INTRODUCTION
The world is a difficult place with many problems. Thankfully for Christians, there is an authoritative Word (the Bible) and there is a supernatural God who lives in a realm of the kingdom of God. Through a personal relationship with Christ, that realm can come breaking into reality here, and things can change. That is the heart of the message in the Beatitudes, which we studied in the last two articles.
Around the 1700s, a view of humanity called the Enlightenment emerged. The Enlightenment said human beings, using their own reason, can figure things out and get better and better. The Enlightenment supposed that human beings are evolving toward higher and higher life forms. Man doesn’t necessarily need a supernatural being to get better.
The Enlightenment was a particular view of humanity that was incredibly optimistic. The Enlightenment looked at Christianity and said, “All this gloom about sin just lowers our self-esteem. All this talk about authority does is destroy our creativity. Education, scientific advancement, and the arts all help us see what kind of world we want, and we’re going to make it independently ourselves.” Of course, what was the result? The result has not been greater optimism. The lasting result of the Enlightenment was unbelievable pessimism because it made us confront the true nature and failings of humanity. It’s hard to look at the world today by itself and be optimistic. Why? Because the world as it is is subject to decay. It’s disintegrating. It’s falling apart. The world is a decaying and dark place.
In The Sermon on the Mount, the Lord Jesus uses two powerful metaphors to describe His people and how they are to respond to the decay and darkness of the world. He calls us Salt and Light. Both of these substances are valuable and useful. Jesus teaches here that the world is falling apart, but he also teaches how to fight against decay and darkness.
Matthew 5:13-16
13 “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.
14 “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.
15 Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house.
16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.
SCRIPTURAL ANALYSIS
It is interesting that these verses should follow the Beatitudes. In the Beatitudes, Jesus gives some qualities that ought to be present in every citizen in the Kingdom. In light of the countercultural perspectives enunciated in the Beatitudes, it would be easy to assume that Jesus was calling his followers to a separate or quasi-monastic lifestyle. Here, Jesus proclaims precisely the opposite. This text encourages us to reimagine our role in the world as God’s ambassadors of redemption. The sayings on salt and light are natural outgrowths of the Beatitudes since the kingdom life found in Jesus’ disciples is demonstrated in their lives in this world.
Verse 13
In the centuries before modern refrigeration, salt was the method of choice for preventing bacteria from poisoning food. Salt was so vital for this purpose that wars were fought over salt, and entire economies were based on it. Salt could literally make the difference between life and death in a time when fresh food was unavailable.
Just as salt prevents or kills bacteria in food, the kingdom servant prevents or confronts corruption in the world. Salt preserves and heals. Jesus was indicating the influence his disciples would have on the moral decay of a fallen world. If our culture is putrefying and decaying, which it is, we, as the church, should work against that decay.
Strictly speaking, salt cannot lose its saltiness because sodium chloride is a stable compound. What, then, did Jesus mean? Jesus is saying that as true disciples go out into the world as salt, they cannot lose what has made them disciples because they have become changed persons, made new by the life of the kingdom of God. Once Jesus changes you, you are changed.
If a disciple isn’t working against the decay of the world, they have nothing to offer the world because they are no different from the world. The challenge is for professing disciples to examine their nature and to confess honestly whether or not they have been transformed by Jesus as laid out in the preceding Beatitudes.
Verses 14-15
Jesus again used the emphatic “you,” clearly stating that this is already what a believer is, not something he might become later. It is the nature of a kingdom servant to be light in the world.
In the Old Testament, light is a symbol linked with purity, truth, knowledge, revelation, and hope, as opposed to sin, ignorance, and lack of direction. In this case, disciples must ensure that their light shines broadly.
“Light” is an essential theme in Scripture, usually emphasizing the removal of darkness in the unfolding of biblical history and theology. The literal contrast between physical light and darkness provokes a profound metaphorical contrast between good and evil, God and evil forces, believers and unbelievers. Jesus later declares that he is “the light of the world.”
Any believer who fails to function as light is going against his nature as God’s new creation. The believer has no light inherent in himself; his light is the reflected light of Christ. Believers are to make sure that nothing comes between them and their source of light because they reflect the light, not source it.
Christ’s disciples must live for Christ, shining like a city on a mountain, glowing in the night for all to see. They are like lights in a dark world, showing clearly what Christ is like. Because Jesus is the light of the world, his followers must reflect his light.
