When Jesus speaks of salt losing its salty quality, He’s referring to the method of mining salt unique to that period and region. People would harvest salt from either the Dead Sea or from the salt pans, and in those salt pans the water evaporated. In that process, the pure salt would leech out, leaving a residue of other minerals and causing the salt to “lose” its saltiness. So, Jesus poses the question to His disciples, “What good will you be if you lose your saltiness—if you succumb to the things that leech the salt out of your lives?”

Many have described Christ’s words in Mark 9:49–50 as being among the New Testament’s most challenging passages. They read,
Everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good, but if the salt has lost its saltiness, how will you make it salty again? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.
These verses reinforce a familiar biblical theme: following Jesus is a serious business. Anybody who views Christianity as some kind of esoteric philosophical journey—a sort of crutch for the inept—must reckon with Jesus’ own claims. The call to following Him involves self-denial and suffering (Mark 8:34).
Jesus further clarifies the seriousness of discipleship in the verses immediately preceding the text in view (Mark 9:42–48). Warning against sin’s dangers, He doesn’t suggest that we negotiate with sin, trying to reconcile our sinful propensities with discipleship’s demands. Rather, He calls for its total eradication. We don’t toy with sin; we put it to death (Col. 3:5).
It’s clear that Jesus deals here with weighty truths. And it’s against the backdrop of verse 48 (in which He describes hell as a place where the “worm does not die and the fire is not quenched”) that His puzzling teaching on salt appears. With the costliness of discipleship and the picture of fire fixed in His disciples’ minds, Jesus asserts, “Everyone will be salted with fire.” How should we understand this peculiar phrase?
The Old Testament Background
The sacrificial system in the Old Testament is a good place to begin. It would’ve been familiar territory for Jesus and His audience. Establishing the design for grain offerings in Israel, God had made the following provision: “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” (Lev. 2:13).
Further, these seasoned offerings were burnt offerings; they were consumed on the altar. In this sense, these Old Testament sacrifices were complete and irrevocable. Jesus appears to be reaching back to this practice, collating the pictures of fire and salt, to remind His followers that discipleship will involve a process whereby they’re “salted.” When they offer themselves to Christ’s cause, they will undergo a refining process, their allegiance to Him being complete and irrevocable.
Other places in the New Testament affirm this idea. In 1 Corinthians 3, Paul describes a similar refining process:
No one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw—each one’s work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. (1 Cor. 3:11–13).
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You cannot worship both God and false gods.  Joshua is clear that choosing to serve false gods means you have determined that it is evil to serve God (Joshua 24:15).  Serving no god is not an option, so there really is no such thing as an atheist.  Everyone worships, whether the true God, idols, the ideas they represent, or self (Romans 1:18ff).  Worship of idols is incompatible with worship of God, which Joshua makes clear by giving the same reason God gave in the second commandment: God’s jealousy (Joshua 24:19 cf. Exodus 20:5).  

