You Are the Salt of the Earth
Matthew 5:13
Turn with me to Matthew 5 for our study tonight; we are continuing, rather patiently, to work our way through the Sermon on the Mount in connection with the study of the entire gospel of Matthew. It will take us quite a long time, but it is so wonderful and rich that we are not at all adverse in spending plenty of time in this tremendous book.
Let me read you the text that we'll be working through tonight. 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."
What you have in these very simple four verses is the picture that our Lord gives of the Christian in the world, the function of the believer in the world. If I could reduce it to one word, it would be the word 'influence.' Our Lord is saying that the Christian who lives according to the Beatitudes is going to influence the world as salt and light. In all that a person does and is (or is not), the sum total of our character, consciously or otherwise, affects other people. Philosophers have put it this way: "No man is an island."
One of my favorite stories in Greek mythology is recorded by Dr. Biederwolf in a rather old book, and this is what he says. "The story is told in mythology of a goddess who came unseen but was always known by the blessings she left in her pathway. Trees blackened by forest fires put forth new leaves as she passed by. In her footprints at the brookside, violets sprang up. The stagnant pool became a spring of sparkling water; the parched fields blossomed as the rose, and every hillside and valley blushed with new life and beauty when she passed.
"The story is also told of another beautiful princess, who was sent as a present to a particular king. About her was an atmosphere as sweet-smelling as the garments of Aphrodite. She seemed as beautiful and as pure as if fresh from a bath of dew, and her breath was as sweet perfume of the richest rose. But, strange enough, in the atmosphere that she carried about with her was the contagion of death. From her infancy, this beautiful woman had known no food but poison. She had been reared on it, and had become so permeated with it that she herself became the very essence of it. She would breathe her fragrant breath into a swarm of insects, and behold, they lie dead at her feet. She would place the loveliest flower upon her bosom and lo, it would fade and fall apart. Into her presence came a hummingbird; it fluttered, poised a moment, shuddered, and fell dead."
How like this poisoned princess is every man whose influence is a blight, a curse upon his fellow men. "We live," says Biederwolf, "and the atmosphere we exhale is richly laden with the fragrance of virtue or with a poisonous perfume that consumes the people around us." One other writer put it this way, "You are writing a gospel, a chapter each day, by deeds that you do and words that you say. Men read what you write, whether faultless or true. Say, what is the gospel according to you?"
Andrew Murray evidently lived a holy life before his children. I was reading about Andrew Murray, a great man of God, and about the effect he had on his children. The biographer says, "Eleven of his children grew to adult life. Five of the six sons became ministers of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Four of his daughters became ministers' wives." Not bad, nine out of eleven. Even the second generation made a good showing. Ten grandsons became ministers of Christ and thirteen became missionaries. Influence.
President Woodrow Wilson told this story. He said, "I was in a very common place. I was sitting in a barber chair when I became aware that a personality had entered the room. A man had come quietly in upon the same errand as myself, to have his hair cut, and sat in the chair next to me. Every word the man uttered, though it was not in the least didactic, showed a personal interest in the man who was serving him. Before I got through with what was being done for me, I was aware that I had attended an evangelistic service, because Mr. D. L. Moody was in that chair.
I purposely lingered in the room after he had left and noted the singular effect that his visit had brought upon the barber shop. They talked in undertones; they didn't know his name, but they knew that something had elevated their thoughts. I felt that I left that place as I should have left the place of worship. My admiration and esteem for Mr. Moody became very deep indeed."
Influence. What message do you leave the world? When you pass by, what are you saying? Years ago, Elihu Burritt wrote this, "No human being can come into this world without increasing or diminishing the sum total of human happiness. Not only of the present, but of every subsequent age of humanity. No one can detach himself from this connection. There is no sequestered spot in the universe, no dark niche along the disc of nonexistence to which he can retreat from his relations to others, where he can withdraw the influence of his existence upon the moral destiny of the world. Everywhere, his presence or absence will be felt. Everywhere, he will have companions who will be better or worse because of him. It is an old saying," says Burritt, "And one of the fearful and fathomless statements of import, that we are forming characters for eternity.