Verse 16
This is the first time Matthew calls God Father, emphasizing the closeness of the relationship a believer has with God, again referencing the reflecting light idea. The closer you are to a light, the stronger the reflection. It is the Christian’s commission to live in such a way as to make God visible in a world that is blind to him.
The light metaphor continues but emphasizes more directly the positive influence disciples will make in this sin-darkened world. The focus now shifts from the disciples' character to their good works, which result from Jesus’ character in us. We not only carry the light of the gospel of the kingdom of God, but we are that light. Christians must let their good works shine before the rest of the world so that others may praise God.
Jesus’s words make clear that the disciple is not the ultimate author of their good works. If the disciple were the author of his good works, they would receive praise. However, Jesus taught that only the Father in heaven is to be praised for a disciple’s good works, for he is the true source of good works. The righteousness demanded by the Sermon on the Mount is a divine gift that God imparts to Jesus’s followers. Everything taught in these first 16 verses (Beatitudes and Salt & Light) of the Sermon on the Mount points back to the nature and character of God.
TODAY’S KEY TRUTH
In a World of Decay & Darkness, Be Salt & Light.
APPLICATION
This passage teaches that the world needs salt and light. Both metaphors raise essential questions about Christian involvement in society. We are not called to change the world by control of secular power structures, nor are we promised that we can Christianize the legislation and values of the world. We are called to be active preservative agents, indeed irritants, in calling the world to God’s standards. We dare not form isolated Christian enclaves to which the world pays no attention. We are out in the world, changing the world one person at a time. Just like the entire sermon on the mount, we are called to change the world from the inside out.
Salt, in the Near Eastern times, was used as a preservative. They didn’t have deep freezers then, so the only way you could keep meat from going bad immediately was to salt it like crazy. Light actually has the same kind of effect. You must keep in mind that there were no electric lights there, right? What were the lamps that Jesus was talking about? He is talking about a wick floating in a little cup of oil.
If you’ve ever been in a city where everything has gone out, and there is no light except candles, you realize how dark things really get at night. We don’t even know how dark things get at night, certainly not here. Now let me tell you this. When you’re really in utter darkness, utter darkness, not just dark, but you’ve got lights from the outside coming in through the cracks, but utter darkness, it gives you a sense of unbelievable vertigo, disorientation, and dislocation. I was once touring a cave where the guide said he was about to turn out his lantern so we could “see utter darkness.” He meant no light pollution would be in effect. My hand on my nose was not visible. That is the darkness of the world.
What Jesus is saying when he says the world needs salt, and the world needs light is the world, human existence, left to itself, inevitably goes to greater and greater disorder, darkness, and disintegration.
Things fall apart. Everything falls apart. Think of yourself physically. We’re all falling apart, and it takes a terrific amount of work to stop it, right? I work out regularly. But I tell those people I work out with that the most challenging exercise I do is getting down and up from the floor. That wasn’t the case as a young athlete. Everything falls apart.
The natural tendency of everything is to fall apart. Eventually, we die, and we literally fall apart, and eventually, all of our molecules will separate from one another. As horrible as that is, everything else is the same way. Everything from flowers to rocks. Flowers fall apart quicker than we do. Rocks fall apart more slowly, but even the rocks split eventually. They’re sand, and eventually, they’re nothing. Everything falls apart physically.
Think of this also relationally and socially. All relationships tend to go bad. Only with the greatest of effort can you keep relationships together, which just goes to show that what Jesus is saying is correct: that the natural tendency is to go to greater and greater disorder. That’s the reason why, for example, the races can’t get along. If you’ve ever been in a multi-cultural, interracial situation, you know you have to constantly work, constantly pray, continually talk, constantly work and work and work to make sure communication is okay and we’re able to keep on seeing eye to eye.
The minute you stop working like crazy, things fall apart, and there’s misunderstanding, resentment, and anger. Look at marriage, the ultimate relationship. Look how hard it is to keep that thing intact. Look how easy it is for that to unravel. Crime and racism and war and class struggle and labor management problems and divorce. All of these things just show that the natural tendency in the social area is to what? To disintegration. To disorder.
