Sermon: Matthew 5:13: 'What is the Salt of the Earth?'

The Many Interpretations of Salt
#1803
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 08-Feb-25; 77 minutes 2025-02-08

When I spoke on the Sermon on the Mount a little more than two years ago, I kind of gave short shrift to the verses immediately following the Beatitudes. And those are the ones about, "you are the salt of the earth" and "you are the light of the world." I would like to read those now as we begin.

Matthew 5:13-16 "You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men. You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven."

Now when I went through these during my Sermon on the Mount series, particularly the "Blessed Are" sermons (so-named because that is how each one of the beatitudes begin, "Blessed are the meek" and so forth), I kind of assumed that everybody knew what Jesus meant about being the salt of the earth. And so when I finished that series, I used them as kind of the conclusion to my series on the Beatitudes as a warning in verse 13 about do not lose your flavor there, and also as a stir to action for the next three verses about being the light of the world.

But that is about all I said about it. It was all of maybe 5 minutes or less when I concluded that series. Because we have all heard messages or read articles about the light of the world and what it all means, and I thought, well, no need to reinvent the wheel, no need to add another 15 minutes to the end of the sermon. (Everybody would have enjoyed that, I am sure.) But I thought, you know, I can pass through this very quickly.

Another reason I did not discuss them very thoroughly was because I had still not committed to taking on the full Sermon on the Mount. I had not decided that I would do the whole Sermon on the Mount. Here it was; I did 12 verses on chapter 5, and it took like 10 sermons or something. It was not quite that many, but maybe it was. It took a lot of sermons and I was thinking, "Oh boy, if I have to go through the rest of chapter 5, chapter 6, chapter 7, this is going to take forever." And it did.

But I finally decided a couple weeks later when trying to figure out what I was going to do for my next sermon, that I would go on. But when I resumed I did not go back to verse 13. I started with verse 17 and the place of the law within Christianity.

So today I want to remedy that oversight. Actually, today, I am just going to remedy the oversight on Matthew 5:13. Maybe next time I will do the light of the world, but I just want to spend some time thinking about what the salt of the earth actually is. So we are going to break down what Jesus meant in calling His disciples the salt of the earth, which has become among the best-known phrases in the Bible. Everybody knows the salt of the earth phrase.

In the English-speaking world, since at least the 16th century and William Tyndale's translation of the Bible (and that is where it is first found in English, by the way), it has been an idiomatic proverbial saying. And what it does, to call somebody the salt of the earth, it describes and even praises a person who is genuinely unpretentious. And by implication you are saying that he is a valuable member of society, trustworthy and reliable. So normally a person who is the salt of the earth is somebody who just quietly goes about doing good for others and maintaining things for others and just being humble about what he does, and so we praise those people for being among us and doing the things that need to be done and asking for no recognition usually.

Now most of nominal Christianity understands Christ's metaphor as His way of expressing His disciples' value and integrity. That He wants us to be the salt of the earth, those same kind of people who do those good deeds for everybody else not wanting to be recognized for them. Most frequently when you look into the commentaries about this, the commentators say His use of salt points to a Christian's preservative role in the world. And the reason they do this is because they see an analogy between men being salt of the earth and the use of salt as a food preservative, especially preserving meat, and that would have been familiar to His listeners. So they think that He would probably have taken the most normal, most understandable tack on this and His disciples then therefore become a preserving influence in the world. Just like salt is used for preserving meat.

So when they explain this, His saying emphasizes the Christian's duty to preserve godly virtue in an evil, anti-God world. And they say this is what He had just alluded to. I want to read these two verses, 11 and 12 of Matthew 5. He says,

Matthew 5:11-12 "Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My name's sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you."

He is saying as a lead up to this, "You're going to face problems in the world. The world is evil, the world doesn't treat Christians very well, just like they didn't treat the prophets very well." And as we know, just like they did not treat Christ very well, they are not going to treat the disciples very well. And so He follows this up then with His admonition to be the salt of the world. You be the preservatives of virtue in a world full of evil and wickedness. And even if they persecute you and even kill you, then you have made a witness against them and you have endured to the end in righteousness.

So it seems reasonable. There is a good logic about it, and it is fine. Many church of God ministers and speakers and writers have referred to this interpretation in their messages. And it just seems overall pretty reasonable to think of it this way.