"Forming characters? Whose? Our own or others? Both. And in that momentous fact lies the peril and the responsibility of our existence. Who is sufficient for the thought? Thousands of my fellow beings will yearly enter eternity with characters differing from those they would have carried thither had I never lived. The sunlight of that world will reveal my finger marks in their primary formations, and in their successive strata of thought and life."
This is precisely what Jesus is teaching in Matthew 5:13-16; He is talking about influence, about how you and I affect the world. In the Sermon on the Mount, at this point, He is saying, "You who are characterized by Beatitude-quality life, you who are the sons and daughters of the Kingdom are the salt and light of the world to influence the world for good and for God." Our Lord is calling on us to influence the world that we live in, just as He was those disciples gathered with Him as He preached to the multitudes.
It isn't easy, you know? In fact, in many ways, it is an almost impossible task. Think about it this way: in a prayer to the Father, in John 17, our Lord once said regarding those who believe and enter the Kingdom, "I pray not that You would take them out of the world." In the very next sentence, He said, "They are not of the world." One verse later, He said, "So I have sent them into the world." Later on, the Holy Spirit said to John, "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world." The sum of those verses goes like this. "I want you in the world, but not of the world. I've sent you to the world, but don't love the world." I don't know about you, but to me, that feels like a thin line. How could believers be in the world but not of the world; sent to the world but not permitted to love it? What a paradox.
How can we influence it, then? How are we to influence this world? How can we be in it and not of it? How can we be sent to it and not love it? The solution comes in verses 13-16. We have to be salt and light. Salt, in order to be effective, has to be mingled with the substance it's affecting, and yet salt is distinct from that substance. Light, in order to dispel darkness, must shine upon the darkness, yet is distinct from the darkness.
It's going to take us a few weeks to get through these four verses because they are so pregnant with meaning, but we'll begin to at least look at the characteristics of salt and light tonight. Remember, our Lord has outlined magnificently the qualities and principles that make Kingdom people distinctive. We are the beggarly ones, who mourn over our sin, who are meek before a holy God, who hunger and thirst for righteousness and are consequently merciful, pure in heart, peacemakers. Thereby, we are persecuted. This is the distinctiveness of our lifestyle.
Remember that in the first part of this sermon, in verses 1-12, the Lord defines the character of a believer. He says, "This is the kind of character that you now must use to influence the world." So you see, in order for us to influence the world, it presupposes the kind of character defined in the first section of the Sermon on the Mount. As we enter the Kingdom on these conditions, as we become Kingdom people, and manifest these characteristics. We who are the sons of the Kingdom will have a profound effect on the world. As we live out the reality of the Beatitudes, we will affect the world. The world will react negatively many times, and persecute us, but some will react positively and believe and be saved.
It fascinates me, I guess, as perhaps it does you, if you think about it. This follows right after verses 10-12. Verses 10-12 say, "Blessed are they who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, blessed are you when men revile you," or abuse you to the face, "And persecute you, and say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad for great is your reward in heaven. So persecuted they the prophets who were before you."
In other words, the point is this: you're going to live a Beatitude kind of life, a godly life in the world, and you can anticipate, gild-edge guarantee, that at some point in time, if you really live a godly life in this present world, you will be persecuted. However, when that happens, that doesn't mean you change your function. Immediately He says, "You are still the salt of the earth. Do not forfeit your saltiness; you are still the light of the world. Don't mitigate or minimize or turn out or hide under a bushel that light." The point is this: don't let persecution alter your function in the world. Your influence is to be what God designed it to be, and it must not be altered even though you would be persecuted.
In I Peter 2:9, Peter says, "You are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a kingdom of priests, a holy nation, a people of His own." Look at the distinctions. A chosen genos, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people of His own. For what purpose? "In order that you should show forth the praises of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light." The reason you are what you are in His Kingdom is to manifest this influence. Christians cannot bend to the world; we cannot bow to the world, even when the world sets about to persecute us. We do not alter our committment.
It is like Martin Luther, when confronted by those who were branding him as a heretic and about to take his life, he said, "I cannot recant, I will not deny that which is true." That is the way we all are to live. The whole point of the passage is that we who are the sons of the Kingdom are to be salt and light in the world, and never, under any condition, be it persecution, face-to-face abuse, behind the back, malicious slander, never are we to alter that function one whit. We have to face the music (in the vernacular), or, in biblical terms, we have to take up the Cross and follow Christ.
