Everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can you make it salty again? Have salt among yourselves and be at peace with each other.
Mark 9: 49-50
I will admit that these verses used to confuse me a bit when I first came to God. I was confused because I associated salt with bad manners. I would hear things like, “she is so salty about this,” and then I would read these verses and be like, “wait, what?” But I have realized that there is a distinction between the salt that the Bible talks about and that cliché of being salty and bitter. Now, two things come to mind when I read about the saltiness in the Bible: seasoned salt and packaged foods.
Have you ever made some homemade spaghetti sauce for your spaghetti dinner? My family prefers to make it instead of using a store-bought brand. We do so because there always seems to be some type of flavor missing in the store-bought kind. Anyway, after I mix all the ingredients, I always taste a spoonful of my sauce to make sure it tastes just right. The one thing I tend to think it always needs is a little more seasoned salt. Seasoned salt always changes the flavor of my spaghetti sauce just right. And, well, the salt the Bible talks about will change the world around you, like the seasoned salt changes my spaghetti.
“Everyone will be salted with fire.” What is fire normally correlated with? The Holy Spirit, right? I mean, the Holy Spirit came down in tongues of fire in Acts 2. So, essentially, we are flavoring the world with the Holy Spirit in us. The world has salt flavoring because of the Holy Spirit in us. We can make that needed difference in this world by listening to the Holy Spirit, shining God’s light through our lives, and sharing His love and message. Salt is good! No matter how small the gesture, act, or word; with the salt of the Holy Spirit, we can make a difference.
Now, have you ever looked at a packaged food’s sodium intake? Sometimes it will be a very high amount, and when it is, it normally has a long life expectancy to go with it. This is because salt is a preservative. It keeps the item from decaying. Not only is our salt a flavor to the world, but it also helps keep it from complete decay. It even helps you from “decay.”
How have you come to Christ? For a lot of people, it was by another human being. And because of it, Christ saved us from our sexual immorality, lust, drunkenness, drug dependency, porn addiction, jealousy, pride, anger, etc. Christ has and continues to save us from the sins of this world. We were salted of the Holy Spirit because someone else salted with the Holy Spirit flavored our lives. We are preserved and not decaying. So, when we go out there flavoring the world, who is to say how many people you have helped in preserving?
We cannot ever lose the desire to salt the world. We cannot ever lose the desire to shine God’s light. We cannot ever lose the desire to spread the love and message of God. Because if we do, we become ineffective for Him. The world will not be flavored by our seasoned salt, and it will not have a long life expectancy. It would decay and, figuratively, crumbly into shambles. Because, once you take away the preservative, it starts decaying and you can’t add it again. And if salt was never added for flavor, it would be bland and disgusting. So,
Have salt among yourselves and be at peace with each other.
Featured Image by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash
Scriptural Musings with Booferchick 