However (there always seems to be a however), that meaning to salt of the earth may be an oversimplification. The metaphorical field of possibilities is much broader than that because salt is so ubiquitous in the world. So the salt as preservative meaning ignores many other biblical uses of salt and Jesus may have had other uses of salt in mind rather than just as a preservative. And some speakers and writers have referred to these other uses of salt in their messages, but people usually glom on to that preservative meaning. They seem to always use it as the fallback position because it is natural. We all know the preservative effect of salt in food. Just look at the stuff we buy in the grocery stores. They are full of salt to give them life on the shelves. So, usually that is the one that comes first to mind and that is what Jesus meant. It fits their preconceptions, if you will, and it is the easiest to grasp.

Let us be honest, a lot of us do not think all too deeply about some of these things, and so we usually remember the easiest one to figure out. So I just want to say I do not discount the preservative meaning or the preservative interpretation. It can be explained to fit into what Jesus was saying here in the Sermon on the Mount.

But we would be well advised as students of the Bible to contemplate the other options that Scripture may provide. Generally, I think we should be skeptical of easy interpretations, especially when we are talking about Jesus. Because Jesus tells us flat-out in Matthew 13:13 that often He used metaphors, parables, those sorts of things, to hide meaning, not to reveal it. So as an answer to the disciples' question in verse 10, "Why do You speak to them in parables?" He says,

Matthew 13:13-15 "Therefore I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. In them the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled, which says, 'Hearing you will hear and shall not understand, and seeing you will see and not perceive; for the heart of this people has grown dull. Their ears are hard of hearing, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears, lest they should understand with their heart and turn, so that I should heal them.'"

He is saying (actually, I did not read these verses) you have to have a special gift from God to understand what He is talking about in these parables. They are not the surface answer, not the surface meaning that you think. There is more going on as subtext or behind the scenes. And so you cannot just take the easy—oh, this is what it means—interpretation all the time. I am not saying that sometimes the easiest interpretation is not the right one. I am not saying that. But I think we should be a little bit skeptical and see if there are other things that it could mean.

So what do we do when we study and we try to seek answers? Well, the first thing that we should probably do is go to the Greek text and see if the wording of the Greek text tells us something, gives us a clue so that we could figure out maybe in the way Jesus said it, that it provides a hint to the interpretation. Well, let us do that.

Back in Matthew 5:13 we have, "you are the salt of the earth." We do not need to look at "you" or "are" or "the," but we do need to look at the word "salt." Is there something about the word salt that gives us a perspective that maybe we should use on our meaning? Well, no. The word salt gives us no joy that way. It is the normal everyday Greek word for salt, halas. Many of you may remember, if you are football fans, the name George Halas. He was a player and a coach and the eventual owner of the Chicago Bears. And it is weird. His daughter just died. I think it was on Thursday or Wednesday. She was 102. And I was putting this together and I looked up George Halas because I wanted to figure out if he had a Greek name and it just said she had died that day. It was weird.

Anyway, halas in Greek is the normal word for the chemical compound sodium chloride, NACL. So there is nothing there other than what we understand as what salt means for us to get into.

By the way, I do want to mention just at this point because we will not be going into the second half of verse 13 very much, but Jesus talks about salt losing its flavor, or savor as it says in the King James. And people have said, "Well, Jesus didn't know very much, salt can't lose its flavor." And they say He was not very much of a scientist if He did not know that.

But the fact is that ancient salt was not pure. It was not pure NACL, it was not pure sodium chloride, and so it had a lot of impurities in it. And so if the salt got washed out, if the true, pure NACL got washed out, then what you had left was actually not salt and it did not have a salty flavor. It would not do anything for your food. Because they were digging this out of the ground and they did not know how to get the pure stuff out of what they got out of the ground. So they would sell all that they took out of the ground as salt, but there was a lot of other things mixed in there. And so it was just kind of potluck when you went to go buy your salt. You might get really good salt or you might get pretty impure stuff. And of course they graded it that way so that they could sell the impure stuff to the plebeians and all the patricians got the good stuff. So yes, at the time salt could lose its flavor.

Let us think about salt for a few minutes. I bet if we all put on our thinking caps, we could come up with dozens of uses of salt. As a matter of fact, it has literally hundreds of uses. Trillions of tons of it sit in solution in our oceans. Seventy percent of the surface of the earth is covered with water. And salt is one of the most ubiquitous minerals we have on the earth.

We use it, of course, to season food. We use it to preserve food. We spread it on our roads when it ices or snows, because it lowers the freezing temperature. The Romans, as you probably heard, paid its troops in salt. That is where we get our word salary. Sal is actually the Latin word for salt, and we get salary from it. Salary means a payment of salt. Manufacturers use it to make soap, leather, pottery, rubber, detergents, clothes, paper, cleansers, glass, pharmaceuticals, and plastics. They all somewhere use salt in the processes. More than half of the chemical products we make involves salt at some stage.

