Our Lord brings together, in our text, as is often His wont, two
apparently contradictory ideas, in order, by the paradox, to fix our
attention the more vividly upon His words. Fire destroys; salt
preserves. They are opposites. But yet the opposites may be united in
one mighty reality, a fire which preserves and does not destroy. The
deepest truth is that the cleansing fire which the Christ will give us
preserves us, because it destroys that which is destroying us. If you
kill the germs of putrefaction in a hit of dead flesh, you preserve
the flesh; and if you bring to bear upon a man the power which will
kill the thing that is killing him, its destructive influence is the
condition of its conserving one.
And so it is, in regard to that great spiritual influence which Jesus
Christ is ready to give to every one of us. It slays that which is
slaying us, for our sins destroy in us the true life of a man, and
make us but parables of walking death. When the three Hebrews were
cast into the fiery furnace in Babylon, the flames burned nothing but
their bonds, and they walked at liberty in the fire. And so it will be
with us. We shall be preserved by that which slays the sins that would
otherwise slay us.
Let me lay on your hearts before I close the solemn alternative to
which I have already referred, and which is suggested by the
connection of my text with the preceding words. There is a fire that
destroys and is not quenched. Christ's previous words are much too
metaphorical for us to build dogmatic definitions upon. But Jesus
Christ did not exaggerate. If here and now sin has so destructive an
effect upon a man, O, who will venture to say that he knows the limits
of its murderous power in that future life, when retribution shall
begin with new energy and under new conditions? Brethren, whilst I
dare not enlarge, I still less dare to suppress; and I ask you to
remember that not I, or any man, but Jesus Christ Himself, has put
before each of us this alternative--either the fire unquenchable,
which destroys a man, or the merciful fire, which slays his sins and
saves him alive.
Social reformers, philanthropists, you that have tried and failed to
overcome your evil, and who feel the loathly thing so intertwisted
with your being that to pluck it from your heart is to tear away the
very heart's walls themselves, here is a hope for you. Closely as our
evil is twisted in with the fibres of our character, there is a hand
that can untwine the coils, and cast away the sin, and preserve the
soul. And although we sometimes feel as if our sinfulness and our sin
were so incorporated with ourselves that it made oneself, with a man's
head and a serpent's tail, let us take the joyful assurance that if we
trust ourselves to Christ, and open our hearts to His power, we can
shake off the venomous beast into the fire and live a fuller life,
because the fire has consumed that which would otherwise have consumed
us.
'SALT IN YOURSELVES'
'Have salt in yourselves, and have peace one with another.'--Mark ix.
50.
In the context 'salt' is employed to express the preserving,
purifying, divine energy which is otherwise spoken of as 'fire.' The
two emblems produce the same result. They both salt--that is, they
cleanse and keep. And if in the one we recognise the quick energy of
the Divine Spirit as the central idea, no less are we to see the same
typified under a slightly different aspect in the other. The fire
transforms into its own substance and burns away all the grosser
particles. The salt arrests corruption, keeps off destruction, and
diffuses its sanative influence through all the particles of the
substance with which it comes in contact. And in both metaphors it is
the operation of God's cleansing Spirit, in its most general form,
that is set forth, including all the manifold ways by which God deals
with us to purge us from our iniquity, to free us from the death which
treads close on the heels of wrongdoing, the decomposition and
dissolution which surely follow on corruption.
This the disciples are exhorted to have in themselves that they may be
at peace one with another. Perhaps we shall best discover the whole
force of this saying by dealing--