You are the salt of the earth. But what good is salt if it has lost its flavor? Can you make it salty again? It will be thrown out and trampled underfoot as worthless. Matthew 5:13 (NLT)
Many people have heard about Jesus and that He taught, healed, fed the hungry, and died on a cross, a brutal death of suffocation. Jesus taught on many things. Each teaching was about loving God by obeying Him, and believing Jesus is the Son of God, the prophesied Messiah.
The passage above comes from Matthew’s account of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. It speaks about saltiness. I’ve learned saltiness is slang for being sarcastic. A person is salty when he or she is sarcastic. People can be too salty. It comes from adding our humanness to an already difficult situation.
Jesus covered many aspects of life when He taught during His Sermon on the Mount. Their messages taught about loving God with our heart, mind, body, and spirit and loving other people as we want to be loved. In Matthew 5:13, Jesus spoke about a common commodity, salt. At that time, people used salt for preserving food, flavoring it, and caring for people’s and animals’ health. People understood salt. Jesus used this common item to teach the people a truth a truth. He used a parable.
When we consider this passage, we must wonder, can salt become unsalty? Have you ever heard of unsalty salt? In my mind, its flavor dictates its name. What good is unsalty salt? How can we make sure we have pure salt? How can we get it? What was the deeper meaning of this parable Jesus told? As we consider this passage briefly, let’s consider these questions and their answers.
Can salt be unsalty? Salt can lose its flavor, preservative, and disinfecting power if people add other things to it. This combined salt is impure. When people or a company create salt and add another ingredient to it, like iodine or carbon, the salt loses its saltiness. The shelf-life of iodized salt is five years. After five years, it loses its flavor and purposes. It can no longer be used to preserve meats or flavor food. In Israel, salt from the Dead Sea in southern Judah was not pure. The people could not use it for flavoring, preserving meat, or disinfecting wounds. Pure salt is sodium chloride. The only place people could get pure salt in that region was from the Mediterranean Sea. Obviously, salt was important to them, and is important today.
What can we do with unsalty salt? When this salt is worthless for its original purpose, people used it to clean ovens and pots. They used it as an abrasive. Unsalty salt absorbs the odor of garlic. It deodorizes strong odors, like bicarbonate soda does, because it combines carbon dioxide with sodium. When impure salt has lost its saltiness, it becomes an abrasive and deodorizer.
Impure salt is only good for its purposes for a short time, then it’s used for dirty activities. People add something to unsalty salt to it to make it salty for a short time. Nobody can add anything to manmade salt to make it permanently salty. Nothing can make impure salt salty again.
Did you catch that? Impure salt is manmade. Are we like impure salt? Do we try to make ourselves into good enough to be accepted by God and gain entrance into heaven upon our physical death on earth? People often will try to donate their time and money, strive for the highest position, or seek more money trying to be good enough. Of course, sometimes those actions are an excuse when people want power, position, status, and wealth. We must realize that nothing we do or say can make us righteous. Adding something good to our personal resume will not remove our sins. Just adding good words and actions to our personal sinfulness does not move us on the scale from sinful to holy/righteous.
Because we can do nothing to make ourselves righteous, since we have a sinful nature, the God the Father sent Jesus His Son to die on the cross in our place. His sinlessness means He is holy. His sacrifice of His life on the cross was as a substitute for ours. Jesus died so we do not have to die for our sins, the judgment we deserve from holy God. When we believe Jesus is the Son of God who died for us and confess and repent of our sins, we are not adding Jesus to ourselves. We are giving ourselves-heart, mind, body, and soul-to Jesus to cleanse and remake us into His image. Jesus is not an addition we make to our lives, like money, status, and fame. He makes us in His image-holy/righteous and renewed, born again. Our old selves are gone; the new has come. Paul wrote this in 2 Corinthians 5:17. He wrote, “This means anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun.” (NLT)
Consider yourself. Are you adding to yourself good works and things, hoping you’ll be good enough for God and enter heaven? When we do that, we add to our impurity, even if those things are good. We, like the manmade salt, are impure. To be and do good, we need Jesus to make us righteous. We are the impure salt until we believe in Jesus and confess and repent.
Don’t add good to impurity. It will not be good enough and will only be cast away. Let Jesus purify and remake you. Know you will be with God in heaven. Live out your faith in Jesus by your words, actions, and thoughts. Show the pure salt from heaven so others choose Jesus, and He makes them the salt and light of the world. Will you seek Jesus, who will remake you into pure salt and use you to share about Him?
You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet. You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven. Matthew 5:13-16 (NLT)
