Snow! It’s beautiful when it completely covers the landscape and builds up on the branches of the trees to make fluffy white flocking. Snow blowing sideways sticks to window screens and siding and generally coats everything. My daughter looked outside on Monday morning and said, “It’s so pretty!” And it was, deceptively so. You see, snow is a good analogy for sin.
Sin is any thought, word or deed that is contrary to God’s holy nature. We all sin. Yes, even you and me. Like snow, sin falls everywhere, not just on each of us or our property. Our sin affects other people, just as snow falls on others. Snow and sin both look pretty, and both can cover our whole lives. Both sin and snow though, eventually become a wet, muddy morass that covers our lives and leaves us stuck. Like snow, we can dig ourselves out of our sin, but if we try to do it all by ourselves it is impossible. We’ll miss some, or get tired of shoveling and quit, or just accept as fact that it will be with us a long time, like those big piles of snow pushed to the corners of parking lots.
Some people will just accept sin as a regular part of life and live their whole lives caught in an endless cycle of “sinfall” and “sinmelt,” like seasons cycle through snowfall and snowmelt. Some people will spend their lives trying to manage their sin, repeatedly shoveling the driveway and sidewalks that other people use to approach them. This somewhat hides a person’s sin but doesn’t eliminate it, and usually no one is fooled by such sin management techniques. Finally, a few will admit the “sinfall” is theirs, confessing to God and others and asking for forgiveness and grace.
God is faithful and just and will forgive confessed sins and cleanse us from our unrighteousness. (1 John 1:9-10) Just as the sun comes out and melts away the snow, so the Son of God came to remove sin from our lives. Only the sun can melt away the snow. Only Jesus, the Son of God, can truly remove sin from our lives.
Note: This story was published on March 17, 2021, in the True Dakotan.