Salt and Light // Matthew 5:13-16

Table Question: What is the most useful gadget that you have purchased in the last year?

*Pray and Read Matthew 5:13-16

What does usefulness for God’s Kingdom look like?

*Jesus uses two metaphors to illustrate how Christians, Kingdom citizens, ought to be useful as they operate in the world.

If you’re anything like me, you read this and think, “Ok I kinda think I know what’s being said here, but I feel like there is something that I’m missing.”

I think this is because when we look at a passage like this, we tend to only look at it from one side. The really great thing about the Bible is that, in any given passage of Scripture, there is one underlying truth that can be applied in many ways.

It’s like shining a light through a diamond. The diamond remains the same, but if you rotate it, the colors it projects can look different.

My hope is to take what Jesus says here and look at them from a few different angles. So, I want us to take a closer look at the two metaphors in verses 13-16, and also answer the question, “so what?” by looking to v. 17-20.

Main Idea: Kingdom citizens should be agents for good in a dying, dark world.

Kingdom citizens are like salt (v. 13)

Depending where you look for the purpose of salt that Jesus is referring to here, you’ll get a few different answers that influence how you might understand the ultimate meaning of this text.

So, instead of focusing on only one use of salt, I want us to look at two, because I believe that will give us a little fuller understanding of all that Jesus is attempting to tell us in this illustration.

Salt purifies and preserves

Salt has many uses, but in the OT it is most often a purifying agent (Ex 30:35; Lv 2:13; 2Kg 2:21; Ezk 16:4). As the salt of the earth, Jesus’s disciples are to purify a corrupt world through their example of righteous living and their proclamation of the gospel. However, contaminated salt does not promote purity. The verb translated lose its taste indicates foolish and immoral behavior. It refers to a professing disciple whose unrighteous lifestyle promotes destruction rather than purification. Such salt is only good for spreading over ground where you want to kill vegetation. Such is the fatal effect of an unrighteous disciple’s lifestyle.

Quarles, Charles L. 2017. “Matthew.” In CSB Study Bible: Notes, edited by Edwin A. Blum and Trevin Wax, 1506. Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers.

Whenever salt stops doing what it’s supposed to do, it only has negative and deadly effects.

2. Salt enhances the flavor of whatever it seasons.

Think about why you add salt to your food: to make it taste better!

But we don’t add salt to most of our food so that it tastes like salt, but so that we can get a better experience of the flavors that are already there.

An article funded by the National Institutes of Health says this about how salt works:

Salt imparts more than just a salt taste to overall food flavor. In work with a variety of foods (soups, rice, eggs, and potato chips), salt was found to improve the perception of product thickness, enhance sweetness, mask metallic or chemical off-notes, and round out overall flavor while improving flavor intensity…

One understood mechanism by which sodium-containing compounds may improve overall flavor is by the suppression of bitter tastes.

Institute of Medicine (US) Committee on Strategies to Reduce Sodium Intake; Henney JE, Taylor CL, Boon CS, editors. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2010. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK50958/#:~:text=Use%20of%20salt%20decreases%20water,1995%3B%20Hutton%2C%202002).

Consider then what this means for Christians… do we enhance the good in the people and the places where the Lord has placed us?

How does our culture stereotype Christians? Think about any time there is a priest or someone who is “religious” in a TV show or movie?

“Suck the fun out of everything,” “weird,” “hypocritical,” or “not trustworthy”

Now partially I think this goes back to what Jesus said back in v. 11 about being persecuted, but I also think its partially because we have given those who oppose Christ the ammunition to shoot at His church.

How many instagram or TikTok reels have you seen of a Christian with a microphone or a megaphone outside of an LGBTQ rally or an abortion clinic telling people that they’re going to hell instead of actually listening to their story, resonating with their hurt, and telling them that there is a Savior who offers them a life outside of where they are looking for answers or happiness?

We are not called to destroy but to build up. We are called to be agents of good in an evil and dying world. When there is good, we should celebrate it and glorify God for it, because if it’s good, it has come from Him.

That is how salt works. Secondly…

Kingdom citizens are like light (v. 14-16)

Again, let’s look at two different functions of light:

Light removes darkness

v. 14: A city on a hill cannot be hidden.

The ability to see a singular house on top of a mountain that has lights on. It can be seen from miles away. This can serve as a landmark to help us better understand our surrounding.

You may have heard this before, but darkness is only the absence of light. There is no physical darkness molecule. No element on the periodic table called darkness.

That’s why darkness is often so unsettling… you can’t see; you don’t know what’s around you. It’s disorienting. But, look what the Bible tells us about Jesus in John 1:

John 1:4–5 CSB

In him was life, and that life was the light of men. That light shines in the darkness, and yet the darkness did not overcomeB it.

Immediately when Jesus comes into the world (or our own personal experience of the world), everything becomes oriented around Him. He is the Light by which we can see, make sense of, and orient ourselves around.

Light guides and directs

John 8:12 CSB

12 Jesus spoke to them again: “I am the light of the world. Anyone who follows me will never walk in the darkness but will have the light of life.”

Jesus is the True Light, and everything is darkness in comparison to Him.

What kind of light are we then if Jesus is THE Light?

v. 15: we are lamp light

Lamps must be lit by another, does not create light on it’s own

We are only able to be a light as we are associated with the True Light, Jesus.

In Him, we become smaller lights that point and lead others to Jesus.

And similar to salt that no longer works like salt, a lamp with no light serves no purpose.

What good is saltless salt, what good is a lightless lamp, and what good is a Christless Christian?*

So we recognize that we can be useful, agents for good in a dying and dark world… but what’s the point? The entire world wants to do good as they define it, so what’s the difference? Are we doing good simply to be good? Is it self-serving, so people have a better opinion of us? Or is there something else?

That brings us to our second and final question:

What’s the purpose for being salt and light?

To display God’s glory and goodness to those dying and trapped in darkness.

You can tell who the citizens of heaven are because they are the best citizens in their earthly cities and countries. You can tell who the kingdom workers are because they are the best workers in their earthly professions.

In the mundane, in the joyful, in the difficult aspects of our everyday lives, we have the opportunity to witness to the glory of God and His gospel that is shown to us in Jesus Christ.