Okay, right outta the gate, let's just get this one thing clear; 'everybody is religious'! EVERYBODY! Without exception, so let's just drop this secular versus religious distinction. One's religion being what one believes, everybody believes SOMETHING; it may be the wrong thing, it may be the right thing, they may act consistently with their belief, they may not, but everyone is religious, whether they want to admit it or not: EVERYTHING is sacred to SOMEONE!
According to the THEORY of Evolution, as taught in most Government Schools & advanced by some scientists, humankind has evolved, most recently, in the past hundred thousand years or so, from the common ape, but before that, a single-celled creature that crawled out of the primordial ooze. Whatever one believes about this 'theory', it takes just as much faith, or more, to believe that, than to believe that an Intelligent Being designed it all & set it in order.
The 'Sea', in Scripture anyway, evokes the image of great bodies of people, in particular, prehistoric denizens of the earth, those who walked back & forth on it before the Creator established His Covenant with the first Adam. As History shows, the 'Sea' is at the bottom, or base of Life itself! Not only does the sea provide the sustenance for many peoples around the world, it can be successfully be argued that there is much in the sea itself & under it, that provides the most basic of building-blocks of life itself, biologically speaking.
Jesus told His disciples, 'You are the salt of the earth' ( Matthew 5:13 ); He knew, as the Creator Himself ( John 1:1-3 ), that salt is maybe one of the most essential elements of biological creation! The phrase 'salt of the earth' is still in fairly common use today; it usually refers to someone ( or 'ones' ) that is honest, good & true. Those who merit this exalted moniker are commonly known to put the needs of others before their own & are loved as they themselves love, not by everyone, granted, but by most who feel the warmth of their friendship!
Jesus, when He used 'salt' as the basis of that most blessed of statements, made no mistake, nor did He randomly choose to name this element as the foundation of goodness! Not only does salt provide needed flavor where there is, simply put, blandness, salt is also a purifying agent. When applied to a wound ( there is also a popular phrase associated with this action ), yes, it hurts like hell, but it serves to cleanse the wound, to draw out the imperfections, in a sense, to cauterize the wound. Not only this nation, but our world, over the many millenia since its conception, has experienced many wounds & we, as the 'salt of the earth' are here to heal those wounds, though it may hurt like hell!
Salt, as anyone can tell, naturally comes from the sea; through the evaporation caused by the warmth of the sun, among other factors; deposits of salt, to whatever extent, can be found throughout the world, either where bodies of saltwater ( seas, oceans ) currently rest, or where they formerly did. Scripturally speaking, as mentioned above, though the Jewish people were chosen to be the progenitors of the human race, the Gentiles, who were denizens of the Great Deep, metaphorically speaking, through the Warmth of the Son & the Wind of the Spirit, became truly 'the salt of the earth'!
Speaking of religion, I am of the opinion/belief that some sort of evolution ( better called 'progression', maybe ) was employed by the Creator in forming the 'worlds'! Science has proven that many aspects of the natural Creation have adapted to their surrounding conditions or environments. Whether this should be called evolution or not is a matter of personal preference, but it is abundantly clear to this blogger that the Creator has ordered His Creation in such a way that it is able to adapt to the many & changing environs of this biology. In a sense, one might observe, our Scriptures are a record of the denizens of the 'sea' adapting to & learning to live on the 'land'!
Religion, in this day & age, is often confused with what is known as Organized Religion, usually the Institutional Church. As we have seen, though, religion is simply what one believes & especially ( more importantly ), according to the apostle James ( James 1:26 & 27 ), what one does with those beliefs. We have noted previously that there are wrong beliefs ( religions ) & right beliefs. The belief that humankind simply 'evolved' from monkeys is simply absurd, when one really ponders it ( honestly )! In a metaphorical sense, yes, we came from the 'sea', but not through chance; it was through the Design of the Creator God that we became 'the salt of the earth'!
Charles Haddon Shank
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