“You are the salt of the earth” (Matthew 5:13). Jesus didn’t say this to the multitudes. Remember that the Sermon on the Mount is primarily to His disciples and the multitudes sat around listening. The multitudes are certainly not the salt of the earth – they don’t have any salt. But the disciples are to be the salt of the earth. Jesus was a master of using word pictures, and He left it to us to understand the meaning behind them as we seek for the inspiration and revelation of the Holy Spirit. “You are the salt of the earth, but if the salt has become tasteless, how it will be made salty? It is good for nothing any more, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men.”

He is using this picture to show us that His disciples will always be small in number. If you have a plate of rice and curry, how much salt are going to put into that whole plate of rice and curry? You would not even put half a teaspoon. You need very little salt to make that whole plate taste right. But if the salt is tasteless, then even if you put 20 spoons in it, it is not going to make any difference in the taste. So the point is not quantity, but quality. When Jesus says, “If the salt has become tasteless” (Matthew 5:13), He is not talking about the quantity of salt at all.

The proportion of the amount of salt relative to the food is about the same as the proportion of true disciples on earth relative to the population of the world (and sometimes even the number of people in the church!). The true disciples are very few.

But it’s only those true disciples who are called the salt of the earth. It is because of them that the earth is preserved from judgment. Abraham once prayed to God concerning the evil city of Sodom, which the Lord said He would destroy. He asked to the Lord (concerning whether He would still destroy it), “Suppose Lord you find only ten righteous people in Sodom?” (Genesis 18:32), the Lord said, “I won’t destroy Sodom, if there are ten righteous people in that city.” Ten people were enough to preserve the city from being destroyed, but there were not even ten there, so it was destroyed.

In Jeremiah’s time, the Lord reduced that number even further. Jeremiah was prophesying at a time when Israel was about to be taken into captivity by the Babylonian king (that was God’s punishment), but before that, Jeremiah went to prophesy. He preached and warned them for 40 years, but they wouldn’t listen to him. The Lord told Jeremiah, “Go through the streets of Jerusalem and see if you can find one man (not ten, just one single man) who does justice, who seeks truth, and I will pardon the whole city” (Jeremiah 5:1). It’s amazing, but there wasn’t even one righteous man, and so the whole city went into captivity.

Very often God is looking around like that. Ezekiel was also a prophet at the time of Babylon and God said through Ezekiel, “I searched for one man among all of them who should stand in the gap for me and build the wall that I shouldn’t destroy the land, and I found none” (Ezekiel 22:30). God spoke the same words: quality, not quantity. He wasn’t looking for 10,000 people. He was looking for even one man.

It’s amazing what God can do through one man if he is whole-hearted and radical. Think of Moses - one man in the Old Testament through whom God could deliver 2 million Israelites. There was nobody else in Israel who was fit to be the leader. In Elijah’s time, even though there were 7000 people who did not bow their knee to Baal (a picture of 7000 believers who don’t worship idols), there was only one man (Elijah) who could bring the fire down from heaven. It is the same proportion today. You might find only one believer among 7000 believers who can bring the fire down from heaven through their ministry or their prayer.

The 7000 may say, “I don’t do this, and I don’t do that.” Their testimony is negative! “I don’t go to movies, I don’t drink, I don’t gamble and I don’t smoke cigarettes.” They don’t worship Baal, but who can bring the fire down from heaven? The one who lives before God’s face, like Elijah did; Elijah had salt.

It’s the same in the New Testament. Can you imagine the loss that the church would have faced, and the loss we would have faced, if the Apostle Paul had never existed? How much Scripture would be missing? He was one man! Of course God’s work is not going to be hindered because one man fails (God could have used somebody else), but what we see in Scripture is that often God accomplishes more through one person who is whole-hearted than He does through 10,000 compromisers. That is the point Jesus emphasizes when He tells His disciples, “You are like salt.” Don’t ever complain, “We are so few!”