SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 6/24/2020 11:08 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-1 “Being Salt”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew 5:13
Message of the
verse: “13
"You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has become tasteless, how
can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to
be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men.”
Today we begin to talk about salt
and in the ancient world it was more valuable than it is in today’s world. In the Greek history the word they called
salt theon and this word means
divine. In the Roman world soldiers were
sometimes paid with salt thus the saying “not worth his salt” came about.
The story goes that in the ancient society’s
salt was used as a mark of friendship.
Sharing salt meant you were friends with someone. Even if your enemy and
you shared salt you were obliged to treat him as a friend.
In the Near East salt was used to
bind a covenant, similar in the way an agreement or contract is notarized in
our society today. It went like
this: When the parties of the covenant
ate salt together then the covenant was given special authentication. In 2 Chronicles 13:5 we read that God made a
covenant of salt with Davie, but there are no particulars given in that
account. “"Do you not know that the
LORD God of Israel gave the rule over Israel forever to David and his sons by a
covenant of salt?’” John Gill writes the
following on the last part of this verse:
“even to him and to his sons by
a covenant of salt? that is, a perpetual one, which was inviolable, and
never to be made void; called so, because salt preserves from corruption and
putrefaction, and because made use of in sacrifices offered when covenants were
made.” I have been going through the OT
in my Bible reading or I should say I am listening to the OT on a DVD, and one
of the things that I have seen is that God prescribed that all sacrificial
offerings in Israel were to be offered with salt “so that the salt of the
covenant of your God shall be lacking” (Lev. 2:13).
MacArthur writes “In numerous ways
Jesus’ hearers—whether Greek, Roman, or Jewish—would have understood ‘salt of
the earth’ to represent a valuable commodity.
Though most could not have understood His full meaning, they knew He was
saying that His followers were to have an extremely important function in the
world. Whatever else it may have represented,
salt always stood for that which was of high value and importance.”
There are some who think that
because salt is, for the most part, white that Jesus may have intended to
associate this with purity, as seen in verse eight “having a pure heart.” Believers are to influence the world because
of their purity helping to get rid of the corruptness in the world. This idea is probably not what Jesus was
talking about because saltiness, not the color of salt is the issue.
Then there are some who talk about
the flavor of salt to add divine flavor to the world. Many foods need salt to give them a flavor in
the same way the world is drab and tasteless without the presence of
Christians. MacArthur adds: “Someone has even said, ‘We Christians have
no business being boring. Our function
is to add flavor and excitement to the world.’
Christians are a means of God’s blessing mankind, including unbelievers,
just as He sends His sun and rain on the righteous and unrighteous alike.”
There are some senses in which that
principle is true as we see in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians that an
unbelieving spouse is sanctified by a believing spouse (1 Cor. 7:14). Then there was the story of Sodom that if ten
righteous people were found that it would have been saved.
There is a problem with this view as
seen in the early life of the church as Christianity was considered to be
anything but attractive and flavorful. “It
has, in fact, often found the most spiritual Christians to be the most unpalatable. In the world’s eyes, Christians, almost above
all others, take the flavor out of
life. Christianity is stifling,
restrictive, and a rain on the world’s parade.”
Christianity became a recognized “religion”
in the Roman Empire later on after the church was established and MacArthur
quotes Emperor Julian who lamented, “Have you looked at these Christians
closely? Hollow-eyed, pale-cheeked,
flat-breasted, they brood their lives away unspurred by ambition. The sun shines for them, but they don’t see
it. The earth offers them its fulness,
but they desire it not. All their desire
is to renounce and suffer that they man come to die.”
Spiritual
meaning for my life today: As I
continue looking at this subject it is my desire to learn how to be salt in a
very tasteless world, to have influence on the unsaved world.
My Steps of Faith for Today: I desire to
live my life in a way that I can do the will of my Lord, to do the things that
He has planned for me to do in eternity past.
6/24/2020 11:46
AM
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