“Now thanks be to God who always leads us in triumph in Christ, and through us diffuses the fragrance of His knowledge in every place. For we are to God the fragrance of Christ among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing. To the one we are the aroma of death leading to death, and to the other the aroma of life leading to life. And who is sufficient for these things? For we are not, as so many, peddling the word of God; but as of sincerity, but as from God, we speak in the sight of God in Christ.”
II Corinthians 2:14-17 NKJV
I went to Calvary Bible Church (Boulder, CO) last Sunday and was also graciously given the opportunity to play in the worship band for both morning services, which was a blast! The sermon was on being ambassadors of Christ in our world and daily lives, according to II Corinthians. Tom (the guest speaker) also talked about the above passage -- the fragrance of Christ, and how it's not up to us whether people find it a pleasant fragrance of life or one of death. We are not 'peddlers' of the word of God. We can't package the good news of the King and His Kingdom in such a way to convince certain people of its truth. We are simply charged with delivering the message. (That merits an entire sermon on its own).
I wish Tom had gone deeper into the "fragrance" metaphor, however. I'm going to briefly expand on that part of it here.
Why does Paul use the metaphor of a fragrance/aroma/smell when talking about reactions to the good news? Think about what happens in your body when you react to a literal smell. If I walk into my parents' home after being gone for so long -- and let's assume mom is baking cookies or dad has been cooking steaks -- I'm going to be immediately hit with the fragrance, which might even have a greater impact on me and my body than just the mere sights and sounds of home. When I'm exposed to this fragrance of life (the familiarity of home, the cookies, etc) I feel a release of tension in my body, an opening up in order to take it all in, a peace, and a different kind of breathing than I was previously engaged in. My body says "this is right."
Now take the opposite situation, where you enter a room/house/space/building with a really, really bad smell. You can use your own imagination. Even keep it simple and let's say your brother's dog just did some serious business in your bedroom. What's your reaction to this "aroma of death leading to death?" It's totally the opposite -- your body tenses up, you close up, you hold your nose or your breath, limiting what enters your body. You want to run away. You don't even want to go near the source to eliminate it as much as you want to get away from it.
Not everyone has had this experience, but it's much more appropriate to imagine going to someone else's home and finding that the smell of the home itself is overwhelmingly unpleasant to you. There is nowhere in that house you can go to get away from the unpleasant scent, so you "close up" even more than you did in the previous scenario. But as unpleasant as it may be to you, this may be the comforting, pleasant smell of home to the people who live there! The smell is not the "problem" -- it is the person being exposed to it. To a degree, fragrances are subjective and depend on the receiver.
This is exactly what happens when someone encounters the good news of the Messiah. If God has not regenerated their heart, they will react to it like a bad smell. They will close up, tense up, wrinkle their noses, and try to get away. It exposes the path that they're on, which they already know (to some degree) is a path of death. When the good news hits the ears of someone whose heart has been softened by God, they open up and receive it the way they would receive fresh air, or the fragrance of home -- cookies in the oven, Yankee candles, burgers on the grill outside, etc. [Great, now I really miss home!]
It saves us a lot of time we would have wasted trying extremely hard to package the Gospel in such a way that this friend of ours would finally receive it, when scripture says it requires the work of the Holy Spirit for them to finally open up and breathe in the message of truth. The first commandment is the one that is most impossible for the unbeliever to obey: Love the Lord with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. It requires that one put away the idol of autonomy and trust in self over trust in God's Word. If you can't get them past that first commandment, you can't ease them into Christianity by some other means. It is the aroma of death leading to death for those who are perishing.
