By God’s breath ice forms;
water’s expanse becomes solid. – Job 37:10 (CEB)
With it being so cold this week, I started wondering what biblical symbolism I could find regarding cold weather. The biblical writings, of course, come from a place with a warm climate, so I would not expect too many references to cold weather. Yet it did get cold sometimes, so I figured that any mentions of it may well have important symbolic value.
Looking through a bible dictionary, I found no references at all. I looked at freezing, cold winds, ice. Nothing. Snow had a brief entry, noting that snow is mentioned literally a few times and a few times to represent the color white. That’s it. When I look for those terms in the bible, snow shows up a fair number of times, spread throughout the Old Testament. But when it comes to cold weather more generally, there is not much. Almost all of the other references I found seemed concentrated in the book of Job. Much of what is going on in Job is a recognition of how unfathomable God is to us. God is at work in so many ways and is so vast that our human minds cannot hope to truly make sense of God or the universe that God brings forth. Ice and cold are included as part of the things that God brings about in the world. The point throughout Job is that we cannot presume to tame God or control God, much less truly understand God. God is a mystery that we could never get our minds around. We run into problems when we begin to assume that everything is supposed to make sense to us. We are not that smart or that powerful. Ice becomes this exotic example of how the ways of God slip beyond our grasp.
It can be helpful to remember such humility before God. We are not the center of the universe, and there is so much that we cannot understand. Things that God creates at times seem strange and even dangerous. The cold can be destructive and cause suffering. Why would God do that to us? But the world is not just about us. We are but a small aspect of this vast universe. The wonder is that God cares for us at all! Sometimes when we get a bit full of our own importance, personally and as humans, we need to be knocked back down a little bit and realize that God and the world are much bigger than us. That makes God’s pervasive love all the more incredible!