Like I said, it is ubiquitous and that is exactly the reason why interpreting this image in Matthew 5:13 is so difficult. Because salt is so commonplace and salt has so many uses. Which one was Jesus pointing out to us? So we have to consider them. Because I have not named several that are used in the Bible of the uses.

Let us leave the word salt and go on to the next significant word, which is earth. And here we hit pay dirt. (Get it? Good pun, right? In the word earth we hit pay dirt.) The Greek word is ge with a long e. But it is pronounced yay in Greek. And it means first, the soil, the earth, the ground, the land. And only by expansion from that does it mean the world or the planet, Planet Earth. So it is really in its first definition, meaning the soil. That is basically how Jesus uses it because He talks about salt being thrown out on the ground is useless, in the second half of the verse. It can by synecdoche. You do not know that. It is another Greek term and it is a figure of speech in which a part of a thing stands for the whole. And so we could say that the soil of a country stands for the whole country, or we could say that the country stands for the people. There are a lot of times when you hear America says this or America does that, and it is really talking about the United States of America, but America means its citizens as well. And so they kind of get mingled together and one stands for the other.

We use synecdoche a lot in our speech. You know, we talk about our cars being our wheels. There is more to a car or a truck than wheels, but the part, the wheel, stands for the whole thing. We, let us say you go into a neighborhood and you knock on the door and you ask for Joe Blow, and the person says, "No, he lives three doors down." Well, that is synecdoche. It means the door stands for the whole house, the whole property. We do this all the time. So synecdoche is not real strange, it just has a strange word to name it.

So, yes, ge in Greek starts with the soil and the expanded meaning goes out to a nation, a whole land. It could be a continent, it could be even the whole planet. So this does not help us at all either because it is so very expansive.

Literally, Jesus' use of ge appears to refer to the ground, to the soil, as I mentioned before, and this is kind of a head scratcher because as interpreters remind us, salt in the soil has no beneficial effect. As a matter of fact, if you put salt on the soil in quantity it renders it sterile. Is that what He is talking about? Are we the sterilizers of the earth? That does not seem right.

And so, most commentators reject the literal meaning here, concluding that Jesus is speaking about people, that earth refers to the planet's inhabitants. So being the salt of the earth means the salt among the general population of the earth.

Let us start. We are going to go through several of these different types of interpretations that have been given. I have five that we will look at seriously. And the first is salt as a preservative. We have already gone over this a little bit, but I want to go into it a little bit more.

One of the major things that is against our interpreting salt of the earth in a preservative sense is that the preserving quality of salt is not directly stated in Scripture, which is kind of strange. You think somewhere along the line it would talk about salted meat or something, but it does not. So when commentators suggest that Jesus is talking about the preserving quality of godly people in the world, they are assuming that salt in the text symbolizes preservation.

So we have to ask ourselves, does Jesus want His disciples to preserve this world? Our theology tells us immediately, ultimately, no. Certainly not for the long term. This world, this cosmos, the current order, is evil. Why would God want us to preserve evil and an evil society? Because this is not God's world. Human society exists under Satan's influence, so why would God want His disciples to preserve a world system that hates Him, like Satan does? And if we go further into the Bible, into the prophecies, we find out that He will return to destroy it. That is one of His chief jobs, if you will, one of His chief works that He is coming back to do.

Now, Scripture does provide an example of a way to look at this salt of the earth metaphor in the right way, in an understandable way as a preservative. So, we are going to look at that. Let us go to Genesis 6 and we are going to read the section right before Noah gets his commission from God, and we will see this use of earth in a way that we can understand, about preserving it.

Genesis 6:5-8 Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that He made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart. So the Lord said, "I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast, creeping thing and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them." But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.

Noah at this time was the salt of the earth.

Genesis 6:9-12 This is the genealogy of Noah. Noah was a just man, perfect in his generations. Noah walked with God. [Okay, definitely a salt of the earth person.] Noah begot three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. The earth also was corrupt before God [we are seeing here the same situation we are facing today], . . . and indeed it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted their ways on the earth.

So here earth is used in two different ways. It is used as the population of the earth and it is used as the land mass of the earth.

Genesis 6:13 And God said to Noah, "The end of all flesh has come before Me, for the earth is filled with violence through them; and behold, I will destroy them with the earth."

Jesus' words back in Matthew 5:13 makes sense in a preservation sense if we understand the earth to mean primarily the planet and its inhabitants, only by extension. So He is talking about earth as the planet and in a lesser sense, the inhabitants. Think of this using this parallel between what happened in Noah's day and what is happening in our day. He was the salt of the earth then, we are the salt of the earth now. God will not destroy the earth while His disciples, the salt of the earth like Noah, do His work on it. So in that sense, the fact that salt of the earth people are there, that is, Christ's disciples are on the earth, He will not destroy the earth. They will not be there in a preserving sense. You could think of it as holding back His wrath.