Now therefore fear the LORD and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness. Put away the gods that your fathers served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the LORD. And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the LORD, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD….You are not able to serve the LORD, for he is a holy God. He is a jealous God; he will not forgive your transgressions or your sins. If you forsake the LORD and serve foreign gods, then he will turn and do you harm and consume you, after having done you good.
-Joshua 24:14-15,19-20, ESV
Last time, we looked at Israel’s tumultuous beginning culminating in Judah’s Adam-like failure when tempted and Joseph’s Christlike success when tempted.  After the conquest of Canaan five centuries later, Joshua tells them to choose whether they will serve God or idols.  Joshua said that he and his house would serve God, so he was exhorting Israel as families not individuals.  Worship, whether of God or idols, begins at home…and there are many American “Christian” households that have chosen the wrong gods.
It Begins at Home
God builds His Kingdom primarily through families and has always dealt with His people as families.  His covenants are corporate, made with households rather than individuals.  Even the tribes of Israel were essentially households of households.  The ultimate blessing of the Abrahamic covenant was that all of the families of the world would be blessed through him (Genesis 12:3, 28:14).  The family, not the church, has always been the center of worship.  The Westminster Divines understood this and devoted an entire document to family worship, but many churches today do not.
It is unsurprising then that Scripture’s first reference to false gods comes in the context of a family: when Jacob fled Laban, Rachel stole the household gods (Genesis 31:19) and hid them from him by sitting on them (Genesis 31:34-35).  Her claim that she was menstruating at the time would have caused Jewish readers to see that Rachel was essentially defiling the idols.  Thus begins a theme found throughout Scripture: mockery of idols and their worshippers.  We should laugh at how these idols were powerless to avoid being stolen, sat on, and defiled.  We see the same with the plagues of Exodus targeting specific Egyptian deities.  We see it when the idol of Dagon fell prostrate before the Ark of the Covenant (1 Samuel 5:3-4).  We see it when Elijah mocked the prophets of Baal at Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18:26-29) and when the ruins of Baal’s temple were used as a latrine (2 Kings 10:27).  And we see it when Jesus picked a longstanding hotbed of idolatry and demonic activity to proclaim: “And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18).  Through His life, death, resurrection, and ascension, “He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him” (Colossians 2:15). Isaiah illustrates the absurdity of idol worship by describing a man cutting a log in half, burning half in the fire, and carving the other half into an idol (Isaiah 44:10-17).  Jeremiah calls them “stupid and foolish” (Jeremiah 17:8).  The psalms are equally harsh: “Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them” (Psalm 115:8 cf. 135:18).  Scripture is clear that false gods are powerless, so it is absurd to worship them. This means that a man who leads his family to worship idols is a fool who makes his family into fools as well.  As goes the man, so goes the family. While Elkanah’s home was tumultuous, he led his family in the true worship of God.  However, the prevalence and persistence of golden calves and high places shows that he was in the minority.  Most men followed Laban, paying lip service to God while betraying Him by worshipping false gods.
No Room for Pluralism
That brings up another important point: you cannot worship both God and false gods.  Joshua is clear that choosing to serve false gods means you have determined that it is evil to serve God (Joshua 24:15).  Serving no god is not an option, so there really is no such thing as an atheist.  Everyone worships, whether the true God, idols, the ideas they represent, or self (Romans 1:18ff).  Worship of idols is incompatible with worship of God, which Joshua makes clear by giving the same reason God gave in the second commandment: God’s jealousy (Joshua 24:19 cf. Exodus 20:5).  Unlike sinful envy, God’s jealousy is “a zeal that arises when sin threatens a covenant relationship”.[1]  Trying to worship God while also worshipping idols is like a wife saying she is faithful to her husband while regularly sleeping with other men.  There is no room for an open relationship between God and His covenant people, so idolatry is often described as adultery.  Therefore, there is no room for religious pluralism.  We don’t know whether Rachel stole the idols because she was trying to be a pluralist or for some other reason such as spite against her father, but we do know that Israel tried to worship God and false gods throughout their history.  As we saw here, while the southern kingdom of Judah was sinning by selectively obeying God, the northern kingdom of Israel was attempting pluralism: “Come to Bethel, and transgress; to Gilgal, and multiply transgression; bring your sacrifices every morning, your tithes every three days; offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving of that which is leavened, and proclaim freewill offerings, publish them; for so you love to do, O people of Israel!” declares the Lord GOD”  (Amos 4:4-5).  By trying to worship both God and idols, they were blaspheming God just as a wife greatly dishonors her husband when he is just one of the men she sleeps with.  Religious pluralism is and has always been abhorrent blasphemy against God, so every man is exhorted to choose whether he and his family will worship God or idols—he cannot worship both.
Today’s Household Gods
I have previously examined various idols in our culture.  Even faithful churches that abhor those idols likely have families that worship them at home then come to church on Sunday and fail to see the hypocrisy.  Idols are myriad and often subtle, but some are made blatantly obvious by a popular yard sign that declares: “In this house we believe: black lives matter, women’s rights are human rights, no human is illegal, science is real, love is love, kindness is everything”.  This is a clear acknowledgement that worship begins at home, and its credal structure proves that it is religious.  What one must believe in order to be a Christian is summed up in the historic creeds—the Apostles’ Creed, Nicene Creed, Athanasian Creed, and Chalcedon Definition.
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The most significant appearance of Gabriel in the book of Daniel was in Daniel 9, and his most significant appearance in Luke 1 was to Mary in Luke 1:26–38. In the former passage he promised that the Anointed One would come, and in the latter passage he announced that the time of fulfillment had arrived. 

The biblical authors identify the angel Gabriel by name in only two books: the book of Daniel and the Gospel of Luke. Let’s consider these appearances and whether they have any relation to each other.
The Appearances
Gabriel is mentioned twice in Daniel and twice in Luke. Here are the spots:

And I heard a man’s voice between the banks of the Ulai, and it called, “Gabriel, make this man understand the vision” (Dan. 8:16)
While I was speaking in prayer, the man Gabriel, whom I had seen in the vision at the first, came to me in swift flight at the time of the evening sacrifice (Dan. 9:21).
And the angel answered him, “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I was sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news” (Luke 1:19).
In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, to the house of David. And the virgin’s name was Mary (Luke 1:26–27).

When you look at these four places where Gabriel’s name appears, the two places in Daniel are back to back, and the two places in Luke are back to back as well. Daniel 8 and Daniel 9 are vision scenes where the future is made known to the prophet. The occurrences of Gabriel’s name in Luke are in 1:5–25 and 1:26–38, passages where the future is made known to a man named Zechariah and to a virgin named Mary.
To recap so far what we’ve noticed, Gabriel’s name appears in only two biblical books: Daniel and Luke. And in these two books, his name appears twice in them (Dan. 8:16; 9:21; Luke 1:19, 26). Furthermore, these two occurrences in each book occur in back-to-back passages (Dan. 8 and 9; Luke 1:5–25 and 1:26–38).
What Gabriel Makes Known

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