Colossians 4:2–6
2 Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving. 3 At the same time, pray also for us, that God may open to us a door for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ, on account of which I am in prison - 4 that I may make it clear, which is how I ought to speak. 5 Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of the time. 6 Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person.
Jesus said in Matthew 5:13, “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.”
Christians are the salt of the earth. But what does this mean, and how should we understand this metaphor? What Jesus is doing here is describing how the disciple of Christ is to function in the world and how we are to influence the world in which we live. Salt has several properties. We all know from experience that salt has to do with purifying. It has to do with preservation. It has to do with giving taste to food. All these characteristics are used in the Bible in connection with salt.
In 2 Kings 2 the prophet Elisha used salt for a specific purpose.
He put salt into the spring water, and he declared at the same time that he had purified these waters. By adding salt to water, Elisha was able to purify the water. Now this seems a bit strange to us. Adding salt to water normally makes water worse, not better, but we’d be missing the point of this passage if we think strictly in terms of chemistry.
We are told that the water from a spring had turned bad. This physical situation reflected the spiritual barrenness of Israel caused by idolatry. Elisha’s solution was designed to teach the people a spiritual lesson: the power of holiness to purify. The whole point of Elisha’s action lies in the symbolism of the salt. Salt was known by the Israelites to preserve and purify. The miracle that he performed had nothing really to do with the salt itself but rather in the power of God. In verse 21, Elisha says, “This is what the Lord says.” In older translations he uses the term the prophets often used when proclaiming God’s Word: “Thus sayeth the Lord.”
The authority, the power to heal came from the Lord working through Elisha. Salt is used here as a symbol that signifies purity or holiness. It represents the power of holiness to purify.
Salt was not the cause of the miracle that took place. Salt is the spiritual symbol that represents God’s purifying power. When Jesus says that Christians are the salt of the earth, it doesn’t mean that we have anything special in ourselves that makes us to be like salt. It is Christ in us that makes us to be what we are. And if we are the salt of the earth, it is only because God’s power is at work in us to make us the salt of the earth. Without God in us, we wouldn’t be anything. It is all by God’s grace that we are what we are.
Salt in the Old Testament was also a prerequisite for offering sacrifices.
Salt not only purified, as we saw in the example of Elisha, but it also preserves. It keeps things from going bad, from decaying. At the spiritual level, it symbolises the power to cleanse from corruption. And so it becomes an emblem of incorruption and purity. That is why no sacrifice in the Old Testament could be presented before God without the addition of salt. Salt had to be offered with all the sacrifices. In Leviticus 2:13 God says to Moses, “Season all your grain offerings with salt. Do not leave the salt of the covenant of your God out of your grain offerings; add salt to all your offerings.”
Salt had to accompany every sacrifice, and the reason is that holiness and purity had to come with the sacrifice. This of course, points us to the Cross, as does every Old Testament sacrifice. What made the death of Jesus an acceptable substitute for our sins was the fact that Jesus was holy and pure. Old Testament sacrifices were not. They were offered by sinners, which meant that they never fully satisfied the requirements of a just God. Adding salt symbolised the need for holiness and purity in the sacrifices, and it was all brought to a perfectly holy and pure conclusion on the Cross of Calvary.
What made the imperfect Old Testament sacrifices acceptable to God, was the symbolic addition of salt.
Now how does this apply to the New testament, and the church in particular?
We are purified by the power of the Gospel through Jesus Christ. As salt is used to preserve meat from spoiling, so does the Gospel prevent us from being corrupted by sin. And as salt was indispensable to make sacrifices acceptable to God, so must we become salt by the Holy Spirit in offering ourselves as a living sacrifice to God. When salt comes into our lives, we are being purified by it. The same principle applies to the analogy of light. Jesus says that He is the light of the world, and then goes on to say that we are the light of the world. We first receive it, then we reflect the light of Christ to the world. We receive purification as we confess our sins and repent. The purification is symbolised by the purifying action of salt, then having received the salt, we are to be the salt.