So Christians are preservatives in the sense that in them, in their character, some good still exists in the world preventing it from becoming totally wicked and sinful like the society before the Flood. So, a little bit of of goodness in the world stays God's hand because there are things yet to be done. And God's people are still witnessing of goodness in the earth. So God's people are still living there displaying very varying levels of goodness, doing His work, and influencing others in the world to turn to Him. And so in this way, Christians forestall God's wrath until the appointed time. So they preserve the earth from wrath until God has done His work completely.

And it is interesting that God destroyed the earth by water once He ensured Noah's safety. He removed Noah and his family from the equation before He let loose His wrath on all those wicked people before the Flood. So I am just going to leave that, take it as you will, but God does protect His people. So in this vein, Jesus' warning in the second half of Matthew 13 makes sense.

Let us go back and read that just, just so we understand what He is talking about here.

Matthew 5:13 [He says] "If the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned?"

Think of it this way. There is only one sacrifice for sin. You can only go before Christ once and accept His sacrifice. If you lose that sacrifice, it does not happen again. You cannot go back a second time and try to be covered by His blood. He says this twice in Hebrews, in chapter 6 and chapter 10, that there is no second chance for salvation. If you reject Him you cannot go back and beg for His blood to be put on you. And so He says here in verse 13,

Matthew 5:13 "It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men."

So if you lose that goodness and you reject Christ, you are thrown out back into the world. And you will probably end up being trampled in the wars and the destruction that men bring. It is a very stern warning here. So if we lose our godliness, we become targets for destruction. God's wrath comes back down upon us, our divine protections will be removed, and we will be destroyed. It will be our own fault if we get caught up in the destructive conflicts of men at that point.

Let us move on. That was depressing.

The second one is salt as flavor. We all like salt on our food. We like that saltiness that enhances things to make them taste a whole lot better, and not be so bland. So this is another idea, that Christ's disciples make the world more palatable. We are the spice in the world, if you will, just like salt makes food more flavorful. He does mention salt losing its flavor which makes this interpretation seem more likely because right in the very verse, He talks about salt and flavor.

However, His mention describes the quality of the salt, and it is difficult to match earth with food. You understand what I mean? They are saying salt of the earth and the flavor of food. The analogy does not quite work very well. Yes, we could say food is a product of the ground, but that is kind of reaching a little bit. It is not a real natural analogy to make. This meaning might not be wrong. I am not saying that it is, but we have to kind of shoehorn it in a little bit. It is not a natural fit. But it is possible. If we consider it as flavoring, it illustrates how Christians are to serve humanity. We are to enhance life on the earth by living God's way of life. One expositor writes that Christians do this by "adding flavor to things that would be bland, drawing out the blessings of whatever is good, and providing a contrast by being distinct and different."

We see a bit of this in Colossians 4. So let us go back there, where Paul actually uses salt in this way, which gives it actually an edge on the preservation one. Preservation by salt is not used in the Bible, but at least flavor of salt is.

Colossians 4:5-6 Walk in wisdom toward those who are outside, redeeming the time. Let your speech always be with grace, seasoned with salt, that you may know how you ought to answer each one.

As I said, the Bible includes this interpretation of salt as adding flavor and seasoning to a wicked world. Our conduct here, specifically our speech, makes a witness for God by the way we live and speak in a godly, gracious way. Is this what Christ meant when He said that? "Be the salt of the earth, be the flavor of the earth, be the seasoning of the earth, be the spice of the earth." Ah, perhaps. But I do not want to say this is the one. Because salt has other possible metaphorical interpretations. We have only just started.

Number three. This one may be a little bit surprising to you, but salt can be interpreted as sacrifice or even as an allusion to the covenant. I am going to take these both together because in the scripture we are going to it puts them together. This is one of the less familiar ideas of the meaning of salt of the earth and it brings in the Old Testament sacrifices. So let us go back to Leviticus 2 and we will read verses 11 through 13. This is in the grain offering section. We will read verse 1.

Leviticus 2:1 'When anyone offers a grain offering to the Lord, his offering shall be of fine flour. And he shall pour oil on it, and put frankincense on it.'

Leviticus 2:11-13 'No grain offering which you bring to the Lord shall be made with leaven [so no leaven], for you shall burn no leaven nor any honey in any offering to the Lord made by fire. As for the offering of the firstfruits, you shall offer them to the Lord, but they shall not be burned on the altar for a sweet aroma. [verse 13 is where we are headed] And every offering of your grain offering, you shall season with salt; you shall not allow the salt of the covenant of your God to be lacking from your grain offering. With all your offerings, you shall offer salt.'