By the way, I feel that this is directed, not to the whole multitude seated on the side of the hill as Jesus preaches, but this is directed to the disciples, the ones who believe. Listen, I still think He has the multitude in His heart. The reason He wants the ones who believe to be salt and light is to win the multitude, you see. So He never loses the perspective. The King, for a moment, leaves the crowd and talks to the saints, the disciples, sitting before Him. But it isn't for their sakes only that He talks, He loves the vast multitude, the unheeding mob, if you will. He realizes that if that unheeding mob is to be reached, it is to be reached because the believing community is salt and light. This is a mandate, beloved, to influence the world.
Jesus is saying we are to be different; poor in spirit, mournful and meek, thirsting for righteousness, merciful, pure in heart, peacemaking. And even though we are all those things, we don't crawl off into a monastery somewhere. We get out in the world and we live it right there where they can see it.
The final Beatitude in verses 10-12 is transitional. We see, in verses 10-12, the attitude of the world toward the believer, and in 13-16, the attitude of the believer toward the world. The world is going to hate us, but we still have to be salt and light to influence them. The important truth is revealed that the people the world hates are the very ones they desperately need to be influenced by. Did you hear that? Even the quasi-religious, quasi-pious scribes and pharisees who hated the representatives of Jesus Christ were totally dependent on their influence to know the truth of God. The world may hate us and persecute us, but the world is absolutely dependent on us being the influence and the verbal manifestation of the Gospel of God.
We alone are the salt of the earth; there is no other. That's it, just us. If we lose our saltiness, it's lost. We are the light; that's it, just us. Nobody else. If our light is under a bushel, there is no other alternative.
As we look at these four verses, I want to give you four great truths. Four great truths so that you'll understand what it means to be salt and light. First, the presupposition; secondly, the plan; thirdly, the problem; fourth, the purpose (it will take us a few weeks to get through these).
First of all, the presupposition. The presupposition is simple; this text presupposes two things: the world is decayed, that's why it needs salt, and it is dark, that's why it needs light. The presupposition, then, is the decay and darkness of the world. It doesn't have to say that; it presupposes it. The fact that the world needs light presupposes it's dark; the fact that it needs salt presupposes that it's decadent, or decayed and decaying. Salt is needed where there is decay. Salt is used where there is corruption. Light is brought where there is darkness.
G. Campbell Morgan says, "Jesus, looking out over the multitudes of His day, saw the corruption and the disintegration of life at every point. He saw its spoilation and because of His love of the multitudes, He knew the thing they needed most was salt in order that the corruption would be arrested. He saw them wrapped in gloom, sitting in darkness, groping amidst fogs and mists, and He knew that they needed, above everything else, light." Morgan is right. The presupposition here is that we live in a decayed and decaying, dark and darkening world; that is the biblical world view. Jesus reveals His perspective on the world: it's decayed and dark.
It isn't getting better. "Evil men," it says in Timothy's epistle, "Shall become worse and worse." You know, it is absolutely a ridiculous, stupid pipe dream to think the world is getting better. It can't get better because it isn't good to start with. It's bad, and it's getting worse.
One student told me last week that one of the professors at a local college was telling his class recently that the reason marriage is on the decline, and the reason marriage is fading out as a human institution is because man is evolving to a higher level and marriage is something man only needs at the lower level. So man is evolving to a higher level of living, an evolutionary-style of living, that is causing marriage (like his prehensile tail) to drop off.
Listen, anybody standing around in the world today, saying, "We're still evolving up," is blind as a bat! Now, I agree that we're learning a lot. We have an incredible amount of science, and technology, and medical knowledge, and philosophy, and history, and sociology, and psychology, and educational technique, and all of this stuff is going on all the time. You know what? It has no effect upon the corruption of society, none at all. We just get worse and worse and worse. All that information means nothing.
The world of Jesus' time had the same decay and the same darkness. All we've done is increased the volume; we've turned it up louder and invented new ways to do it. There are just more of us than there were then, and the time in between has allowed us to have more inventions of evil, as Romans 1 talks about.
