WWUTT 1934 You Are the Salt of the Earth, Part 2 (Matthew 5:13)

The Meaning of “You Are the Salt of the Earth”

In Matthew 5 .13 we read you are the salt of the earth, but if the salt has become tasteless, how will it be made salty again? It's no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot when we understand the text.

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Here's your teacher, Pastor Gabe Hughes.

Thank you, Becky. In our study of the Sermon on the Mount, we are in Matthew 5, and I'll begin reading here in verse 13, and we'll go through verse 16 out of the Legacy Standard Bible. Hear the word of the Lord.

You are the salt of the earth, but if the salt has become tasteless, how will it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men. You are the light of the world.

A city set on a hill cannot be hidden, nor does anyone light a lamp and put it under a basket but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in heaven.

A reminder once again that we are not continuing on in our study of Isaiah today. You probably caught that. God willing, we'll jump back into Isaiah next week. This is part two of the sermon that I first played yesterday from Matthew 5, verse 13, You are the salt of the earth.

I preached this at First Baptist Church in Lindale, Texas in March of 2021, and so here is part two. What I had talked about in part one was ontology, how what Jesus is describing here is who we are, not things that we have to do to become this, but just like we read in the Beatitudes a description of who his followers are, so Jesus is saying to his disciples, you are the salt of the earth, and what does that entail?

Our Identity in Christ and the Gospel

Picking up with part two of that sermon, and I'm going to be reading here from Ephesians chapter two as we continue on. Ephesians chapter two, verses one through three were exactly me before I came to Christ.

You were dead in your sins and your transgressions in which you once walked, following after the course of this world, following after the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived, carrying out the passions of our flesh, the desires of the body and the mind, and were by our nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind.

That's who we are before we come to Christ. We are children of wrath by our nature. That's who we are. We rebel against God. We sang about it this morning. Your enemy, you've made your friend, pouring out the riches of your glorious grace.

We were once enemies of God, but as it goes on there in Ephesians chapter two, verse four to say, but God being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us didn't leave us dead in our sins and our transgressions.

He made us alive together with Christ. By grace, you have been saved and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places. That's who we are in Christ before Christ. We are worthy of judgment.

And that's, you know, I said that was my story. That's the story of every person here. Every single person before you come to Christ, you're a child of wrath deserving of the judgment of God. There's your ontology.

But then in Christ, we're changed into something new. No longer an enemy of God, but a recipient of his grace and a fellow heir with Christ in glory. My friends, that's the gospel. And we can't change that.

If we change who the Bible says, if we change what the Bible says about who we are, then we change the gospel. Do you realize that? If we change what the Bible says about who Christ is, then we change the gospel.

It's through an understanding of the scriptures that we come to an idea, an understanding of who we are, what our identity is apart from Christ and in Christ. This is the statement that Jesus makes to his followers in Matthew 5, 13.

You are the salt of the earth. You are something not because of any work that you've done, but because of the work that Christ has done for you. And now by faith in the son of God, you are a child of God.

So that's number one. That's the first part of our statement here. You are, there's our ontology. The second part of this statement is the salt. You are the salt of the earth. Why is this significant?

Why would Jesus be talking here about salt? This was a very, very important mineral in the world at this particular time. Do you understand that salt at this day and age, this was their refrigerator? We have refrigeration units.

We have deep freezers that we put our stuff in. They didn't have that at this particular time. They would pack their meat in salt and that would be the preservative that would keep it from rotting. Friends of mine at the church that I pastored before I came here in Kansas, a lot of hunting goes on there in that part of Kansas and we had plenty of hunters in our congregation.

It was not uncommon at certain parts of the year that we had some of our older, more retired gentlemen would come in with rounds of deer meat. They're just handing it out like candy. Like kids would come running up to one of our deacons, his name was Dave.

Like you got that guy in church who's got the Werther's Originals in his pocket. Kids will go up to him, pulls out a Werther's, hands it to the kids. It's not the way it was in our church in Kansas. He would have rounds of deer meat.

So the kids would run up and David would look at him and go, didn't I just give your dad a round of deer meat? Yeah, but you didn't give some to me. So he gets another extra pound of deer meat. So we've got refrigerators and freezers that can preserve all of that.

It'll last us a long time. That's not what they had anywhere in the world 2 ,000 years ago. They would use salt to preserve. Salt was a preservative. It was also a seasoning, of course. You use salt to season your food.

And though many of you in Texas are not aware of this, you can also use salt to cover your roads and keep it from icing over or getting too much snow on it. I know that's not real common in Texas, as I discovered a few weeks ago, but a very common thing in Kansas.

There are plenty of wars that have been fought over salt. I was trying to look this up. I couldn't write them all down. There were a ton of them. People have gone to war over having access to salt. One of the most famous ones was the Salt War of 1540, when Pope Paul III had put a tax on salt.