So salt was an indispensable part of the offerings. As it says, every offering had to have an offering of salt with it. Here it is also linked with their covenant with God, the Old Covenant. It is called a covenant of salt. Matter of fact, this term is used at least three times in Scripture. Here in Leviticus 2:13 with the whole nation; in Numbers 18:19, a covenant of salt is made with the priests, Aaron's sons; and in II Chronicles 13:5, a covenant of salt is made with David the king, that he would have one of his sons on the throne forever.

Now, as blatant as the description here is, as much as salt is front and center in this, it is hard to pin down what salt symbolizes in the offerings. But one of the good guesses that I found of what salt represents here is inviolability. That it cannot be violated, if you will. In this way, it represents that the covenant is—famous word in the Declaration of Independence—inalienable, which means it cannot be taken away, and unalterable, which means it is not changeable. And so, in that way, if you think of a sacrifice with salt showing its inviolability, it means that it cannot be taken away, it cannot be changed, and because it is made with God, it is sacred and holy.

Putting all those words aside and kind of getting it down to its brass tacks, in this way salt indicates purity and permanence. And this is the same indication of all the covenants of salt. They were all said to be forever. They were all made with God, and thus holy. So what we could say is a covenant of salt, let us say, is a holy, everlasting covenant. And if you want to get another reference for salt signifying purity, Jericho's water was purified with salt when Elisha threw salt in the spring there at Jericho. That is at II Kings 2:21.

So, how do we translate this interpretation to what Jesus says in Matthew 5:13? That it is holy, pure, and permanent.

This is where we have to bring the sacrifice back in. Let us go to Romans 12, verses 1 and 2. When God inspired Paul to write Romans 12, it was a masterpiece. So much comes through in these first two verses. Let us think of this. Salt was used in every sacrifice, and salt seems to be symbolizing purity and permanence. Now what are we told to do? What are we told to be?

Romans 12:1-2 I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.

Now this is very interesting. Paul teaches here, that as God's elect, as Christ's disciples, our reasonable service to God for what He has done for us is to present ourselves as living sacrifices. Holy, that is, pure, and acceptable to God, and of course it is forever. He has given us eternal life. Thus, as salt, Christians in this world are to be sacrificial actors for God.

Just think: when He said this to the people that were listening to Him, not just His disciples but anybody who was around to hear, they all knew about the Temple. They all knew about the sacrifices. They all knew that every sacrifice had to have salt in it, and if this was the way Jesus talked about it, or if that is what His meaning was, they would have had a better chance of understanding it because they were in a civilization or in a culture where this was happening all the time. I mean, evening and morning sacrifices. It happened twice a day, at least. So it would be more likely to spring to their mind than it would be for us because we do not have that experience in the world every day. So, Christians in this world are to be sacrificial actors for God.

Now, because Christians have the Holy Spirit, and they have signed on to the New Covenant, they are the only ones that can do this necessary work of making spiritual sacrifices or spiritual offerings to God through sacrifice. What is more, Romans 12:2 somewhat parallels what Jesus says in Matthew 5:13 in the last half. Remember, He talks about that when salt loses its flavor, it is not worth anything but to be thrown out on the ground. So, losing one's flavor and conforming to the world are similar ideas. And Paul warns us here, do not be conformed to this world. That is a regressive act. That is going back to the world. That is backsliding.

So both Jesus and Paul warn us against regressing to our former state of worldliness, going back to the world. But whereas Jesus informs us of the result of losing our flavor, that is, going back to the world, Paul provides a solution. Let us read it again. Here is his instruction about how to make sure you will not conform to the world.

Romans 12:2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.

He says the best defense against backsliding is transforming into the image of Christ. The best way we could keep from going back into the world is moving forward so that we act more and more like Christ every day, and we witness of Christ's way in this world. We do this, he says in a little bit more detail, he makes it a little bit more granular, by reforming the way we think. That is, the renewing of our mind. We do it by changing our thinking. We reform it from being selfish, self-centered, always out to get for me to being outgoing, always trying to help others. That is where the sacrifice comes in. We sacrifice ourselves and our own wants and even needs to make sure others have what they should have. Whether it is food or whether it is housing or whether it is a vehicle or whether it is some spiritual thing that they need; and we will sacrifice ourselves so that they can learn a lesson, or however it is done.