It's interesting to go back in history, to go back to the end of the 19th Century - that wasn't long ago, just 80 or so years ago. Philosophers and poets at the end of the 19th Century had an incredible optimism. In fact, not long after that, we had what we call the Emerson Era; people just believed that everything was going to become a golden age, we were all going to go waltzing into Utopia. Everything was going to change, the Golden Age in the 20th Century, and they based it on the theory of evolution. Man was getting better and better; man was ascending, advancing, rising, the scale was going upward.
They said, at the end of the 19th Century, that wars were going to be abolished, that there would never again be a great war. They said that disease was going to be cured, suffering would be eradicated, through education, the masses would cease drunkenness and immorality, and vice would come to a halt. Nations would talk, not fight, and the world would be characterized by peace. Some writers said the earth was fast becoming a paradise.
Those books don't sell too well in the day in which we live. Not many people believe that stuff. The world is rotten and polluted, and we know it. What is so amazing is that it is just as rotten and polluted with technology as it was without it. It has had absolutely no impact on the morality of our day. Information has no impact at all.
Listen, beloved, that is the biblical view of the world; that's the way Jesus saw it, that's the way it has always been. It didn't take very long from Genesis 1, when God created man, to Genesis 6, when God looked at man and said, "All I see is only evil continually." God said, "There's only one thing to do: save eight righteous souls and drown the rest of humanity." And He did. He locked up eight of them with a bunch of animals in a big boat, and the rest of them drowned. God made a perfect world, sin entered, evil, polluting influence took over, and God had to destroy the entire world by Genesis 6. He had a new start, gave them a new start.
By Genesis 19, one area of the world called Sodom & Gomorrah had become so rotten, vile, and corrupted that God had to come in and destroy everyone in that place by fire and brimstone. The time is coming in the future, according to II Peter 3, when God will again rain fire out of Heaven and destroy the world in a holocaust of fire like men have never dreamed.
You see, it's the same old tale told again. It's the same old story. Man just gets worse and worse and worse; he is infected with the germ of sin. There is no antidote apart from God, and he will not have God because he loves his darkness rather than light. He loves his decadence and does not want purity, and the germ thus affects the whole body of humanity, brings universally the disease of sin, and the world continues to descend on the scale of immorality to the place where God will eventually bring final judgment.
The world is dark. I don't mean we're dark in the sense of information; we have information. We have all kinds of information. They're storing it on molecules now. They can get the Library of Congress on an object the size of a sugar cube. We've got so much information that they're working on storage problems. We have information, but our knowledge is mechanical. Our knowledge is scientific, and with inanimate objects. There is some knowledge of the scientific function of animate objects, but when it comes to the inward knowledge of why people are what they are, and to the truth of life and death and eternity and God, man has no answers. So he cannot retard the corruption and darkness in which he lives.
By the way, it's really a frustrating thing to be a philosopher. Bertrand Russell spent his whole life being a philosopher. At 96 years old, he was ready to die. His final statement was this, "Philosophy has proved a washout to me." It didn't take him anywhere, because nothing that he ever thought of ever had anything to affect the way the world was going.
The greatest thinkers in the world are completely baffled at solutions to the real hunger of the human heart. They are talking now about the fact that what we need is electronic stimulation of the brain (ESB), where they stick a bunch of stuff in your brain and zap out all your evil parts, so that all you are is a zombie. You know what cloning is? You know where we're going with test tube babies? We're going to the place where they will determine who gets to be born and who doesn't get to be born. They will try to get this all out of society by controlling genetic processes. It will never work. You say, "All we'll have is a bunch of zombie clones." Well, if that's true, they'll be bad ones.
You're not righteous by accident; man is depraved from his birth. David said, "In sin did my mother conceive me. From the very point of conception I was a sinner." So the decay and the darkness of the world is the presupposition, and nothing can be more evident that that against the backdrop of the knowledge we have today.
I mean, we've had so many peace talks and we have so many answers, and technology and science and so forth, but we still have problems we will never solve. Killings, slaughters, wars never end. Crime rates rise, more murders and rapes and crimes of all kinds than ever are happening. Despair and pessimism reign in our day because man hasn't been able to retard his descent. In fact, he has the sickening feeling that he is just speeding it up with his technology. We're all sitting on the edges of our chairs hoping that some little man somewhere doesn't punch the wrong red button and blow us all up in a nuclear war.