It is after we receive the light of Christ that we become light. And in much the same way, it is after we receive the purifying work of the God by the Holy Spirit, pictured here as salt, that we become salt.
So in the Old Testament all the sacrifices had to be seasoned with salt. In the New Testament, there is something else that has to be seasoned with salt. Paul says that our speech has to be seasoned with salt.
Now, what does that mean? How do we season our talk with salt? Here we need to understand the spiritual meaning of salt. What does salt represent in that verse?
There is an important clue in Matthew 5:13, but unfortunately we don’t see it in our English translations. “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness…” A literal translation of the original Greek text would be, ‘You are the salt of the earth, but if the salt has become foolish…”
This idea of foolishness is not apparent in the way it is translated in our English Bibles. So salt loses its taste in the sense that it becomes foolish, or that it acts foolishly. This gives us an important clue to the meaning of salt in this context. It tells us that salt is meant to express spiritual wisdom since the opposite of foolishness is wisdom. And if you become foolish, it means that you have lost spiritual wisdom.
This is an important point for us to understand because wisdom, in the Biblical sense, has a strong moral emphasis and it often stands in contrast to folly.
The modern world is a case in point. As the world has bought into the lie that we no longer need God, and as the world has become more hostile to the God who created us, it has convinced itself that we have reached the point where God is no longer necessary. Science, technology, humanism, the arts – all of these things and more have made the world into a secular world.
The secular world thinks it has it all together. We are so enlightened now, and so free to be me. But just scratch below the surface and you find a very different picture. The world is falling apart. It is rotten to its very core and it can do nothing to stop it – without Christ, that is.
The New Testament, and the first 3 chapters of Romans in particular, teaches the clear contrast between earthly wisdom and heavenly wisdom. Earthly wisdom is carnal, unspiritual, selfish and foolish. But the wisdom from above has Christlike qualities. We have a list of these qualities in James 3:17-18. “Wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.”
Being the salt of the earth means that we reflect in our conduct these characteristics of Heavenly wisdom.
How does salt keep things from going bad, or how does it add flavour? Think about the last time you used salt. You put some salt in your food, either while cooking or on your plate just before you ate it. What happened to the salt? It disappeared. It dissolved into the food.
And here is the clue to an important aspect of the nature of the disciple and what we are called to do in this world.
Salt functions by dissolving, by losing itself, by dying. John 12:24 uses the picture of a seed that falls into the ground and dies. And by dying, it brings eventually produces fruit. Salt functions in the same way. It falls into the food and it dies. It dissolves. That is how it preserves. That is how it can give flavour. If salt doesn’t dissolve, it cannot do any of these things. Salt works by dissolving, by losing itself.
Think about light. How does light function? By giving itself away. Look at a candle. It gets shorter and shorter. If the candle is to give light to the room, it cannot remain at the same length. It has to burn itself out in order to give light. It literally burns itself to death, until it disappears completely.
This is the kind of picture that Jesus uses to describe the life of a disciple. The oil is burning away in order to give light. The salt dissolves and loses itself in order to fulfill its function to preserve. The seed falls into the ground and dies.
Just as Old Testament offerings without salt had no value, there is no point in offering ourselves as living sacrifices to God without the power of the Spirit within us, represented by the life-changing properties of spiritual salt.
If you have experienced the life changing transformation of the Gospel of Christ, you are the salt of the earth. You are not like the world. By your Christian character, you are to act like salt in your family and your community.
But in order to be effective, you must retain your Christian character. Now this doesn’t mean you should be preaching every time you open your mouth, but allow God to season your thoughts and your words. Be loving, be kind, be respectful.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote in one of his books, “We are to be unlike the world. There is no need to stress that, it is perfectly obvious. Salt is essentially different from the medium in which it is placed and in a sense it exercises all its qualities by being different. The very characteristic of saltness proclaims a difference, for a small amount of salt in a large medium is at once apparent. Unless we are clear about this we have not even begun to think correctly about the Christian life. The Christian is a man who is essentially different from everybody else. He is as different as the salt is from the meat into which it is rubbed. He is as different as the salt is from the wound into which it is put.”
