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Ready For The Compost Pile?
The two verses at the end of Luke 14 seem out of place. I’ve studied the Bible awhile, and I understand Jesus used metaphor, symbols, allegory, and hyperbole to teach His disciples and confound His enemies. However, I really missed a deeper meaning here until very recently.
Jesus spends much of Chapter 14 teaching about personal sacrifice and about counting the cost to be His disciple. Would he randomly toss in a parable about salt? We all know salt, right? Salt seasons, saves, cures, preserves, etc. Jesus says, “If salt has lost its saltiness… it is unfit for soil or manure.” That seems obvious, but what’s salt got to do with soil and manure?
Read any good composting stories lately? I came across an article about composting two weeks ago. Something in the article reminded me of my Dad who was an avid gardener. I read that farmers in the U.S. used salt as a chemical fertilizer until the early 1900′s. It is still used as fertilizer in other parts of the world, and has been for ages. Too much salt will burn your crops, but a judicious application has the same effect as nitrate fertilizers and can improve crop yield as much as organic fertilizer. But do some research before you salt your yard!
And get this. If you apply salt to manure, especially sea salt with higher mineral content, it prevents the formation of sulpher dioxide and ammonia – it kills the odor, and it becomes a catalyst that allows manure to be used as fuel, something familiar to the people of Jesus’ day and now. Treated manure can then be used in baking ovens.
So Jesus teaches us to count the cost using the lowest of everyday examples. He says to me, “Count the cost, Bill! Be prepared! Until you let me scatter you like fertilizer to make my crop grow, and until you let me mix you with the manure of world to produce heat… you are of no use to Me.”
Do I have ears to hear? Am I ready for composting?
Holy Crap!!!
)
Exactly! The study in Luke and in particular, Luke 14, make the secular view that Jesus was merely “a good man and a good teacher,” ridiculous. You can’t tell people to eat your flesh, drink your blood, and become God’s “holy crap” without offending people. The stuff he is telling us now and telling his disciples at the time that we must do to be his followers is crazy talk, unless He is the Word and God with us.
Bill
I was reminded of this passage. Holy crap smells like…well..like it does to the world, but to God:
II Cor. 2:14 But thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumphal procession in Christ and through us *spreads* everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of Him.
15 For we are to God the *aroma* of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing.
16 To the one we are the *smell* of death; to the other, the fragrance of life. And who is equal to such a task?
I hear folks all the time trying to be conciliatory with the “Jesus was a good man, but not the Son of God” remark.
Do they not understand how that statement immediately begs the question, “HOW!?!”
If Jesus is NOT who He says He is, then He is more evil than Hitler! What a wicked thing that would be by perpetrating such a hoax on humanity and have generations of people lose their lives over a lie! Jesus is either who He says He is – or He’s the most evil person to ever exist.
How’s that for offensive?
True. We’re coming up on Christmas. It is so much easier to adore a sweet innocent infant, than to worship the King who requires *everything* of you, who won’t take our excuses, who works in us to his will, and who tackles us and brings us to the ground in his grace! Those who condemned Him to death, I think, understood exactly what he was saying, maybe better than we do most times. Maybe in a sense, many of them had a sincere desire to see Jesus dead for that reason. There is no “happy medium” with Jesus. Paul said it best (paraphrased), “…if we only have hope in Christ in this life we are worse off than pitiful.”
Oooh! speaking of Christmas, do you want a scary version of the Christmas story? Do parallel readings from Luke and Revelation 12. Just like C.S. Lewis wrote, the birth of Christ was the first wave of The Great Invasion!