“Drought and heat consume the snow waters: so doth the grave those which have sinned.”
Job 24:19
Who would contend that winter is a season of survival?
A classic fable tells of a grasshopper and an ant. The grasshopper fiddled his summer away, while the ant stockpiled for the coming winter. You know how that story ends– the grasshopper starved while the ant survives the frigid weather with what he saved.
When we think of preparing for the future, we usually relate preparing in harvest for the bare winter months. This verse contends that every season is intended to ready us for the next.
The winter store is dependent on a good fall harvest.
The fall harvest is derived from a timely and abundant spring plant.
The spring plant is nurtured from the hard frost and thick snows of winter.
And winter? Yes, even winter’s chilly darkness is welcome respite from the blistering long harvest day.
But what does winter provide? According to Job, it bestows a precious resource without substitute.
An Unskippable Sequence
Paul saw the orderliness of life in Christ. Calculable as the golden mean, predictable as the Fibonacci sequence, as simple as counting by ones; yet sculpted into life it begets a beautiful truth for the believer: the season past has equipped me for the season present. Today’s trials, blessings, labor, or lack thereof is God’s means to draw you closer to Himself. Even a past which Paul counted as dung was a beginning:
“If by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead.
Not as though I had attained, either were already perfect: but I follow after, if that I may apprehend that for which also I am apprehended of Christ Jesus.
Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before,
I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.”
Philippians 3:11-14
Paul kept looking ahead to the prize awaiting him in his Lord. The snow-waters of yesterday fell to be used today. “For the earth which drinketh in the rain that cometh oft upon it, and bringeth forth herbs meet for them by whom it is dressed, receiveth blessing from God:” (Hebrews 6:7)
There is no better season to prepare for eternity than this one. The grave devours lives constantly, whether they are ready or not. Let neither snow, rain, sun, nor wind keep you from Jesus Christ.
Rather than regretting or excusing the season behind us, let us see a provision from God for us. For, as much as we weary of the falling of the crystallized rain, we will wipe caked, gritty sweat from our eyes one day and realize how needful and transient was the season of “the snow waters.”
"Summer and winter and springtime and harvest,
Sun, moon, and stars in their courses above
Join with all nature in manifold witness
To Thy great faithfulness, mercy, and love."
-Thomas O. Chisholm (1866-1960)
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