We’ve talked so much about it at church, I thought we’d start the new year with a chemistry lesson.

It’s often a bright, yellow, happy color. But so very little happiness surrounds it! It forms into attractive, cool shaped crystals like oversized salt chunks that got yellow food dye on them. You can dig it right out of the ground if you know where to look, also just like salt. But this ain’t no food seasoning!

And to suggest strongly that God knows what he’s doing and leaves not so subtle hints around to remind us of that, when it’s melted it goes from these yellow crystals to a bright, blood red liquid. Perhaps a warning of some kind? And almost unique to all other liquids, unless it is superheated to the point of vaporizing the hotter it gets the “thicker” it gets – it almost reverts to a solid at very high temperatures. How strange.

It itself has no smell at all, but when left to oxidize, it has the most foul rotten egg stink. The odor is strong, in fact its what gives raw sewage that stench that burns the inside of your nose and makes your eyes water. Ever notice how you can get close to yuk like that and then the smell “hits” you? Almost so thick you can draw a line in the air where it starts? Phew!

Just the tiniest, itty-bitty amount in ground water and you can smell it, taste it, bleah. And you can’t boil it out, it hangs on in there for dear life. I remember being able to find where a spring bubbled out of the ground when I was a boy in Ohio tromping around in the woods – the smell is unmistakable and led you right to it. You have to purify water to get rid of that, which is expensive, so most people that have it around just drink it and tell you it’s good for you. After a while, they don’t even notice it anymore! It’s true!

Know what it is yet? How about this – when you burn matches, or fireworks, or shoot a black powder gun, it’s that telltale smell. Yes, the third main ingredient to gunpowder. Not carbon, not potassium nitrate – sulfur. Combine it with iron and you get pyrite – fools gold, something people have given their lives away for thinking it was something valuable when it was not.

Sulfur stinks so badly and leaves that “burn” in your nose because when you breath it in it starts to form, with the moisture in your nose, sulfuric acid, a very powerful and destructive compound. It really does trash the inside of your nose! If you breath the fumes long enough it will easily kill you from the inside out, bringing to your lungs death in the most awful and painful way. By the way, burning coal with sulfur in it without any type of smoke filtering produces a yellow smog cloud that often, when cleaned from the sky and brought to the ground during a rainstorm, is what they’re talking about when people use the term “acid rain” and it will destroy cars, buildings, and yes trees and people. Very caustic stuff.

It can be useful, when we keep it under control. We use it for lamps, Epsom salts, and rubber. It appears in fertilizer and medicines. But I really want to stress that it’s quite a dangerous item, and that makes a simple spiritual point for us.

What I’d like to suggest is that sin is much the same. Sin stinks up our lives. God has designed sin that it leaves tell-tale signs when it is present. We can get rid of it by purifying ourselves, but it is expensive to do so; it took the son of God’s blood to wash it out. Yet people get so used to living with it day to day that they get used to it – they don’t see it, taste it, smell it any more. Yikes! Sin is something that has no value, but people still throw their lives away pursuing it thinking its worth it! Sin leads to an awful, painful death from the inside out. It is very, very caustic stuff. Maybe that’s why the symbol for sulfur is S – shaped like a snake.

Perhaps you wonder why I said we’ve been talking about sulfur so much at church lately. You might be thinking, “Randy I don’t recall hearing anything about this 16^th element of the periodic table in any lessons or sermons. You’re nuts!” Ah that’s because we don’t use its scientific name. What is the common, ancient name for this rock that burns, who’s very vapors cause anguish and destruction, that simple poison found so readily and abundantly on the face of this earth?

Brimstone.

Randy