And he also adds here, not just reforming the mind, but figuring out through the experiences of life, through study of God's Word, what God's perfect will is. Most of that we will get from the Bible, we will get from sermons and articles, we will get from fellowship with one another and talking these things through with another person who has God's Holy Spirit. But we also learn things through the experiences of our lives. We often think, "Oh, this is what God wants me to do." And we do it, and God is constantly putting roadblocks in our way, that is not His will. He does not want that. He does not want you to do that. And so He swings you back somehow, through usually trial or any kind of destructive thing or whatever that is going to get us back on the right track, something that hurts us a little bit because learning and growing and experiencing things is usually a tough process. Or as Dr. Meredith used to say, He spanks us and gets us back on the right track.

But that is how it works. We are in a process with God, learning these things, combining what He has revealed through His Word with the experiences of our lives and Him shoving us in the right direction all the time so that we will go His way. And that is why he says we have to prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. Because a lot of times, God's will is not readily apparent. We face a lot of situations where we know generally what we need to do, but when it comes to specifics, we cannot figure it out. And so we try one thing and that does not work, and then we have to try another thing to see if that works, and God gets us back to the straight and narrow through various lengthy or short, it does not matter, trials is what they turn out to be, until we figure out the right way to go.

Now, another interesting thing about the mention of salt in the offerings is that it appears in the grain offering, the meal offering. And if you remember my dad's sermons on the offerings of Leviticus, you will remember that the grain offering deals with devotion or service to other men. And it is in line with the second great commandment, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself," as He says there in Matthew 22:39. So if we take this idea of sacrifice being the meaning of salt here, in this way Jesus is calling Christians the salt of the earth because He is referring to sacrificial goodness and godly love expressed toward others.

This would fit very well with this next thing about being the light of the world. He would be saying basically the same thing in two different images. One is actually the sacrificial hard work of being godly in this world of sacrificing, of showing love to other men. And then the light of the world would be the witness that it makes other people seeing it and being impressed by it, hopefully, and turning toward God.

Let us leave the idea of sacrifice as the interpretation and go to the next one. This one is maybe a little shocking, that salt is a metaphor for destruction. Or even worse, salt is a metaphor for a curse, and that Jesus would say, you are a curse of the earth. Wow. We kind of shrink from this interpretation because it seems so negative. "I'm not a curse. I'm a good person." Well, that is not what it means.

Why is destruction a possible interpretation of salt of the earth? It must be considered because the Bible contains more references to salt being used in judgment or destruction than any other usage. The main usage of salt in the Old Testament is as an act of war and of judgment. Most of the places where this is seen have to do with sowing the land with salt, making it infertile and therefore worthless. Sowing the land with salt is actually a terrible curse. It is frequently mentioned in the Bible as a tactic of total war or deep hatred for the enemy. Remember Lot's wife? That is exactly what Jesus said, "Remember Lot's wife." She was turned into a pillar of salt as punishment for disobedience (Genesis 19:26).

I want to read a fairly long section of Deuteronomy 29 here where this interpretation, if you will, comes up with the mention of salt as punishment appears. We are going to read verses 14 through 28.

Deuteronomy 29:14-28 "I make this covenant and this oath, not with you alone, but also with him who stands here with us today before the Lord our God, as well as with him who is not here with us today (for you know that we dwelt in the land of Egypt and that we came through the nations which you passed by, and you saw their abominations and their idols which were among them—wood and stone and silver and gold); so that there may not be among you man or woman or family or tribe, whose heart turns away today from the Lord our God, to go and serve the gods of these nations, and that there may not be among you a root bearing bitterness of worm or wormwood; and so it may not happen, when he hears the words of this curse, that he blesses himself in his heart, saying, 'I shall have peace, even though I walk in the imagination of my heart'—as though the drunkard could be included with the sober.

"The Lord would not spare him; for then the anger of the Lord and His jealousy would burn against that man, and every curse that is written in this book would settle on him, and the Lord would blot out his name from under heaven. [This is a pretty heavy curse here.] And the Lord would separate him from all the tribes of Israel for adversity, according to all the curses of the covenant that are written in this Book of the Law, so that the coming generation of your children who rise up after you, and the foreigner who comes from a far land, would say, when they see the plagues of that land and the sicknesses which the Lord has laid on it: 'The whole land is brimstone, salt, and burning; it is not sown, nor does it bear, nor does any grass grow there, like the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboiim, which the Lord overthrew in His anger and His wrath.'

"All nations would say, 'Why has the Lord done so to this land? What does the heat of this great anger mean?' Then men would say, 'Because they have forsaken the covenant of the Lord God of their fathers, which He made with them when He brought them out of the land of Egypt; for they went and served other gods and worshiped them, gods that they did not know and that He had not given to them. Then the anger of the Lord was aroused against this land, to bring on it every curse that is written in this book. And the Lord uprooted them from their land in anger, in wrath, and in great indignation, and cast them into another land, as it is this day.'"

