“Season all your grain offerings with salt. Do not leave the salt of the covenant of your God out of your grain offerings; add salt to all your offerings.”
As salt was regarded as a necessary ingredient of regular diet, so Israelites were instructed to add salt to sacrifices offered to the LORD. There are Arabic expressions, "There is salt between us"; "He has eaten of my salt," "eat the salt of the palace”, which means partaking of hospitality which cemented friendships. Formal covenants were generally confirmed by sacrificial meals and salt was always present. Since salt is a preservative, it would easily become symbolic of an enduring covenant. Offerings to Yahweh were to be by a statute forever, "a covenant of salt for ever before Yahweh" (Numbers 18:19).
When the disciples caught fish, they had to get it to market soon. The only way to deliver it in a condition in which anyone would want to buy it was to salt it down. They would pack it between layers of salt so they could carry it with them down into the markets in Jerusalem where it could be sold as fresh as when they caught it. Salt arrested decay and contamination. It kept fish edible.
In that same manner followers of Jesus Christ are to preserve our society with righteousness. Our lives become a living sacrifice to the Lord and living for Christ affects our sin-filled world. We are to stand as a preventative to corruption and decay in our society and world. The influence of Christians is supposed to hinder increasing sin and corruption of man and their devises. We need to be people that say no to corruption, be it in government, schools, social agencies as well as churches. We need to vote and speak up on issues on morality, pornography, injustice, truth, honesty, abortion. We need to preserve the sanctity of family and marriage, to preserve freedoms that will build goodness in our society and not freely impose the evils on one another.
Christians need to preserve our society by reminding us winning is not the only thing in life. Sports researcher Robert Goldman polled 198 world class athletes and asked, "Would you take a pill that would guarantee a gold medal even if you knew that it would kill you in five years? More than 50% agreed they would.
We need to foster a keen sense of right and wrong in the early years of children. High on the list of worldly priorities is pleasure and good times without weighing long range consequences that scar and hurt persons for years to come. It's no wonder that the kids who want to remain chaste, often feel like prudes and freaks today. Pornographic music videos, raunchy TV, internet and teen sexploitation on cell phones make it seem like everybody's doing it.
We are responsible before our Lord, not only of living honestly and Christ-like in our world and by so doing we preserve it from getting worse. We do that by living like Jesus.
Application: Ask God how He wants You to bring salt this worldly system.
Prayer: Lord, teach me to be a salt and light to those around me. Show me how to impact our world for You