And so Perugia, the Perugians rebelled against the Pope, and the Pope led soldiers against them. This was the Catholic Church fighting against the Perugians over salt. More recently, there was the Salt March in India back in 1930 that was led by Gandhi.

This was a more peaceful demonstration for salt. And as Gandhi had said, everyone deserves a right to salt. Salt has been a pretty important mineral in the history of the world, and it served a very particular function and purpose, even in the Holy Land at this particular time.

We have references to salt in the scriptures. In fact, even when it came to sacrifices and the covenant, we have references to salt. In Numbers 18 -19, it says that an everlasting covenant is a covenant of salt.

And so when Jesus here is saying to his disciples, you are the salt of the earth, there's something there they would have made a connection on regarding salt, because they know salt is mentioned in the law.

It is said in Leviticus 2 -13 that all grain offerings were to include salt. And it says, you shall not let the salt of the covenant with your God be missing from your grain offering. Salt was a symbol of that everlasting covenant.

And don't we know that we have an everlasting covenant with God? And the salt of that covenant is the message of the gospel. And so as we are called to be the salt of the earth, to season and to preserve, we go out preaching the gospel, which is, as Paul described it in 2 Corinthians, the savoriness of God.

We also know that by preaching the gospel and when people hear it and believe it, they are preserved. They will not be destroyed in hell under the judgment of God, but they will have everlasting life with God in glory.

And so as we, the disciples of Jesus, are salt of the earth, we are commissioned to go out with that message of the gospel. Now there was a context here that we saw even in the verse right before that.

In verse 12, Jesus says, Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. And then in verse 13, he says, You are the salt of the earth.

Where's the contrast there? Or where's even the comparison, you could call it. That gets to the third point of our statement here. You are, point one, the salt, point two, third part of this statement, of the earth.

Because the prophets who are mentioned in verse 12, they were the salt of the land of Canaan hundreds of years before. But now Jesus is saying to his disciples, there's something very specific here. You are the salt of the earth.

You're going to go with the proclamation of God, not just to the land of Canaan as the prophets were sent to. Not even to just this region of the holy land where Jesus is going to limit his ministry to.

But as he said to his disciples, greater things than these, you will do. Some have taken that passage to mean they're going to do greater miracles than Jesus. That's not what he meant. You're going to go out farther with the gospel than it has ever gone before.

And so as we go out with the message of Christ, we are the salt of the earth, taking the good news of Jesus Christ to the world. Now Jesus goes on from here to say, 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. Now, there are skeptics who will say that Jesus did not understand salt here because salt cannot actually lose its saltiness.

And so those skeptics will even go so far to say, see, we can doubt he was the son of God because not even the son of God understood salt doesn't lose its saltiness. Living in Kansas, I heard a story about a man around the Hutchinson area who decided to go into the salt business.

Hutchinson is actually known for salt mines. There's the air and space museum that's there. That's kind of what put it on the map, but there's also salt mines in that area and it's become a tourist attraction.

You can actually go and tour the salt mines. And so there was a man there in that area who decided to invest in salt because like I said, in Kansas, we needed a little bit more than you needed here in Texas.

So he would build these barns and these silos and that's where he would store this salt and he would sell it to local farmers and local towns and things like that. And he noticed something. Salt can go pretty fast there in Kansas, especially if we have a pretty harsh winter.

As the salt would get depleted in these bins that he would build when it got closer to the ground, like within just like less than an inch of the ground, you would start to see more dirt mixed in with the salt.

Some of his barns didn't have floor on it. He would just pile it up on the dirt. And so he noticed there that when you would start to see the dirt mixed in with the salt, he would take it, he would put it in his hand, he would put his tongue to it, and he could tell it was not nearly as salty as the salt even an inch above that.

You get further down, even closer to the ground, and it's hardly salty at all. You're just tasting dirt. So there's a very interesting metaphor there. Because the closer the salt is to the earth, the less salty it tastes.

So the same as with you. The closer you are to the world, the further you are from God. In fact, James says that friendship with the world is enmity with God, right? But let's say having shared that story, somebody in here is a salt expert, and that person stands up and says, no, Brother Gabe, you don't understand salt.

That's just a story. You heard that secondhand. It's not true. Salt cannot lose its saltiness. All right. Fair enough. I don't think you need to know anything scientific about salt to understand what it is that Jesus is saying here.

The point that he is making with this text, if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? As I said to you, salt served a very particular use. It had a very specific function. In fact, it was so specific and so pure that it was even used in sacrifices.

If you change the composition of salt in any way, if you change salt and what it means to be salt, then it's no good. It's not going to preserve your food. It's certainly not going to taste any good. It's going to taste like dirt, as that man in Hutchinson discovered.

