"With the Snow"

Forecasters are predicting snow for our area today, a very unusual occurrence in the subtropical region where we live. I am reminded of Job, and of wisdom formed in his heart and mind by suffering.

"If I wash myself with snow water, and make my hands never so clean; yet shalt Thou plunge me in the ditch, and mine own clothes shall abhor me. For He is not a man, as I am, that I should answer Him, and we should come together in judgment. Neither is there any daysman (umpire; arbiter) betwixt us, that might lay his hand upon us both" (Job 9:30).

Job did not know that "there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus" (I Timothy 2:5). He did live unbeknownst in the foreshadowing of the Savior, and was "a perfect and upright man" because he trusted God according to the light he had (Job 1:8). His trial, however, revealed to Job the inadequacy of his own works and sacrifices, and of his great need for an arbiter that could "lay his hand upon us both."

"Being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in His blood, to declare His righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; to declare, I say, at this time His righteousness: that He might be just, and the justifier of Him which believeth in Jesus" (Romans 3:24-26).

There should be no possibility of reconciliation between the perfect God and imperfect man, at least according to human reasoning. Job expressed this man-centered logic perfectly - "there is no daysman between us." Divine reasoning, however, declares to humanity that there is a daysman, a "mediator between God and men." He is "the man Christ Jesus," who is also the I AM, the living God (John 8:58). An even more impossible reconciliation presents itself to us in this most elemental truth of the Bible. How can the Infinite and the finite meet in one Person? How can Heaven and earth unite? How can the Word become flesh? How can the Word ultimately become sin in order to be our mediator? And how can He effect a salvation so profoundly redemptive that "your sins, though they be as scarlet, shall be white as snow?" (Isaiah 1:18).

There are many things to ponder in this life, many subjects worthy of our attention and consideration. There is nothing, however, so fascinating as the Lord Jesus Christ. Our minds were made first and foremost to "consider Him," and to be enthralled in both time and eternity with this glorious One in whom seemingly impossible contradictions unite to form the great enigma from which the light of God shines in both blinding and illuminating glory. Who is He? What has He done? What is He doing? And what will our Savior be doing forevermore on behalf of God and man? He has laid His nail-scarred hands on both, and God has remained perfectly just even as believing man has become perfectly justified. Contemplation of this, as guided by the Scriptures and the Holy Spirit, is the most heart and mind-filling consideration to which we can attend ourselves.

In Heaven and earth, there is no one like the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the Beloved of the Father, and He is the Beloved of all who have been cleansed, redeemed, and changed by His sacrifice. His garment of pristine righteousness is "white as snow" and His precious blood has made us "whiter than snow" (Daniel 7:9; Psalm 51:7). A long eternity will not suffice in our knowing Him in the fullness of His glorious being, but this day offers to us the possibility of fresh insight in who and what our Savior is. With the snow comes such consideration, and new opportunity to know and love the Christ for whom our hearts were made.

"For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, saith the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts. For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater."

(Isaiah 55:8-10)