2 Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving. 3 At the same time, pray also for us, that God may open to us a door for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ, on account of which I am in prison - 4 that I may make it clear, which is how I ought to speak. 5 Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of the time. 6 Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person.
Jesus said in Matthew 5:13, “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.”
Christians are the salt of the earth. But what does this mean, and how should we understand this metaphor? What Jesus is doing here is describing how the disciple of Christ is to function in the world and how we are to influence the world in which we live. Salt has several properties. We all know from experience that salt has to do with purifying. It has to do with preservation. It has to do with giving taste to food. All these characteristics are used in the Bible in connection with salt.
In 2 Kings 2 the prophet Elisha used salt for a specific purpose.
He put salt into the spring water, and he declared at the same time that he had purified these waters. By adding salt to water, Elisha was able to purify the water. Now this seems a bit strange to us. Adding salt to water normally makes water worse, not better, but we’d be missing the point of this passage if we think strictly in terms of chemistry.
We are told that the water from a spring had turned bad. This physical situation reflected the spiritual barrenness of Israel caused by idolatry. Elisha’s solution was designed to teach the people a spiritual lesson: the power of holiness to purify. The whole point of Elisha’s action lies in the symbolism of the salt. Salt was known by the Israelites to preserve and purify. The miracle that he performed had nothing really to do with the salt itself but rather in the power of God. In verse 21, Elisha says, “This is what the Lord says.” In older translations he uses the term the prophets often used when proclaiming God’s Word: “Thus sayeth the Lord.”
The authority, the power to heal came from the Lord working through Elisha. Salt is used here as a symbol that signifies purity or holiness. It represents the power of holiness to purify.
Salt was not the cause of the miracle that took place. Salt is the spiritual symbol that represents God’s purifying power. When Jesus says that Christians are the salt of the earth, it doesn’t mean that we have anything special in ourselves that makes us to be like salt. It is Christ in us that makes us to be what we are. And if we are the salt of the earth, it is only because God’s power is at work in us to make us the salt of the earth. Without God in us, we wouldn’t be anything. It is all by God’s grace that we are what we are.
Salt in the Old Testament was also a prerequisite for offering sacrifices.
Salt not only purified, as we saw in the example of Elisha, but it also preserves. It keeps things from going bad, from decaying. At the spiritual level, it symbolises the power to cleanse from corruption. And so it becomes an emblem of incorruption and purity. That is why no sacrifice in the Old Testament could be presented before God without the addition of salt. Salt had to be offered with all the sacrifices. In Leviticus 2:13 God says to Moses, “Season all your grain offerings with salt. Do not leave the salt of the covenant of your God out of your grain offerings; add salt to all your offerings.”
Salt had to accompany every sacrifice, and the reason is that holiness and purity had to come with the sacrifice. This of course, points us to the Cross, as does every Old Testament sacrifice. What made the death of Jesus an acceptable substitute for our sins was the fact that Jesus was holy and pure. Old Testament sacrifices were not. They were offered by sinners, which meant that they never fully satisfied the requirements of a just God. Adding salt symbolised the need for holiness and purity in the sacrifices, and it was all brought to a perfectly holy and pure conclusion on the Cross of Calvary.
What made the imperfect Old Testament sacrifices acceptable to God, was the symbolic addition of salt.
Now how does this apply to the New testament, and the church in particular?
We are purified by the power of the Gospel through Jesus Christ. As salt is used to preserve meat from spoiling, so does the Gospel prevent us from being corrupted by sin. And as salt was indispensable to make sacrifices acceptable to God, so must we become salt by the Holy Spirit in offering ourselves as a living sacrifice to God. When salt comes into our lives, we are being purified by it. The same principle applies to the analogy of light. Jesus says that He is the light of the world, and then goes on to say that we are the light of the world. We first receive it, then we reflect the light of Christ to the world. We receive purification as we confess our sins and repent. The purification is symbolised by the purifying action of salt, then having received the salt, we are to be the salt.