And we know that He actually did that. It ended up exactly like that for both Israel and Judah.

So Moses' warning of God's wrath that He will bring upon those specifically for idolatry and for breaking of the covenant. He will bring His wrath upon them just like He rained His wrath and destruction on Sodom and Gomorrah. There is another place. Let us go to Psalm 107, verse 34. I am pretty upset at the New King James version for this verse, just to let you know right here, right now.

Psalm 107:33-34 He [that is, God] turns rivers into a wilderness, and the water springs to dry ground [He is talking about desertification of the land.]; a fruitful land into barrenness, for the wickedness of those who dwell in it.

Here we have a very close parallel with what He said in Deuteronomy 29, that He strikes the land with barrenness, if you will, for the people's wickedness. Now, let us go back and read what it actually says in Hebrew, literally. "He turns a fruitful land into a salty waste, for the wickedness of those who dwell in it." Why did they go to barrenness? Salty waste is a much more active image, I think, than just plain old barrenness.

So, how would this apply to Christ's disciples that they are the curse of the earth? They are the destruction of the world? The apostle Paul actually uses this, believe it or not, in Philippians 1. Let us go to Philippians 1, verses 27 and 28. He says here,

Philippians 1:27-28 Only let your conduct be worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that whether I come and see you or am absent, I may hear of your affairs, that you stand fast in one spirit, with one mind striving together for the faith of the gospel, and not in any way terrified by your adversaries [here it comes], which is to them a proof of perdition [a proof of destruction], but to you of salvation, and that from God.

So what does he say here? He says, to Christ's enemies Christians' righteous, godly conduct is proof of their, meaning non-Christians, coming destruction. That it is a witness against them that they will die. Remember, God says that He judges according to our works. Our righteous behavior, our works prove that God has called us to salvation, is that not what he said? He says that your good works are proof to you of salvation and that from God. So he is saying when you do good works, when you do what God wants you to do, that shows you and everybody else that you are one of the saved, you are one of the elect. You are doing right. You are acting godly. That is what godly people do.

But, when non-believers see that, they do not see you acting as Christ's agents in the world doing what you are supposed to do as sons and daughters of God. What they see is they are sentenced to death because they are not living up to the standard of God. They are sinning, they are wicked, they are evil. And what does God say when your acts are wicked and evil and sinful? That you are subject to the wrath of God.

So in this way, true Christians become a glaring witness against evildoers, testifying of their doom, proclaiming judgment without saying a word, and forecasting God's wrath. That is the image that Paul brings up here in in Philippians 1:28.

Actually, this interpretation as a curse, as much as we do not want to think about it in that way, fits nicely into the flow of the Sermon on the Mount as Jesus had just been speaking about His enemies reviling and persecuting His disciples. Persecution is what happens when the wicked react against a witness against them, a witness of good that they know they cannot do, that makes them feel guilty. And so they act in violence against those who do righteousness. And if the persecuted person faithfully endures their suffering, he, the persecuted person representing a living testimony of the destruction of the ungodly, will act as salt on the earth. Kind of interesting.

Now, this last meaning, the fifth one, is worth considering. But like the preservation interpretation, it has no scriptural backing. And this is as fertilizer; that we are the fertilizer of the earth. Now contrary to what all the commentators and scholars say, salt can be beneficial to the soil. Some of you look a little shocked, but it is true. It is beneficial when it is used in small quantities. Makes me think of Jesus' little flock in Luke 12:32. In small quantities, if the salt of the earth, God's people, are fertilizers, then we do add helpful things to the earth, the earth in terms of people.

Did you know that salt used in small quantities can help the earth retain water? That is, when you sow something and maybe you are in a fairly dry area, you could add a little bit of salt to the soil and it will hold liquid moisture in the soil for a little bit longer than normal. It can make fields actually easier to plow. Helps break up the soil a little little bit. It will act as a catalyst for releasing minerals for plants. It can be used to kill weeds. It can protect crops from disease. It can stimulate growth in certain plants. And it can also increase yields. It has to be used in small quantities at the right time, but it can be beneficial to soil. And in an agrarian society like Judea, some of these things were probably common knowledge. Many civilizations have recommended adding just a little bit of salt to the soil to enhance its growth.

