Leviticus 1:1-3:17
Mark 1:29-2:12
Psalm 35:17-28
Proverbs 9:13-18
Leviticus 2:13 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.
The salt caught my attention. It brought to mind Jesus telling us that we are the salt of the earth. So I pulled up the Enduring Word Bible Commentary Leviticus Chapter 2
It says...
3. (13) Each grain offering must include salt.
And every offering of your grain offering you shall season with salt; you shall not allow the salt of the covenant of your God to be lacking from your grain offering. With all your offerings you shall offer salt.
a. Every offering of your grain offering you shall season with salt: Salt was an important part of the offering because it spoke of purity, of preservation, and of expense. Every sacrifice offered to God should be pure, should be enduring, and should cost something. In this one verse, God repeated the command three times.
i. As a preservative salt will slow or virtually stop the normal process of rot in meat. It is the nature of flesh to spoil, but salt-cured meats stay good.
ii. Salt also spoke of friendship. According to ancient custom, a bond of friendship was established through the eating of salt. It was said that once you had eaten a man’s salt, you were his friend for life. God wanted every sacrifice to be a reminder of relationship.
iii. Previously, God commanded that sacrifices should not contain honey (Leviticus 2:11). The command to include salt and exclude honey means God wants the sincerity of our service, not things made artificially sweet. “There is a kind of molasses godliness which I can never stomach.” (Spurgeon)
iv. The fact that God commanded that every grain offering should include a pinch of salt shows that small things matter in our service to God. Our faithfulness in small things honors God. “My brethren, nothing in the service of God is trifling. A pinch of salt may seem to us exceedingly unimportant, but before the Lord it may not be so.” (Spurgeon)
v. “A special chamber in the temple was designated for the storage of salt (m. Mid. 5:3).” (Rooker)
b. The salt of the covenant of your God: Therefore, a covenant of salt had specific characteristics. It was:
· A pure covenant (salt stays pure as a chemical compound).
· An enduring covenant (salt makes things preserve and endure).
· A valuable covenant (salt was expensive).
i. “Salt is a preservative, so it symbolizes the notion that the covenant cannot be destroyed by fire or decay. The phrase ‘covenant of salt’ emphasizes the durability or eternality of the covenant.” (Rooker)
ii. The idea of the covenant of salt is repeated in Numbers 18:19 and 2 Chronicles 13:5.
c. With all your offerings you shall offer salt: Jesus spoke of the idea of salt and sacrifice in Mark 9:49-50. There He said that people, as living sacrifices to God, must be seasoned with fire and salt.
i. Because salt spoke of so many things – the covenant, fellowship, sincerity, purity – the inclusion of salt with all your offerings speaks to the way we should serve God. In all our service, we must:
· Remember the covenant.
· Remember fellowship.
· Remember sincerity.
· Remember purity.
"Salt was an important part of the offering because it spoke of purity, of preservation, and of expense." If we are to be the salt of the world then we should be...
Pure in comparison to the world which we can be with Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit in us.
Enduring in faithfulness in this world that wants to eat away at the foundations of faith. As salt we can preserve Christian values in the places we touch even when they are being eroded away in the public square. Remember that "Our faithfulness in small things honors God"
Our lives should be valuable to the Kingdom. As a child of God our lives are valuable because of the value of the gift we have been given in Jesus and we should live in that truth.
Salt is associated with friendship. We should be loving a welcoming and be a friend to others. As Jesus is a friend to us.
"Because salt spoke of so many things – the covenant, fellowship, sincerity, purity – the inclusion of salt with all your offerings speaks to the way we should serve God. In all our service, we must:
· Remember the covenant.
· Remember fellowship.
· Remember sincerity.
· Remember purity."
Mark 1:44 “See that you don’t tell this to anyone. But go, show yourself to the priest and offer the sacrifices that Moses commanded for your cleansing, as a testimony to them.”
I find it interesting that Jesus tells the healed leper to go and offer the sacrifices required. He talks so much about how the heart is what matters when it comes to the law. We know that Jesus heart is to honor the Father so He encourages this. Even though His sacrifice will fulfill the sacrificial system for the forgiveness of sins this sacrifice is done not just to fulfill the law but "as a testimony" to the priests. Check out Enduring Word Bible Commentary Mark Chapter 1
c. Show yourself to the priest: Jesus told the former leper to go to the priests to carry out the ceremony the law required when a leper was cleansed. Jesus did this first to honor the law of God, but also as a testimony to the priests that an incurable disease had been cured.
i. The elements used in the Levitical ceremony for the cleansing of a leper (cedar wood, hyssop, and scarlet) are the same elements used in cleansing someone who was defiled by a dead body (Numbers 19:6, 19:13, 19:18 and Leviticus 14:4-7).
ii. Since lepers were never healed, these priests had never conducted this ceremony. When they had to look up the procedure for this ceremony and had to carry it out for the first time, it would be a strong witness that the Messiah was among them.
When our hearts are right our lives should be a living sacrifice seasoned with salt that testifies to the world the good news of Jesus!
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