IDENTITY: Daily Reading Plan #6
Matthew 5:13-16
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 underfoot.
You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.
Jesus says to His disciples, "You are the salt of the earth." Then, as now, salt served a variety of functions. Before the days of refrigeration, salt was used widely as a preservative by rubbing it into meat. In some cases, it could be used as a kind of fertilizer. Also, of course, it was used to bring flavor to food. Jesus' call for followers to be "salt of the earth" carries those uses, symbolically, into our spiritual lives.
As salt preserves meat from rotting, believers in Jesus, distributed around the world, help to preserve humanity from falling into godlessness, immorality, chaos, and the resulting judgment. Salt permanently changes the flavor of food, just as the influence of godly people can change a culture. The main point is that Christians serve a godly purpose in the world simply by living out what we believe about Jesus.
Christians stop serving that purpose when we stop living in faithfulness to God. The recent references to the Beatitudes put that purpose in context. When Jesus' followers stop being poor in spirit, living in repentance and meekness, having an appetite for righteousness, and being merciful, they stop serving their purpose on earth. This is just as catastrophic, and unthinkable, as if salt were to lose its flavor.
Some object to this metaphor by saying that salt never loses its saltiness, according to chemistry. This misses the point and is not true in a practical sense. Jesus' teaching can be taken to mean, in part, that certain qualities are as innate to a born-again believer as saltiness is to salt. The idea of losing those properties is unthinkable. In a more practical sense, the salt which people used daily was not chemically pure. It could be diluted, or even contaminated. That would result in something that was supposed to be salt but didn't taste or act like salt anymore. That made it useless, and subject to disposal.
Jesus indicates the same can happen to a disciple who stops living faithfully to Christ in the world. The point here is not about loss of salvation, but a loss of purpose. "Bad salt" isn't destroyed or burnt, it's simply ignored along with the dust of the earth.
In the previous verse, Jesus compared His disciples to salt (Matthew 5:13). Now He compares them to light. He calls them the "light of the world," in fact. Light was a crucial symbol in the Jewish worldview. Just as Greek culture prized knowledge, or Roman culture valued glory, or modern American culture touts freedom, Hebrew culture's ideal standard was light. This concept factors heavily in biblical explanations of godliness and truth (Proverbs 4:18–19; Matthew 4:16; John 8:12; 2 Corinthians 4:6).
Spiritually speaking, there is no light in the world apart from Jesus Christ. His light, though, shines through every person who belongs to Him. In this way, the light of Christ is distributed into the darkness in every corner of humanity. That this light is meant to be visible to the world is also important. Jesus adds to this metaphor by referring to a city positioned on top of a hill. It is not meant to be hidden; a city on a hill is meant to be seen and found even in the darkness of night. During the time of Christ, the walls around a city on a hill were often made from white limestone, which would be relatively easy to see, even on a dim night.
In the same way, the light of Christ is not meant to be hidden on the earth. It is meant to shine out brightly from all who belong to Christ. It is meant to be discovered, in this way, by those still in the darkness. Jesus will add to this point in the following verse that Christ's light should not be covered up in the lives of His followers. It is meant to be seen.
Reflection Questions
- What do these passages reveal about our identity?
- What does it look like to find my identity in who God says I am as the salt of the earth?
- What does it look like to find my identity in who God says I am as the light of the world?
- How does seeing myself and others this way cause me to change the way I think about and act toward myself and others?