It's good to just be thrown out and trampled in the dirt. And in fact, Jesus is going to get to that later on in Matthew when he tells some parables saying that those who are judged will be bound hand and foot and thrown into the outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

So it is the same with a person who changes what it means to be a Christian. There's a very specific definition of what it means to be a Christian. As I've said to you regarding our ontology, we are defined by Christ.

Who Jesus is is who we are to be. And if you change anything about what it means to be a Christian, then you change the gospel, you change what Jesus has said, you change what the Bible says, and this person can no longer accurately be called a Christian, but will be thrown out and judged on the day of Judgment Day.

We are not at liberty to change what God has defined. That starts in Genesis 127. Male and female, he created them in the image of God. You are not at liberty to change that definition of what it means to be a man and a woman.

And likewise, we are not at liberty to change what it means to be a Christian. We're not at liberty to change what it means to be a sinner, even. As I talked about, people who live self-righteously, that's pretty convenient, because you're always right as long as you say you are.

But you cannot call good what God has called evil. You cannot call evil what God has called good, or you change his word. You cannot say this person is a Christian who is not a Christian, or you've changed fundamentally what it means to be a Christian.

And there are plenty of evangelical teachers out there that are changing these doctrines and saying that they're unimportant. Few weeks ago, Pastor Tom had brought up the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement, the understanding that Jesus Christ has died in our place, and we sang about it this morning.

Your blood has washed away my sin. The Father's wrath completely satisfied. Once your enemy now seated at your table, Jesus, thank you. You who drank the bitter cup reserved for me. Jesus died in our place.

Isaiah 53, it pleased the Lord to crush him. By his stripes, we are healed. 2 Corinthians 5, 21, for our sake, he became sin, who knew no sin that we might become the righteousness of God in him. That's the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement.

The penalty was upon us for our sin. Christ took it for us as our substitute, and he is atoned for us, and we might be innocent in the presence of a holy God. But I think as Pastor Tom rightly said last week, people who deny that message or who change that doctrine and say that it's not important, the skeptics that will say, well, that's paganism, a God dying to appease himself, or the whole thing about the Father crushing the Son.

Come on, that's child, that's like cosmic child abuse. That's what they'll call it. Pastor Tom was right when he said those people who define that doctrine in that way are heretics. Because they have changed something fundamental about the gospel.

We were sinners deserving of judgment, but God showed us mercy and gave his Son to die in our place. When you start changing what it means to be a Christian, you come up with something completely different altogether that's not a Christian at all.

We're not at liberty to change these things. Our identity is Christ. We are to desire Christ and to grow in him. Let me conclude with this. Coming back to the Beatitudes once again, poor in spirit, mourning, meek, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, merciful, pure in heart, peacemakers, persecuted for righteousness' sake.

Who does this describe? Now you can say, well, you said it at the very beginning. You said it describes us. It describes the saved. It describes followers of Jesus. That's right. But ultimately, who does it describe?

Jesus himself, the incarnate Son of God. Poor in spirit, even mourning, for as it says in Isaiah 53, he was a man of sorrows acquainted with grief. Meek, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, merciful, pure in heart, peacemakers, persecuted for righteousness' sake.

And my friends, if we know that our master has been persecuted for righteousness' sake, won't we be persecuted also? But here's the good news, and here's where we're going to pick up next week. Jesus says, you are the salt of the earth.

You are the light of the world. Though we are persecuted at the present time, and though things that are coming upon us in our culture right now means that persecution is going to increase in the church, we've even seen persecution happen within the church when wolves rise up and lead people astray.

Though from an earthly vantage point, it's going to look like the world is winning. They're not. Victory has already been claimed. It's in Christ who died and rose again. And so in him, we have victory over this world, over sin and over death, and we will reign with him victorious in his kingdom forever.

Amen? So this world will not win. And it looks like they are coming upon us, but darkness is not winning. The dirt isn't winning. You are called the salt of the earth. You are called the light of the world.

Because Jesus is these things. So are we. As followers of Jesus. Amen. Let us conclude with prayer. Heavenly Father, we thank you for these words that have been spoken to us through your son, applied to our hearts by your Holy Spirit.

And may we understand what it means to live in this way. We are called the salt of the earth. We are to season. We are to preserve. And the number one way we do that is through the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Holding out that hope for mankind, the only way of salvation, the only way to be forgiven our sins and be made in a right relationship with God is through faith in Jesus. Give us boldness to proclaim the gospel in these days until the day that Christ returns.

It's in Jesus' name that we pray.

Amen. This has been When We Understand the Text with Pastor Gabriel Hughes. For all of our podcasts, episodes, videos, books, and more, visit our website at www .utt .com. If you'd like to submit a question to this broadcast, or just send us a comment, email whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com.

And let your friends know about our ministry. Join us again tomorrow as we grow together in the study of God's Word when we understand the text.