Everyone With Fire Shall Be Salted

Mark 9:42 "[Jesus said:] And whoever may cause to stumble one of the little ones believing in me, better is it for him if a millstone is hanged about his neck, and he hath been cast into the sea. 43 And if thy hand may cause thee to stumble, cut it off; it is better for thee maimed to enter into the life, than having the two hands, to go away to the gehenna, to the fire- the unquenchable- 44 where there worm is not dying, and the fire is not being quenched. 45 `And if thy foot may cause thee to stumble, cut it off; it is better for thee to enter into the life lame, than having the two feet to be cast to the gehenna, to the fire- the unquenchable-46 where there worm is not dying, and the fire is not being quenched. 47 And if thine eye may cause thee to stumble, cast it out; it is better for thee one-eyed to enter into the reign of God, than having two eyes, to be cast to the gehenna of the fire- 48 where their worm is not dying, and the fire is not being quenched. (Young's Literal Translation)

Jesus "gives an impressive description of eternal destruction. ...The Greek word for hell, gehenna, appears twelve times in the New Testamenty. Literally translated, it is ‘the valley of Hinnom’. This valley was originally dedicated to the idolatry of Moloch (2 Ki 16:3; 2 Chron 28:3), in which children were sacrificed. After the exile, the Jews were so disgusted with this place that they turned it into a dumpsite for all Jerusalem’s garbage. [No such thing would occur in Israel!] In this place, just outside the city, the fire burned constantly and maggots did their incessant work (consuming). That place was known as Gehenna." (de Koning)

“Perhaps it is in this place's character as a garbage dump that the most appropriate likeness to HELL is found; because hell is God's cosmic disposal device for that which is finally unconformable to His holy will. Here also is seen the necessity for it. No industry, no kitchen, no household were ever possible without the means of disposing of the refuse; and it would be illogical to suppose that God could run the whole universe without some means of taking care of the refuse.“ (Burton Coffman) Jesus does not suggest cutting off the offending parts of the body (it would be better), but rather to stop sinning.... or the "soul" or "person" as the term is often used in the Bible will be threatened by the fire of God's endtime wrath. "As a surgeon does not hesitate to cut off a gangrenous hand to save a life, so evil and destructive practices, though precious to us as a very part of our lives, must be sacrificed to save the soul (person)." (Hiebert)

There were three refrains of the notorious saying taken from Isaiah 66:24.— "where their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.” Daniel and Isaiah prophesied of the Second Advent, resurrection, judgment and extermination of the wicked— “And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, some to shame and everlasting contempt.” (Dan 22:2) Isaiah prophesied a destruction of God's enemies. “For behold, the LORD will come with fire and with His chariots, like a whirlwind, to render His anger with fury, and His rebuke with flames of fire. For by fire and by His sword the Lord will judge all flesh; and the slain of the LORD shall be many. (Isa 66:15-16) "For as the new heavens and the new earth which I will make shall remain before Me," says the LORD, "So shall your descendants and your name remain. And it shall come to pass that from one New Moon to another, and from one Sabbath to another, all flesh shall come to worship before Me," says the LORD. "And they shall go forth and look upon the corpses of the men who have transgressed against Me. ‘For their worm does not die, and their fire is not quenched.’ They shall be an abhorrence to all flesh." (Isaiah 66:22-24)

Here is described "the establishment of Christ’s kingdom on earth, the restoration and conversion of Israel, and the ‘restitution of all things’ in the setting up of ‘New Heavens and New Earth.’ The closing words describe the holy central worship set up at Jerusalem; and the going forth of the worshippers to the scene of that ‘supper of the fowls’ (Rev. 19:17-21), to wit,—the masses of the dead who have been slain, like the Assyrian army of Sennacherib, by the hand of God.” (Future Punishment by Edward White)

"In describing the great prosperity of the kingdom of the Messiah, Isaiah says that the people of God 'shall go forth, and look upon the carcasses of the men who have transgressed against God.' Their enemies would be overcome. They would be slain. The people of God would triumph. The figure is taken from heaps of the dead slain in battle; and the prophet says that the number would be so great that their worm - the worm feeding on the dead - would not die, would live long - as long as there were carcasses to be devoured; and that the fire which was used to burn the bodies of the dead would continue long to burn, and would not be extinguished until they were consumed. The figure, therefore, denotes great misery, and certain and terrible destruction. In these verses it is applied to the state beyond the grave, and is intended to denote that the destruction of the wicked will be awful, widespread, and eternal." (Albert Barnes)

Many traditionalist supposed that “their worm" that does not die is the eternal soul or the consciousness of the objects of God's wrath. But rather, it is the destroying agents of the fire (Matt 25:41) and the entole worms (maggots, Mar 9:42-48) that are described as eternal. “The ‘eternal fire’ mentioned in Matt 25:41 is described elsewhere in Matthew as a consuming fire, not a tormenting one (Matt 3:12; Heb 12:29).” (Ralph G. Bowles) Moreover: “In the case of the dead it is their carcases which will be abhorred by all flesh. And it is their carcases that the righteous will come to look on as a reminder of God’s judgment." (Peter Pett)— "And the fire is not quenched.”— Nobody will be able to quench the eternal fire of God’s wrath at the end of time. He will consume His adversaries. They “will surely die” and and the fire will die out without new fuel.

