us reveal the infinite love of God. God can lavish His love upon every single human life, through time and eternity, and it will make not even a dent in the storehouse of God's love.
Let me offer that prayer from the Apostle Paul for you:
I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge-that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:17-19)
– Pastor Lynn
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