In other words, God's people, scattered among all the peoples of the earth, are blessings that enhance life among their families and friends and neighbors. And if they practice God's ways, they bring things like sacrificial love, peace, joy, kindness, gentleness, and self-control because they have the Holy Spirit and these are the fruits they are producing. And the blessings of producing those fruits of the Spirit spread out and enhance the life of others and all of that is pleasing to God.

That is enough for fertilizing. (Believe it or not, at this early time, I am reaching my conclusion.) Let us go to Mark 9, verses 49-50. Now some of you may be thinking, why did he not go here first? Well, that is the way I put my sermon together. This is actually Mark's version of what Matthew said in Matthew 5:13.

Mark 9:49-50 "For everyone will be seasoned with fire, and every sacrifice will be seasoned with salt. Salt is good, but if the salt loses its flavor, how will you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and have peace with one another."

Wow! Different but the same. Mark's version of Matthew 5:13 is a revelation. The Greek literally says, "Everyone will be salted by fire." Here again, the New King James needs a bonk on the nose, for their changing what the words said. It is not in my margin, but it is pretty evident that 'seasoned' should be 'salted.' And the commentators are very clear about this, that is the word and if you go and look at the Greek text, you will see it is the verb form of halas.

Well, what does "everyone will be salted with fire" mean? It likely refers to purification through fire, that is, through testing, trials, tribulation. We talk about this a lot in terms of fiery trials and the fiery trials are designed to purify us spiritually. Does it not say the sons of Levi will be purified by fire in Malachi? That is the idea here. So salting a believer with fire would imply the sanctification process. That God salts us with fire to bring us into a pure state so that we will be like His Son Jesus Christ. He does this through fiery trials.

Then Jesus ties the seasoning with salt to the sacrifices. Read that, "Every sacrifice will be seasoned with salt." That is what we read back in Leviticus 2:13. That every sacrifice, He almost quotes it word for word, will be seasoned with salt. And of course, the context of those sacrifices deals with devotion to God, devotion to other men, peaceful relations with God, the payment for sin, and those sorts of things. Each one of the sacrifices or the offerings there in Leviticus 1 through 6 or whatever, they all have a different spiritual meaning. And in this case, He is bringing all of those meanings in to one illustration of being seasoned with salt or being salt of the earth. He is tying in this idea of fiery trials, sacrifice, and in verse 50, He talks about having this salt in ourselves.

So, let us go back to the idea of the sacrifices again. Remember, I said they deal with devotion to God, that is the burnt offering. The meal offering has to do with devotion to man. The peace offering has to do with peaceful relations with God and with Christ, and we are at peace, we are in fellowship with one another. And then we have the sin offerings and the trespass offerings and things which have to do with payment or covering for sin, atonement.

These represent Christ's work most of all. He is the one, He is the agent that made all of these things possible. He is the one that makes us able to have devotion to God. He is the one that makes things possible for us to have devotion to other people, to be able to serve them. He is the one that brings peace in our relationships both with God and man. He is the one that paid the price for our sins, etc. etc. etc. His work is overwhelming in those sacrifices.

But they also reflect various aspects of our transformation into God's image. We have to grow in our devotion to God. We have to grow in our devotion to other men and our service to them. We have to grow in our fellowship with both God and men. We have to overcome sin, trusting and relying on the redemption that we have through Jesus Christ.

So they fit Christ and they also fit His brethren, or we could use the other metaphor of His wife. We are bound together, if you will, in this work, works that are shown in the sacrifices there in Leviticus. And that brings out what Paul said in Romans 12:1-2, that we are to be living sacrifices. Just as Christ was a sacrifice, we have to imitate that in our own lives by being living sacrifices.

This is kind of amazing to juxtapose Mark 9:49-50 with Matthew 5:13. Jesus did not talk about preservation. He does not talk about flavor. He does not talk about several of the other ones. He does not necessarily talk about the curse. But what does He talk about? He talks about sacrifice.

So, what have I concluded about the salt of the earth phrase? I think we cannot say this interpretation or that interpretation is definitely the right one. I think there are just too many things to consider as what might be included in it. As a matter of fact, I think Jesus is purposely vague, especially in Matthew 5:13 because He wants His disciples to think the image through. What is Jesus Christ trying to tell me here?

I think a safe conclusion is that the metaphor of "salt of the earth" encompasses all the duties of Christian discipleship, all the various aspects of godly living in this world under the New Covenant. That we are placed on the earth to do Christ's things, God-like things. We are here to be His witnesses in whatever way possible.

So let us just say, God's elect are the spice of godliness in an evil world, with all the responsibilities of representing Jesus Christ in every word and deed. As Jesus says, if we have this salt in us, as He says in Mark 9:50, if we have this in ourselves, this godliness, this character of our Savior, we will have peace with one another.

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