Preachers Monthly Mark 9:50 Salt is good: but if the salt have lost his saltiness, with which will you season it? Have salt in yourselves… I. LOOK AT WHAT IS HERE SO EXPRESSIVELY SYMBOLIZED. Salt is necessary to sacrifice. 1. Christ is the symbol of the covenant of everlasting mercy, but of everlasting mercy as the basis of a sinner's new life. 2. Salt symbolizes not only God's covenant of mercy with man, but man's covenant with God. The life of the animal was devoted and offered with salt to signify — not only the Divine fact of atonement, but the human fact of self-surrender: and the worshipper said, "I have given the life of the animal to Thee to signify that henceforth my own life is forever Thine." 3. Salt is also the principle of counteractive grace — "Have salt in yourselves." 4. Salt signifies the preventive, corrective, life-nourishing power of the Christian society in the world — "Ye are the salt of the earth." 5. Salt is also the principle of peace. It destroys the unbenevolent passions. II. The Saviour's lesson concerning the deterioration of the salt. 1. The possibility of deterioration — "If the salt have lost its savour." 2. Christ marks here three things as characteristic of men in this state. (1) They are useless,. (2) They are contemptible. (3) They are rejected with disdain. (Preachers Monthly.) Parallel Verses KJV: Salt is good: but if the salt have lost his saltness, wherewith will ye season it? Have salt in yourselves, and have peace one with another. |
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