How to Live in a Decaying World (Part 1 Salt)

Matthew 5: 13

Introduction

Spiritually speaking. We live in a very dark and decaying world. Rather than dig up all the details of the atrocities we see every day committed around the world, let me just simply say that this is nothing new. The Bible tells us that when people do not know God and they don’t know his truth then;

“Every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart is on evil all the time”.

(Genesis 6: 5b)

On top of all of that is seems like one way this is manifested is in the way that Christians are often the objects of hostility. That really should not surprise us because we found out in the last episode that Jesus taught that the world hated him, and if they hated him, they were going to hate his followers as well. Be all that as it may, the question is how do you make it through in this spiritually dark, decaying, and depraved world? How should we live and what should we do? Should we all head off to a convent or monastery, or form some sort of commune in a forest somewhere so that we’re safe, and away from the conflicts of the world? What should we do? Well, Jesus talked about this darkness and in his Sermon on the Mount, he talked about the fact that Christians were going to be persecuted and hot on the heels of that statement, he issues a response. In light of that darkness, he tells us what to do and He uses two metaphors to communicate to us what that is. What’s coming up over the next couple of days are two very well-known passages, and particularly relevant to how we should live in our day. 

In the main living room in our house, we have what is called a dimmer switch, so you can turn the light up really bright or you can slowly turn it down and it gets darker and darker. It seems to me in my lifetime, as far as the light of the world is concerned, the world is getting darker and darker, and the background light is getting dimmer and dimmer and dimmer. The fact that this has coincided with the Christians, particularly in the west having less and less influence upon the societies in which we live cannot be ignored. So, how do you live in a dark world like that? The answer is found here in Matthew Chapter 5. I’m going to begin reading at chapter 5, verse 13.  Keep in mind, he said in the previous verses that the world is going to revile you and persecute you and say all kinds of evil against you falsely and they’re going to do it for my namesake. 

Now, in light of that, he says this verse 13.

 “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. 

(Matthew 5: 13)

This is the first of  two metaphors that Jesus will uses to communicate to us how to live in this dark world and it is that of salt, later he will talk about us being “light”. So, these are the two things I want us to talk about over the next couple of days. Jesus initially says you are the salt of the earth, the basic idea with both these different figures of speech he will use will be to tell us how to live in a dark and decaying world.. So let’, first of all talk about salt. In the ancient world, salt was very valuable. As a matter of fact, one Roman author said the two most valuable things in ,life are the sun in the sky and the salt of the earth. Salt was very valuable in Jesus’ day. It was so valuable that they sometimes they paid soldiers with it. Have you’ve heard the expression, that someone in not worth their salt. That comes out of this practice of paying the soldiers in salt, and if they didn’t do their duty, they weren’t worth their salt. They weren’t worth what they were being paid. Jesus uses this figure of speech, one that was very common in the ancient world about are being important and very valuable  and having a purpose. So, what does He mean? What does salt do? 

Well, there a number of things that salt does and I think all of these uses  are involved in what Jesus has in mind here. 

For example, one of the things salt does is it preserves food from corruption. This was a very common use of salt in Jesus’ time. Fishermen who caught fish had to get them to shore and transport them to market, but they didn’t have refrigeration. So, they use salt to preserve the fish before they got to market. Farmers did the same thing with meat. They had to preserve it and they didn’t have a refrigerated truck, so they packed it with salt and that salt preserved the fish or the meat until they could get it to market. So the backdrop of this aspect of salt is that there is potential decay, there is corruption and salt preserves against that process, and now, here Jesus applies that metaphor to us as followers of Him. This implies there is corruption is on the earth and concept is a key tenant of scripture, one that has been played out since the fall of man in the garden of Eden. According to the bible, corruption and decay has been working through humankind ever since. Perhaps one of the best passages of Scripture that describes the ultimate the ultimate corruption that's in the world is in Romans chapter one. In that passage, Paul talks about the fact that God has revealed himself in Creation, but people have turned their backs on God. Paul then declares that no one is without excuse, everyone has had their opportunity because even before Christ had come, they could have simply looked at creation and seen there was a creator above all things. They could have sought Him and known him, but the chose not to. 

