You shall season all your grain offerings with salt. You shall not let the salt of the covenant with your God be missing from your grain offering; with all your offerings you shall offer salt.
The grain offering pictures the perfect human life of Christ offered to God. Verse 13 names the one ingredient that must never be left out. Salt appears three times in a single sentence. Why does so ordinary a household item carry such weight before God?
Salt as the opposite of leaven
The chapter has just banned leaven. Salt stands on the other side of that line, and what it does gives it its meaning.
Numerical Bible NotesIn meaning, salt was the very opposite of leaven. It was the symbol of what opposes corruption, and so the picture of what endures — of the holiness that the "covenant of God" implies. A holy God can only go on with what is holy, and so salt is the "salt of His covenant." It was never to be missing from any offering.
The salt of the covenant
The phrase ties salt to a covenant — an agreement God makes and guarantees. Commentators read it as a mark of how long that covenant lasts, and hear the same quality in the words of Christ.
C. H. MackintoshThe expression, "salt of the covenant," sets forth the enduring character of that covenant. God Himself has so ordained it, in all things, that nothing can ever alter it — no influence can ever corrupt it… "Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt." Everything the Perfect Man said showed the power of this principle. His words were not only words of grace. They were words of sharp power — words God fitted to guard against every stain and corrupting influence.
What God pledges by it
Salt preserves. So its place in the offering says something about how long the offering's value lasts.
Robert F. KingscoteSalt, as you know, is a preservative, and here it may speak to us of what is eternal… In the case of the sacrifice, its effectiveness and its results will last forever. It is "the salt of the covenant with your God." In it God, as it were, binds Himself to bless us according to His own heart, resting on the everlasting effectiveness of the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus. With this grain offering, the sweet fragrance of what Christ was to God as man on earth will be no passing fragrance. It will last for all eternity, and so will our joy in feeding on Him as the humbled Man here on earth.
Held by His faithfulness, not ours
Salt is also a separating power. It guards what is good by shutting corruption out. But whose strength does the keeping?
J. N. DarbyThe stability, the durability, the preserving energy of what was divine was there, though it may not always feel sweet and pleasant to us… This holy separating power, which keeps us apart from corruption, comes from God. It shares the stability of the divine nature. It binds us to Him, not by what we are in our will, but by the security of divine grace… The obligation of the divine promise does bind us to Him, but it binds by His energy and faithfulness, not ours.
Salt where honey was forbidden
Two verses earlier God banned honey; here He commands salt. Kelly sets the two side by side in the life of Jesus, where natural sweetness would have meant giving in to a human claim.
William KellyWhen His mother appealed to Him at the marriage in Cana, saying that they had no wine, His answer was, "Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come." There was not an atom of disrespect in this, but it was not what answered to honey. It was rather the salt of the covenant, which must not be missing from an offering by fire to the LORD. Christ was doing then, as always, the things that were pleasing to the Father. He would not act on a human motive, even to listen to His mother.
With all your offerings
The last clause widens the rule past the grain offering to everything Israel brought. Kelly carries it forward to our own words and ways.
William KellyAs the salt of the covenant was a pledge on God's part of a savour that did not pass away, so there is a need on our part for a holy separating energy toward God, to keep us from corrupt words and ways. Only Christ and His offering of Himself to God for us could be the ground of such a pledge and permanence… But, as our Lord urged at the close of Mark 9, "Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another." The separating power applies here to ourselves, the gracious spirit is for one another. Without holiness, peace between us would be an illusion.
Summary
- Salt, not leaven — salt is leaven's opposite. It resists corruption and pictures what lasts — the holiness God's covenant calls for.
- Salt, not honey — honey stands for natural sweetness, and it could not go on the altar. Christ acted on God's will, not human feeling, even toward His mother.
- God's pledge — in "the salt of the covenant" God binds Himself to bless us. The pledge rests on Christ's sacrifice, whose fragrance to God never fades.
- His strength, not ours — the preserving, separating power belongs to God. It ties us to Him by His faithfulness and promise, not by our willpower.
- With all your offerings — God asks the same salt of us — speech seasoned with it, salt kept in ourselves, and peace with one another that holiness makes real.