Salt can be bad for your body. That’s when you over salt.
In the New Testament, salt and light are two useful metaphors about how we as Christians can and should be effective in reaching God’s truth and love to others.
In one verse in Leviticus, 2:13, the application of salt was literal. You shall apply salt to your grain / meat / food offering as part of your sacrificial worship.
- The symbolism here is as strong as the salt in the New Testament.
- Salt is a preservation agent, and carries a kind of covenant seal God has with us, so it acts as a reminder.
Salt might be a common enough product, but it needs refinement and so it’s not so much a “freely available” item like…. sands and rocks in the desert. Most people would have some, but the point here is that it is an expense item.
Salt is a central, important element in a lot of food.
You can do some work to find out as many meanings of salt that can be applied here, in our everyday context, in the context of Leviticus, as well as that in the New Testament. I want to take a different angle on this – because of the rich meanings of salt, as well as its strong properties (saltiness), this action of application of salt speaks of investment. It speaks of own our faith.
This application of salt (in today’s context, this is symbolic) then is our response to God, that we want to react back more than just “OK” and move on, but perhaps spending more time praying, and more effort in remembering God’s love and faithfulness to you and those you love.
Leviticus 2:13 instructs us, three times, about application of salt to all food offering. I don’t know whether it was written as a reminder. But it sounds more like a reinforcement:
- The first time you hear it, you think “huh? even put salt on food offering to God? He can taste it?”
- The second time it is said, it seems to be an affirmative response.
- The third time you hear it, it makes you think the literal meaning is not likely the point, it’s making you think there is more than this.
It is an act, and the use of products, that speaks about something more than the act and product. It’s about you and God. The visible points to the invisible. The inferred invisible part makes the visible metaphor stronger.
The third time you hear it, it makes you think the literal meaning is not likely the point, it’s making you think there is more than this.
