Exploding Metal a good thing?

The other night I woke up parched and thirsty. We had eaten pizza for dinner, and as most of you know it tends to be a salty meal that doesn’t seem too salty at the time. I got myself a long drink and since I was lying there awake, I started thinking about salt.

From my days of studying chemistry, I recall that salt is NaCL. This is sodium chloride. Sodium, in case you are not familiar with it, is in its pure form a dull, almost but not quite shiny metal that is so radical that if you throw a fair sized chunk of it in water (about the size of a nickel) it will literally catch on fire on top of the water and can even explode! It is quite reactive. Chlorine in its native form is a gas, a green gas, that is completely and absolutely deadly. Put any living creature under a dome, pipe in Chlorine, and it will die quickly and painfully. Even plants can’t handle it.

Put these two radical elements together and you get… salt. Extremely stable, very resistive to reacting to anything else. Harmless in small doses, in fact you simply cannot live without having some in your food; your body requires it. Salt doesn’t taste all that great, but it makes other things taste better. Bacteria, tiny animals that they are, try to spoil meats treated with salt and die from salt poisoning: so salt is a great preserver of foodstuffs. When you make ice cream, the rock salt “melts” the ice by lowering the freezing temperature of water, thus you end up with a bunch of water that is below 32 F and helping it conduct the heat away from your milk mixture (which has no salt in it, allowing the stuff inside the can to freeze at the normal 32 F. See how that works?) Salt burns in an open wound, but heals at the same time. Salt can smother a fire.

Christians are called the salt of the world. Salt is a good choice. Perhaps we were once reactive, deadly, explosive, almost uncontrollable. But we are now Christians, and have become stable, no longer radical but calm, reliable. Boring? Hardly! Like salt, we still influence things about us. We enhance the word of God, by personally carrying it to people who might otherwise never have opened the bible. We are great preservers, by showing peace, calm, and wisdom given to us by God. We bear things with patience, and we overcome. We may be called upon to be servers of justice, which we do with the guidance of God. We are God’s messengers, and we help people reach beyond their circumstances to new and greater things! Our prayers and deeds can touch the hearts of men, and further God’s cause by possibly causing mercy and smothering anger. We may have been hard like metal, green with decay, but we were made as white as snow. Or white as salt. And if we’re effective salt, people are going to “wake up” in the “middle of the night” and be “thirsty”! Think about it!

Leviticus 2:13 And every oblation of thy meat offering shalt thou season with salt; neither shalt thou suffer the salt of the covenant of thy God to be lacking from thy meat offering: with all thine offerings thou shalt offer salt.

Matthew 5:13 Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.

Mark 9:47-50 And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire: Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched. For every one shall be salted with fire, and every sacrifice shall be salted with salt. 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.

Colossians 4:5-6 Walk in wisdom toward them that are without, redeeming the time. Let your speech be alway with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man.

Corinthians I 6:9-12 Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.

Galatians 6:15-17 For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature. And as many as walk according to this rule, peace be on them, and mercy, and upon the Israel of God. From henceforth let no man trouble me: for I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.