One magazine says, "It is the particular heresy of Americans that they see themselves as potential saints rather than real-life sinners.." Time Magazine says, "Today's young radicals in particular are almost painfully sensitive to these and other wrongs of their society. They denounce them violently. But at the same time, they are typically American, in that they fail to place evil in its historic and human perspective." Time Magazine says this! "To them, evil is not an irreducible component of man, it is not an inescapable fact of life, but something committed by the older generation attributable to a particular class or the establishment and eradicable through love or revolution." That's foolish. It is an irreducible human component, evil is.
The heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. This is Jesus' view, the view of any thinking person. Any evolutionist would have to be blind to reality to think human society is on the ascent. It isn't true. So our Lord is saying that since we have a decaying, corrupted society shrouded in darkness, this society needs salt to retard the corruption and light to brighten the darkness. The presupposition, the darkness and decay of the world, moves us to the second point: the plan.
God has a plan. The plan is the dominion of the disciples. He sets us up in the world as a holy priesthood, a kingdom of priests, as kings and priests. He says, "I'm giving you dominion, I'm giving you a restored dominion that man lost in the Fall. You are My kings, and you are My vice-regents, you are My princes in the world. You are My priests and prophets in the world, and your job is to retard the corruption and bring light to the darkness."
You know what's so sad about it? Instead of the church influencing the world this way, the church is influenced by the world. The very things we talked about this morning, and what we've talked about in the past, we become victimized. Remember when we talked about the crises of Christianity and how the church has fallen victim to so many trends in human society? It's ludicrous what the church permits under the influence of the world.
So what is the plan? Verse 13. "You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world. Let your light so shine before men." Guess who has the responsibility? You! To whom does the 'you' refer? I believe it refers to the disciples, the believers; they are the agents of divine transformation. They are the ones who are salt and light.
By the way, in verse 13, "You are the salt," and verse 14, "You are the light," the pronouns are emphatic. You only are the light, you only are the salt, no one else! You're it, and if you don't retard the corruption, if you don't bring the light to bear on the world, there will be no retardation and no light. That's why I've been telling you, from the bottom of my heart, for so many months now that we must live in the world, distinct from the world, if we are to fulfill the plan that Jesus set about to fulfill in the world. We cannot be corrupted by it; we cannot swallow its morality, or immorality, or ammorality, or non-morality. We cannot swallow its materialism, self-centeredness, easy solutions, we cannot listen to its philosophies.
When we are called to come out and be separate and touch not the unclean thing, that is a very exacting call. The very ones who are persecuted by the world, the very ones hated by the world are not to retreat to some place in the woods, they are not to run in persecution. We are to stand there and face the world emphatically, holding to the responsibility to be salt and light if ever there is to be a retardation of corruption and a dawning of light in the darkness. Literally translating verse 13 would be this: "The only salt of the earth is you." That's it. Here we are in 1979, in Southern California, in the midst of a decadent and dark society, and the only salt of this place is you. That's it. All who possess the character of the Kingdom are it.
By the way, that 'you' is plural; He's talking about the collective body of believers. You don't put one grain of salt on anything. You don't say, "Pass the salt," and then pick out one grain and drop it on there. It only functions in combination with other grains of salt, and the church, to influence the world, must be collective salt. It's not enough to be all alone at it, we must be at it together using collective influence. By the way, the same is true of the light. 'The light' uses the illustration of a city; it's many lights that light city, many grains of salt that affect a substance.
So the saved are the salt. The verb here, este, stresses being. The stress is on being, what we are and what we continue to be. We are the salt, we continue to be the salt, and we are the only salt in the world. Let me add this, it's not what we should be, it's what we are. Like it or not, you're the salt of the earth. The only question is whether you're salty or whether you've lost your salty flavor. You are the salt; you either have savor or you don't.
The idea isn't, "Please be salt," it's, "You are salt." The only question is whether you're salty. You are light; the only question is whether you're on or not. That's all. If you are a believer, you're salt. If you're a believer, you're light. You're not going to get to be salt.
Unleashing God's Truth One Verse at a Time