Think about the psychological. I mean, we can keep on going, can’t we? Nobody is naturally happy, and only with the greatest of effort can you keep yourself psychologically intact. Disintegration is right around the corner any time you start to coast. There is depression. There’s anxiety. The context for all of this is something you can just ask a physicist or an astronomer about, and they will tell you that the entire universe itself is running down. The universe itself is running down. The second law of thermodynamics, in general, is that Energy dissipates or runs down. Eventually, the sun is going to burn out. Everything is going to pieces. Things left to themselves go to pieces, and that’s what Jesus is saying when he says the world needs salt and the world needs light.
We are out in the world, changing the world one person at a time. Just like the entire Sermon on the Mount, we are called to change the world from the inside out.
In a World of Decay & Darkness, Be Salt & Light.
CONCLUSION
When Jesus Christ says, “You are the salt and the light of the world,” he is saying what a Christian should be like. Salt and light expose decay and darkness. If you are light, that means your life should be so beautiful that when it comes into contact with other parts of the environment, the beauty of your life shows other things for what they really are.
For example, if you’re a Christian, then just by your very presence, you show up, you reveal the dishonesty in the business. You reveal the gossip in the office. You reveal the racism in your neighborhood. You reveal the corruption in your political sphere, just simply by being a Christian and being present. Sometimes, it's by using words to call wrong out, but because you have the light of Christ within you, darkness is naturally exposed even without words in those moments. You walk on in, and it immediately makes the racism look like racism. It makes the promiscuity look like promiscuity. It makes the gossip look like gossip. It makes the corruption look like corruption just by you saying, “I’m going to live according to the truth and beauty of Jesus Christ.”
If your life, by its order, by the way in which you handle stress, by the way in which you take criticism, by the way in which you treat the people who work under you, if you are like Jesus Christ, the beauty of that is going to show up the reality of the environment. If you are a Christian walking like Jesus Christ, then the beauty of your life shows everybody around you what is good and what is wrong.
So here’s the question: Is your life so remarkable that it shows the constant contrast between the beauty of Christ and the world around you, or do you blend in, and there is nothing remarkable about your life at all?
In a World of Decay & Darkness, Be Salt & Light.
If you are salt and light, that means you bring joy to people. Salt is not just a preservative. What else is it? It’s a seasoning. It was the original seasoning. It brings out the taste. It makes things taste good. Light, of course, is beautiful because it shows up the beauty of things.
Friends, what it means to be salt and light is you are not a wet blanket. This is what’s really tough because, on the one hand, we just said the beauty of your life can show up corruption, right? And, of course, that can get you some persecution. The beauty of your life shows up racism. It can get you persecuted. But, on the other hand, at the same time, you are the joy of the people around you. Are people attracted to you because of your joy, or do they avoid you because of your constant negativity and complaints?
You are to be the stability in your neighborhood. You are to be the glue at your work because a Christian doesn’t look at a situation and say, “What can I get out of it?” The Christian acts like salt and light by getting in there and saying, “How can I bring the best out of this organization, out of this group, out of these people?” One of the big problems in business today is people just want to come into the business or a deal and say, “How can I get the most out of this deal or group to use it as a stepping stone to keep on moving up? How can I enhance myself?”It's about what I, me-me-me, can get out of something.
A Christian says, “How can I make this the best possible place?” Being salt and light, in part, means putting those around you in a place where they can be greater and more successful than you. A Christian brings joy to others because he or she has put others ahead of themselves.
Being salt and light, in part, means putting those around you in a place where they can be greater and more successful than you.
In a World of Decay & Darkness, Be Salt & Light.
Neither salt nor light exists for its own sake. Salt needs to stay salty to fulfill its function, and light needs to be lifted up to give light. These metaphors imply a turning outward toward God's mission in the world. God’s mission is to redeem a broken, decaying, and darkening creation through Jesus's life, death, and resurrection.
The follower of Jesus is summoned into a mission on behalf of and for God in this world. Salt and light both evoke the impact a follower of Jesus is to have on others. To be salt and light means getting involved individually with people’s lives and showing them the beauty of Christ. Do people have cause to praise God (v. 16) because of us?
Jesus’s disciples inherit the character of the heavenly Father and glorify him by displaying the righteousness described in the Sermon on the Mount. This righteous living is essential to our mission of purifying a corrupt world and bringing salvation to the nations.
The story and the salt and light metaphors reveal that our, the church's, fundamental task is to represent God’s presence by serving God in God’s mission. Our task is to represent God and demonstrate God’s goodness, grace, holiness, and justice to this world. Salt and light are about not just what we do but who we are.
In a World of Decay & Darkness, Be Salt & Light.