Why does the Bible make a big deal about salt?

Have you ever thought about salt? Other than to shake it onto your food or if you live in Michigan your roads in winter, you might not consider how many different ways salt is mentioned in the Bible. In my reading of the Gospel of Mark the other night, I ran across this passage:

“For everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good, but if the salt has lost its saltiness, how will you make it salty again? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.”

Mark 9:49-50

The first sentence stopped me. Everyone? And what does it mean to be salted with fire?

This led me back to Leviticus where the grain offering is explained. (Leviticus 2:13) The Israelites were not to bring a grain offering with yeast or honey to be burned on the altar. They were to season the grain with salt. Then it could be a burnt offering, a pleasing aroma to the Lord. It was called the salt of the covenant with your God.

So salt had to do with their covenant with God. Which covenant? That doesn’t seem to be as clear, but God also made a covenant of salt with David, promising that his descendants would always sit on the throne of Israel. (2 Chronicles 13:5) Hmm…why a covenant of salt?

In the New Testament verse from Mark that I quoted above, Jesus said, “Have salt in yourselves…” And in Matthew He repeats the idea, “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)

Okay. To recap:

1. There was a covenant of salt with God and Israel.
2. There is a covenant of salt with David and his descendants.
3. Everyone will be salted with fire.
4. We (believers) are the salt of the earth.
5. We are to have salt in ourselves.
6. Salt needs to stay salty to be of any use.

The covenants of salt are hard to understand, but even today “bread and salt between them” is a welcoming thing, a means to offer friendship or even protection. Salt made an agreement legally binding. It would not be offered to an enemy unless reconciliation was sought.

Salt also:

1. acts as a preservative.
2. destroys vegetation or land so that nothing could grow there.

When Jesus said we were the salt of the earth, we are part of the new covenant and having salt within us makes me think that perhaps salt is equated with faith. Our faith in Jesus as God’s Son who died for our sins and rose again makes us the salt of the earth. A pleasing aroma to God, as in the grain offering like the covenant of salt with God that Israel had.

As for salt destroying vegetation…when a nation conquered another nation, they would destroy the people and burn the town and then salt the land so that nothing would grow there. So salt preserved what was good, like meat or in non food terms, it preserves the good in a society. But it can destroy what is not good. Could salting the earth be like destroying evil? I wonder…

Lastly, I looked up whether or not salt can actually lose its saltiness. This is what I found: “Natural salts (not iodized) are a common mineral that will never go bad.” Never go bad? Then why did Jesus say if salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? And it is useless, to be trampled on?

Maybe He said this with the knowledge that the people knew that salt couldn’t lose its saltiness. And if that’s true, and His followers are the salt of the earth, then can we lose our saltiness? We can lose our effectiveness. We can lose heart. We can doubt and lose faith. But ultimately, if we are His, we can’t lose these things permanently. The salt within us can’t lose its saltiness. But it can be hidden and no longer preserve good and destroy evil. We are all too easily tempted to become ineffective, which our enemy the devil loves to see happen to us. So though salt might not be able to lose its saltiness, the example is clear in that we can lose our effectiveness.

Salt. I never thought of it as so potent and so important in Scripture. Or in our lives. But we need to remember that salt meant something to the ancient world of Jesus’ day and it hasn’t lost its importance in ours. We just need to understand it. And though I might not understand it well, I think it’s safe to say that Jesus wants His people to keep His covenant of faith in Him and have salt in us that preserves truth and lives in peace with one another and stands up to and destroys evil wherever we find it.

~Selah