That Romans passage describes in more detail than any other the corruption that’s in the world, it summarized in the statement, “Therefore God handed them over to the sinful desires of their hearts”. And then he goes on to describe the idolatry and the immorality, that rises out of that way of thinking and also states that that will only be the beginning of the process. It’s interesting that Paul wrote Romans when he was in Corinth. Corinth was a seaport that was filled with decay, moral corruption, and debauchery. It was the “Sin City” of the ancient world and it was there that Paul was inspired by God to write, “God handed them over to their own uncleanness”. The world is in a state of moral and spiritual corruption and decay, and in this context, Jesus says, “you are the salt of the earth” we are the ones that will preserve the earth from it collapsing further into sin and depravity.

The biblical illustration that comes to mind is what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah, the twin “sin cities” of the Old Testament.  God said he was going to destroy Sodom and Abraham was concerned about that because he had a nephew there named Lot. So, he goes to the Lord. He says look, if I could find 50 righteous people, would you then not destroy the city and God says OK. Then Abraham then realising that 50 righteous people was a bit of a push negotiates all the way down to just 10. If I could find just ten people, can the city be spared and God said yes, and yet Abraham couldn’t find 10, as a result of which the cities where destroyed. But the point is, had there been 10 righteous people in Sodom, Sodom could have been spared. Maybe today, God is sparing our respective countries for falling into catastrophic decay and corruption, maybe God is sparing us because of the presence of a few faithful Christians around the place. I don’t doubt from a spiritual point of view that that is exactly right. 

But let me illustrate the principle on a more personal level. Do we preserve our environment from moral corruption, are we salt? And the answer is yes. Yeah. I know of many occasions when an office or a site culture at work can be radically changed by the appointment of a Christian manager or site foreman. On a larger scale  in the 18th century there was utter moral collapse in France following the French revolution. Yet across the English Channel just 20 miles away what happened in France did not happen in England.  Historian William Doyle in his Oxford History of the French Revolution: suggests that the reason the moral and spiritual collapse that happened in France didn’t happen in England  was because of the Wesley revivals. That spared England from going down that road of chaos and murder seen in France at that time. We all know that there are people in whose presence it is easy to be good and there are those people in whose company it is easy to be bad. So best try and be the salt in the societies you live and work in today.

There’s a second characteristic of salt, it not only preserves things from decay and corruption, but there’s a second characteristic, salt seasons food. Now I don’t need to tell you that food without salt can be bland and boring, Salt gives food flavour, at least until the doctor tells you your blood pressure has gone up and to cut it out. But the point is salt seasons, food and I would like to submit to you that the Christians who are walking as God intended add flavour to life and society, or at least they should. We’ve just gone through the Beatitudes in this introduction to the Sermon on the Mount, and in the opening verses of Matthew Chapter 5 Jesus has described for us the characteristics and attitudes that Christian believers should develop. The attitudes we should develop include being humble, tender hearted, gentle, merciful and seeker of righteous, not to mention being peacemakers. Disciples of Jesus Christ, make life more palatable for everyone. If we had things like humility and tender, heartedness and gentleness and mercy in our attitudes and seek to spread peace we will make life more palatable for everyone. American legal scholar, Oliver Wendell Holmes once said. And I quote, I might have entered the ministry if certain clergymen I knew had not looked and acted so much like undertakers. Too often life in the church today still has a sense of the undertakers about it. However, if we acted with the correct attitude there would be joy in people’s lives because of the impact and flavour we can add into one another’s lives. If your saltiness is allowed to flavour the places where God has placed you they we should bring joy and flavour to life instead of making it boring and bland.

There’s a third characteristic of salt. It not only preserves food from corruption, and it seasons food, but salt creates thirst. This would have really had spoken to the ancient world because they understood what being thirsty was like. For many of the travelling meant having to cross deserts to get from one town or city to another. They understood that salt created a thirst. In Colossians chapter 4, Paul said, and I quote, let your speech be seasoned with salt, that you may know how to answer people. The idea is that if you answer peoples’ questions properly, you will create a thirst in those people. 

