'Every one shall be salted with fire.'--Mark ix. 49.
Our Lord has just been uttering some of the most solemn words that
ever came from His gracious lips. He has been enjoining the severest
self-suppression, extending even to mutilation and excision of the
eye, the hand, or the foot, that might cause us to stumble. He has
been giving that sharp lesson on the ground of plain common sense and
enlightened self-regard. It _is_ better, obviously, to live maimed
than to die whole. The man who elects to keep a mortified limb, and
thereby to lose life, is a suicide and a fool. It is a solemn thought
that a similar mad choice is possible in the moral and spiritual
region.
To these stern injunctions, accompanied by the awful sanctions of that
consideration, our Lord appends the words of my text. They are obscure
and have often been misunderstood. This is not the place to enter on a
discussion of the various explanations that have been proposed of
them. A word or two is all that is needful to put us in possession of
the point of view from which I wish to lay them on your hearts at this
time.
I take the 'every one' of my text to mean not mankind generally, but
every individual of the class whom our Lord is addressing--that is to
say, His disciples. He is laying down the law for all Christians. I
take the paradox which brings together 'salting' and 'fire,' to refer,
not to salt as a means of communicating savour to food, but as a means
of preserving from putrefaction. And I take the 'fire' here to refer,
not to the same process which is hinted at in the awful preceding
words, 'the fire in not quenched,' but to be set in opposition to that
fire, and to mean something entirely different. There is a fire that
destroys, and there is a fire that preserves; and the alternative for
every man is to choose between the destructive and the conserving
influences. Christian disciples have to submit to be 'salted with
fire,' lest a worse thing befall them,
I. And so the first point that I would ask you to notice here is--that
fiery cleansing to which every Christian must yield.
Now I have already referred to the relation between the words of my
text and those immediately preceding, as being in some sense one of
opposition and contrast. I think we are put on the right track for
understanding the solemn words of this text if we remember the great
saying of John the Baptist, where, in precisely similar fashion, there
are set side by side the two conceptions of the chaff being cast into
the unquenchable fire (the same expression as in our text), and 'He
shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire.'
The salting fire, then, which cleanses and preserves, and to which
every Christian soul must submit itself, to be purged thereby, is, as
I take it, primarily and fundamentally the fire of that Divine Spirit
which Christ Himself told us that He had come to cast upon the earth,
and yearned, in a passion of desire, to see kindled. The very frequent
use of the emblem in this same signification throughout Scripture, I
suppose I need not recall to you. It seems to me that the only worthy
interpretation of the words before us, which goes down into their
depths and harmonises with the whole of the rest of the teaching of
Scripture, is that which recognises these words of my text as no
unwelcome threat, as no bitter necessity, but as a joyful promise
bringing to men, laden and burdened with their sins, the good news
that it is possible for them to be purged from them entirely by the
fiery ministration of that Divine Spirit. Just as we take a piece of
foul clay and put it into the furnace, and can see, as it gets
red-hot, the stains melt away, as a cloud does in the blue, from its
surface, so if we will plunge ourselves into the influences of that
divine power which Christ has come to communicate to the world, our
sin and all our impurities will melt from off us, and we shall be
clean. No amount of scrubbing with soap and water will do it. The
stain is a great deal too deep for that, and a mightier solvent than
any that we can apply, if unaided and unsupplied from above, is needed
to make us clean. 'Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean,'
especially when the would-be bringer is himself the unclean thing?
Surely not one. Unless there be a power _ab extra_, unparticipant of
man's evils, and yet capable of mingling with the evil man's inmost
nature, and dealing with it, then I believe that universal experience
and our individual experience tell us that there is no hope that we
shall ever get rid of our transgressions.
Brethren, for a man by his own unaided effort, however powerful,
continuous, and wisely directed it may be, to cleanse himself utterly
from his iniquity, is as hopeless as it would be for him to sit down
with a hammer and a chisel and try by mechanical means to get all the
iron out of a piece of ironstone. The union is chemical, not
mechanical. And so hammers and chisels will only get a very little of
the metal out. The one solvent is fire. Put the obstinate crude ore
into your furnace, and get the temperature up, and the molten metal
will run clear. There should be mountains of scoriae, the dross and
relics of our abandoned sins, around us all.
If we desire to be delivered, let us go into the fire. It will burn up
all our evil, and it will burn up nothing else. Keep close to Christ.
Lay your hearts open to the hallowing influences of the motives and
the examples that lie in the story of His life and death. Seek for the
fiery touch of that transforming Spirit, and be sure that you quench
Him not, nor grieve Him. And then your weakness will be reinvigorated
by celestial powers, and the live coal upon your lips will burn up all
your iniquity.
But, subordinately to this deepest meaning, as I take it, of the great
symbol of our text, let me remind you of another possible application
of it, which follows from the preceding. God's Spirit cleanses men
mainly by raising their spirits to a higher temperature. For coldness
is akin to sin, and heavenly warmth is akin to righteousness.
Enthusiasm always ennobles, delivers men, even on the lower reaches of
life and conduct from many a meanness and many a sin. And when it
becomes a warmth of spirit kindled by the reception of the fire of
God, then it becomes the solvent which breaks the connection between
me and my evil. It is the cold Christian who makes no progress in
conquering his sin. The one who is filled with the love of God, and
has the ardent convictions and the burning enthusiasm which that love
ought to produce in our hearts, is the man who will conquer and eject
his evils.
Nor must we forget that there is still another possible application of
the words. For whilst, on the one hand, the Divine Spirit's method of
delivering us is very largely that of imparting to us the warmth of
ardent, devout emotion; on the other hand, a part of this method is
the passing of us through the fiery trials and outward disciplines of
life. 'Every one shall be salted with fire' in that sense. And we have
learned, dear brethren, but little of the loving kindness of the Lord
if we are not able to say, 'I have grown more in likeness to Jesus
Christ by rightly accepted sorrows than by anything besides.' Be not
afraid of calamities; be not stumbled by disaster. Take the fiery
trial which is sent to you as being intended to bring about, at the
last, the discovery 'unto praise and honour and glory' of your faith,
that is 'much more precious than gold that perisheth, though it be
tried with fire.' 'Every one shall be salted with fire,' the Christian
law of life is, Submit to the fiery cleansing. Alas! alas! for the
many thousands of professing Christians who are wrapping themselves in
such thick folds of non-conducting material that that fiery energy can
only play on the surface of their lives, instead of searching them to
the depths. Do you see to it, dear brethren, that you lay open your
whole natures, down to the very inmost roots, to the penetrating,
searching, cleansing power of that Spirit. And let us all go and say
to Him, 'Search me, O God! and try me, and see if there be any wicked
way in me.'