“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.” Matthew 5:13
Remember the Lord is speaking to the nation of Israel. In the Sermon on the Mount He sets the nation straight on what a heart that truly loves God is like. Then, after giving the beatitudes, He reminds Israel of their mission – that they are to be the salt of the earth – God’s witness to a dying and decaying world. They have not done this however. Instead of drawing people to God they have made the worship of God tedious, legalistic, harsh and unappealing. The Lord now begins to confront the nation with their true condition. He serves the role described in Malachi 3 of being the refiner of silver. He puts the behavior and doctrine of Israel to the test and tells them what it is in God’s sight.
But if The Lord changes the narrative. What God provided to the world as a gift to bring them to Him has not been presented accurately. The Lord describes what happens when the people of
God do not fulfill their responsibility to be salt to the world they live in.
Salt Salt is the valuable commodity provided by God to preserve, develop a thirst for God and to create true worship between God and man. It is the valuable life giving gift of God to the world, the mechanism that He uses to serve as a witness to a dying world.
Has lost its taste This is one word in the Greek. The word means to make foolish, turn to foolishness and thus to be tasteless or useless. This is the word used in Romans 1:22 where Paul describes those who “profess themselves to be be wise, become fools”.
What can we learn? Most of the salt in the Lord’s time would have come from the Dead Sea. The salt itself was a stable compound. The sodium and chloride would share electrons and form a complete bond so no other element could invade its properties. But the Dead Sea was full of impurities. Those impurities could not invade the essence of the salt but they could attach themselves to the outside of the salt. Thus when salt was eaten the impurities would mask the flavor of the salt – it became useless to perform its function of providing flavor or preserving food from corruption. The Lord is telling His listeners that true followers of Christ who should be distinctive from the world around it could lose that uniqueness. Salt covered with impurity was no longer salty.
It is interesting to read this passage and compare it to the Lord’s words to the Ephesians in Revelation 2. There are two major areas
of comparison. First in the Sermon on the Mount the Lord says the salt has lost its flavor. It is no longer desired as something
unique and desirable. It does not do what it was designed to do. This is the result of not being separate from the world. In Revelation 2 we see the cause. The Lord tells the Ephesians that they “have left your first love”. This is a deliberate act of forsaking the distinctiveness of the the Lord even as they stayed religious. This is exactly what Judaism had done to God in turning love for Him into ritual. It is the same sin the church commits against the Lord.
Second we see that the ultimate result of this act is something that is distasteful to God. At the beginning salt is unsalty. When we come to the last church age, the Laodiceans, in Revelation 3 we see the Lord
vomit them out of His mouth. The fellowship is tasteless, sour and nauseating. It is worthless.