I was once talking to a young lady who was going through some real difficulty. She hated living with her parents, she didn’t have a job she enjoyed and was living at home again because her husband had left her. Trying to be helpful to her, I said. What do you really want in life? To my surprise, she said. Oh, I know exactly what I want. I want to be like, and she named this lady in the church we both knew. That Lady was an outstanding Christian, but you know, I don’t think that Lady knew the impact she was having on that other young lady. What she had done just by living the way she did was create a thirst in her for something better. A thirst that says I don’t like my life and I want it to be like different, and in this case, it was evidence in the life of this other woman. She’s got what I would like to have. 

That’s the kind of thing I think this passage is talking about. So that we be  like salt and create thirst in people so that they want to be like Christ. So, if we are to be the salt of the earth, like mentioned here. Our presence should prevent corruption, and colour and flavour to the lives of those around us and we should create to create a thirst  fo the Lord in the people we come into contact with.

But let me make one more point. To do that, we have to be in contact with people. Salt doesn’t do anything if it stays in the salt cellar. 

The fact that the world is dark and it’s decaying doesn’t mean we withdraw from it. It means we should be in contact with it so we can have an influence upon it. We don’t head for the hills and we don’t need to hide in a cave somewhere, we should go sprinkle ourselves throughout the decaying world so that we can help resist the corruption and decay that is spreading everywhere .But Jesus makes another interesting observation. Looking again at verse 13, he says, “you are the salt of the earth, but if the salt loses its flavour, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men”. 

In order to understand this, you have to understand something about what went on in the ancient world. At that time there were two kinds of salt. There was one that was pure and used in the various way we have just looked at, and there was also a type of salt that was impure.

Evaporating seawater made saltwater, pure salt, and most of that type of salt came from the Dead Sea, but the Dead Sea was filled with other white minerals that resembled salt. Farmers would use that impure type of salt to fertilize their fields, and when it rained, the sodium chloride would be washed away, leaving a useless white sandy. Substance. It was this salt that lost its flavour and it was thrown down on the ground and used to line paths that was and people walked on.  It was useless salt, impure salt if added to a field would kill the crop so it was only used for path making. Jesus is saying look, you need to be salty, but it’s possible that you could lose your flavour and if you do that then you become useless and worthless as far as God is concerned. 

Look again at this verse 13, right in the middle of it, it says it is then good for nothing.  So, you are the salt of the earth, but you could lose your flavour and then you end up being good for nothing. if you’re salt and you’re standing up to darkness and decay, but you want people to like you then you’re not going to be salt like God intends. But let me suggest that one of the ways that you can lose your saltiness is through fear. If you live in fear of rejection, you don’t want to be laughed at or made fun of, or put down, then what’s going to happen is you’re going to be conformed to the world instead of transformed by the word. That’s what Paul warned against in Romans be not conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. So let me suggest, that you are salt not sugar. The idea is not just to be so sweet that everybody will like you but to sometimes challenge people respectfully, lovingly so that they think about their position before God. Be salty, but that is not to suggest that you should be sour. It is to suggest that your motive is ultimately to be the type of salt that creates thirst and prevent corruption and adds some flavour to people’s lives. Not just trying to get people to like you. So, we are the salt of the earth, not the sugar of the land. Got it. In the Greek text of this verse, the “you” is emphatic. It’s as if Jesus said you, and pointed his finger at you. You are the salt of the earth. 

There was a crowd on the hillside that day but he was mainly speaking to the disciples who were fishermen, very ordinary people, just people like you and I.  So, you are the salt of the earth. He didn’t say this to kings or emperors, he didn’t say this to the type of people we think of as the movers and shakers of this world. Jesus said it to ordinary people like you and I. So how do you live in a decaying world? We should be like salt in a decaying world.

Jesus then uses a second analogy one that is fitting when it comes to dealing with the issue of darkness in the world, and he says you are the light of the world. We shall look at that in the next episode.