It is after we receive the light of Christ that we become light. And in much the same way, it is after we receive the purifying work of the God by the Holy Spirit, pictured here as salt, that we become salt.
So in the Old Testament all the sacrifices had to be seasoned with salt. In the New Testament, there is something else that has to be seasoned with salt. Paul says that our speech has to be seasoned with salt.
Now, what does that mean? How do we season our talk with salt? Here we need to understand the spiritual meaning of salt. What does salt represent in that verse?
There is an important clue in Matthew 5:13, but unfortunately we don’t see it in our English translations. “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness…” A literal translation of the original Greek text would be, ‘You are the salt of the earth, but if the salt has become foolish…”
This idea of foolishness is not apparent in the way it is translated in our English Bibles. So salt loses its taste in the sense that it becomes foolish, or that it acts foolishly. This gives us an important clue to the meaning of salt in this context. It tells us that salt is meant to express spiritual wisdom since the opposite of foolishness is wisdom. And if you become foolish, it means that you have lost spiritual wisdom.
This is an important point for us to understand because wisdom, in the Biblical sense, has a strong moral emphasis and it often stands in contrast to folly.
The modern world is a case in point. As the world has bought into the lie that we no longer need God, and as the world has become more hostile to the God who created us, it has convinced itself that we have reached the point where God is no longer necessary. Science, technology, humanism, the arts – all of these things and more have made the world into a secular world.
The secular world thinks it has it all together. We are so enlightened now, and so free to be me. But just scratch below the surface and you find a very different picture. The world is falling apart. It is rotten to its very core and it can do nothing to stop it – without Christ, that is.
The New Testament, and the first 3 chapters of Romans in particular, teaches the clear contrast between earthly wisdom and heavenly wisdom. Earthly wisdom is carnal, unspiritual, selfish and foolish. But the wisdom from above has Christlike qualities. We have a list of these qualities in James 3:17-18. “Wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.”
Being the salt of the earth means that we reflect in our conduct these characteristics of Heavenly wisdom.
How does salt keep things from going bad, or how does it add flavour? Think about the last time you used salt. You put some salt in your food, either while cooking or on your plate just before you ate it. What happened to the salt? It disappeared. It dissolved into the food.
And here is the clue to an important aspect of the nature of the disciple and what we are called to do in this world.
Salt functions by dissolving, by losing itself, by dying. John 12:24 uses the picture of a seed that falls into the ground and dies. And by dying, it brings eventually produces fruit. Salt functions in the same way. It falls into the food and it dies. It dissolves. That is how it preserves. That is how it can give flavour. If salt doesn’t dissolve, it cannot do any of these things. Salt works by dissolving, by losing itself.
Think about light. How does light function? By giving itself away. Look at a candle. It gets shorter and shorter. If the candle is to give light to the room, it cannot remain at the same length. It has to burn itself out in order to give light. It literally burns itself to death, until it disappears completely.
This is the kind of picture that Jesus uses to describe the life of a disciple. The oil is burning away in order to give light. The salt dissolves and loses itself in order to fulfill its function to preserve. The seed falls into the ground and dies.
Just as Old Testament offerings without salt had no value, there is no point in offering ourselves as living sacrifices to God without the power of the Spirit within us, represented by the life-changing properties of spiritual salt.
If you have experienced the life changing transformation of the Gospel of Christ, you are the salt of the earth. You are not like the world. By your Christian character, you are to act like salt in your family and your community.
But in order to be effective, you must retain your Christian character. Now this doesn’t mean you should be preaching every time you open your mouth, but allow God to season your thoughts and your words. Be loving, be kind, be respectful.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote in one of his books, “We are to be unlike the world. There is no need to stress that, it is perfectly obvious. Salt is essentially different from the medium in which it is placed and in a sense it exercises all its qualities by being different. The very characteristic of saltness proclaims a difference, for a small amount of salt in a large medium is at once apparent. Unless we are clear about this we have not even begun to think correctly about the Christian life. The Christian is a man who is essentially different from everybody else. He is as different as the salt is from the meat into which it is rubbed. He is as different as the salt is from the wound into which it is put.”