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)
