Pause for Thought: It pays to dig a bit deeper into the texts so as not to get caught
Have you ever read a bible passage and scratched your head at its meaning? Originally written in Hebrew, it is a collection of ancient Jewish documents, rich with metaphors, symbolism, and figures of speech etc.
As my first language is not Hebrew, this can cause me a headache, since I’m not grounded in that culture.
So I tend to look at explanations offered by Jewish Christian scholars.
In Matthew 5, Jesus delivers his famous sermon on the mount. One of the first teachings is about salt.
Jesus says, “You are the salt of the earth, but if the salt has become tasteless, how can it be made salty again?
It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by people” (NLT).
I remember sitting in a church, and the minister had a bowl of soup that had been made without salt. After getting a couple of people to taste it (to confirm that it was bland), she seasoned it with salt and then asked them to taste it again, and ooh would you believe it? It was pretty good after that!
So I went away thinking, ‘If I’m not seasoned with salt, I am tasteless, should be thrown away and trampled on by some bruiser in size 11 dockers, or I need to learn how to make good salty soup!
So what does the original Hebrew text say?
Well, salt is used to preserve meat and draw out any contaminated blood remnants. Salt has power. And we have power when we walk in the holy spirit.
Instead of the mis-translation of salt losing its saltiness, the actual understanding is, if salt loses its power, it is unable to do its job, and is therefore useless.
So, if we are walking in the holy spirit, yet we are not committed to the purposes of God, we will become vulnerable to the temptations of the world and will eventually be overcome by them.
Now, if that was the understanding that I came away from the service with, it would have made perfect sense to me, and saved me years of throwing salt all over my chips and raising my blood pressure!
So you see it pays to dig a bit deeper into the texts so as not to get caught and lost in translation.