May 16, 2016

Salt of the Earth

During a television food show a bread baker demonstrating the ingredients needed for making bread said, “Don’t let your salt and yeast touch…your salt will kill your yeast.” I find the spiritual implication startling. Jesus warned his disciples to be on guard against the yeast (the teaching) of the Pharisees and the Sadducees (Matt 16: 5-12). Jesus also said of his disciples, “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 by men” (Matt 5:13). For me the spiritual connotation is that I can do more than just be on guard against erroneous teaching. If I maintain my saltiness I can actually kill the false teaching of the modern day Pharisees and Sadducee!

1 comment:

Steve Corey said...

Gail;

-----“Seek the LORD, all you humble of the land, who do his commands; seek righteousness, seek humility; perhaps you may be hidden on the day of the wrath of the LORD.” (Zephaniah 2:3) What makes salt salty? What makes yeast yeasty? Why did Jesus choose salt as the metaphorical characteristic of His followers? Why did He choose yeast as the metaphorical characteristic of the Pharisees, Sadducees, and of His kingdom, too (of all things?)
-----The ordinary human specimen is like a vacuum. It starts out empty of knowledge and understanding and sucks up from its own proximity whatever it finds to be filling. Yeast is just the thing for such a specimen. It is a microorganism thriving on sugars, mass producing prolifically. So, yeast is not only something to suck in, but once within, it fills even more by its own nature of reproduction. Both evil and good operate inside the very psychology of people like yeast. We try to replicate what is familiar and found to be useful to us. And that replication is not enough when made within our own individual selves. The sucking vacuum of the human soul paradoxically must see the same replicated in those around us before it can feel satisfactorily filled. Thus politics everywhere you turn, in government, in the church, in the workplace, on the playground, and even at home. Camaraderie is the path to strength according to the human soul.
-----But the whole world can go wrong and suck down the spoiled soup of Satan himself, and no strength will be had for any individual to stand on the Day of Judgment. That Day is the test of all strength, for it will be encountered by all. And the strength necessary for that Day does not come from either the minds nor the camaraderie of mankind. It comes from the mind of God worked into a plan effected in the individual. It is like something interjected into the biological process which is not created by biological processes. Yeast is bound up in the rotating circle of biological life. Salt is an inanimate chemical. We do not produce it ourselves, like the Pharisees and Sadducees produced their own characters. The character of the Lord is produced within the individual by processes the Holy Spirit makes of the new life sparked by the individual’s humble turn to and abiding in Jesus Christ. Though the whole world coming against you might effect your biological condition (your body would then most likely die,) it will not whatsoever effect the salt in which you choose to remain. It will merely hasten you to the Judgment Day wherein you will stand by your salt while the whole world would die in its biological end.
-----Pharisees and Sadducees need each other to suck up to. The yeastiness of the kingdom of heaven is not that way. Salty ones need each other to feed and build up and love and exalt before the Lord in prayer and honest concern. The yeast of the kingdom is not spread because the soul is empty and sucking for more, but because the soul is filled up and overrunning with new life. The salt’s presence in a loaf of bread dough constrains the yeast process to producing purpose. Without salt from God's righteousness, yeast just grows chaotically wild, and all its beneficial purpose goes lost in the messes it makes.
-----In the same way those who are individually salty salt the world. Standing in their salt, they constrain the spread of the foamy senselessness around them. But as fewer choose to stand in their salt, Pharisaical yeast is fomenting a people vacuously readied to suck in the antichrist.

Love you all,
Steve Corey