Mark 9:49 "for every one with fire shall be salted, and every sacrifice with salt shall be salted." (Young's Literal Translation)

According to traditionalist John Wesley, they "shall be, as it were, salted with fire, preserved, not consumed thereby..." Another traditionalist on the other side of the determinism vs free will debate echoes: “That fire shall be to them, what salt is to flesh; as that keeps flesh from putrefaction and corruption, so the fire of hell, as it will burn, torture, and distress rebellious sinners, it will preserve them in their beings; they shall not be consumed by it, but continued in it: so that these words are a reason of the former, showing and proving, that the soul in torment shall never die, or lose any of its powers and faculties.” (John Gill) Yet a third traditionalist suggests a more reasonable interpretation: “While verse 48 applies to the rejected[and to the Judgment of God], verse 49 has reference to those who are true to God in a hostile world.” (The Gospel of Mark by William L Lane) Lane showed a “close relation between Mark’s Gospel and the fires of persecution. In Lane’s view, Jesus offers his disciples a choice: the ‘fire’ of persecution now or the ‘fire’ of Gehenna later.” (The Fire that Consumes- Fudge)

Conditionalists believe that the fire of Judgment is a consuming fire. Chris Date of Rethinking Hell explains the problem: “The connection between the preserving function of salt and the alleged preserving function of this fire seems dubious…. [and] In Leviticus 2:13 grain offerings [representing the harvest] are to be seasoned with salt before being burned up ‘so that the salt of the covenant of your God shall not be lacking from your grain offering.’… It seems strange that the seasoning of Levitical sacrifices by salt, which were subsequently destroyed, should be seen as support for the salting of the damned by fire which never destroys them.” Another conditionalist suggested:

“The meaning may be, that every such sacrifice to the avenging Justice will be, like ‘Lot’s wife,’ who was ‘salted with fire,’ preserved as a monument in death of the tremendous results of rebellion against the Omnipotent. ‘Remember Lot’s wife,’ is one of Christ’s momentous warnings to His disciples.” (Edward White)

According to Edward Fudge: “Perhaps the most promising explanation of Mark 9:49 relates to the premise that Mark used a Hebrew source for this passage, which included Hebrew idiom lost on later Greek readers. Weston W. Fields, Executive Director of the Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation and a member of the Jerusalem School of Synoptic Research, explains: Mark 9:49 can be translated literally from Greek into Hebrew word by word in order to yield: ‘Every man with fire will be salted.’ The expression ‘to salt with fire’ is an idiom, says Fields, for the practice of destroying a place and sowing it with salt to make its destruction permanent (Judg 9:45). This fits the context in Mark, in which Jesus declares it better to enter the kingdom with some body pieces missing, rather than to be thrown into hell with every body part intact (Mark 9:42-48). Fields thus translates verse 49 as ‘Everyone [who is sent to hell] will be completely destroyed’ (‘that is,’ he explains, ‘destroyed by fire’)… Fields’ explanation is consistent with the picture in Isaiah 66:24, with Jesus’ agreeable use of that picture in verse 48, and with Jesus’ regular teaching elsewhere that the wicked will be destroyed (Matt 10:28) and perish (John 3:16).”

But conditionalist Peter Pett seems to agree but also combines the traditionalist (Lane) and the conditionalists (Edwards and Fields) ideas. He is certainly helped by His knowledge of the nature of God’s endtime wrath. "There is no doubt that to the ancients salt could be seen as a preservative, in which case ‘being ‘salted’ might be seen as signifying being treated in order to be preserved. The fire would then here indicate the purifying fires of persecution and tribulation (see Mark 10:30; John 15:20; John 16:2) which would purify the righteous (see Romans 5:1-5; Hebrews 12:4-11; Jas 1:2 ; 1 Peter 1:7; 1 Peter 4:12). But this interpretation by itself assumes that the saying is a semi-independent one, for it does not specifically connect it up with what has gone before. However, it was also recognised in those days that where ground had been salted nothing could grow in it, and the picture here might well, in the light of the context, have Deuteronomy 29:23 in mind. There salt and fire are closely connected, so that the result is seen to be that nothing grows in the land that has been salted and subjected to burning, and the picture is connected by Moses with the area around the Dead Sea, where the salt lands themselves were equally seen as places lacking in life (see Ezekiel 47:11). Thus as an alternative to the picture of preservation we have the picture of ‘salting’ as something that results in barrenness and death, something which is also then connected up with the idea of destructive fire. Taking this view the verse would be carrying on the theme of judgment and Gehenna, emphasising its inevitability for all who sinned."

So, the destruction will also be final. The grain offering representing the harvest was not to be lacking of the salt of the covenant. At the Harvest, at the end of the age, Jesus wil say to the reapers, “First gather together the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them, but gather the wheat into my barn." (Matthew 13:30) One will be preserved in life and the other in destruction.

Mark 9:50 "The salt [is] good, but if the salt may become saltless, in what will ye season [it]? Have in yourselves salt, and have peace in one another." (Young's Literal Translation)

Salt preserves the current state of things in this world. It is a type of the preserving power of the Holy Spirit of the covenant of the LORD our God- the power to trust and to obey, as well as the preserving power of God over "the second death" of His enemies.. These are dust "without" His Spirit. We are now encourage to have this preserving salt (and light, Matthew 5:14-16) within us to season the lives of other people and help them along. In the sermon on the mount, Jesus said in Matthew 5:9 that peacemakers would inherit the earth and He then told His disciples, “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.” (Matthew 5:13) Jesus will trample His enemies under His feet one day. But meanwhile, let us be both salt and light, always about our Father’s business, as He was. Thus: “Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone." (Colosians 4:6)