The God Of Smell
(1) Be ye therefore imitators of God, as beloved children; (2) and walk in love, even as Christ also loved you, and gave himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for an odor of a sweet smell. Ephesians 5:1-2
All through the Old Testament you hear of all kinds of offerings given before the Lord. One that gets my attention is the “BURNT” offerings.
Have you ever smelled the stench of burning flesh? Have you ever forgotten a pot roast in the oven and burned it to a crisp? It is repulsive. Have you ever smelled the horrid smell of burning human flesh? It is a smell that stays in your nostrils for a lifetime.
Did you know that the books of Leviticus and Numbers contain somewhere around forty references to God smelling a “sweet aroma” from the sacrifices offered before Him? I suspect that if God had ordained the sacrifice of a skunk and it was offered from the heart of a faithful child of His, He would have called it a “sweet aroma.”
In the passage above, Paul associates a life of love lived in the footsteps of Jesus a sacrifice rising up to Him as an “odor of a sweet smell.”
Paul spoke to the church at Corinth in his second letter and urged them, and us, to understand that when we spread Jesus around, it is a fragrance of life. (14) But thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumphal procession in Christ and through us spreads everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of him. (15) For we are to God the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing. (16) To the one we are the smell of death; to the other, the fragrance of life. And who is equal to such a task? (17) Unlike so many, we do not peddle the word of God for profit. On the contrary, in Christ we speak before God with sincerity, like men sent from God.
You have heard the phrase, “He is sticking his nose in my business.” Well, are we now to realize that God is doing the same thing? He is sticking His nose in our business, sniffing and smelling to see if what we are offering has “the odor of a sweet smell.”
He might sniff around a little when we assemble as a church. Certainly there are things that can go up to Him from there. While many think that the assembly is when and where God does the most of His sniffing, they are wrong. God watches and sniffs the air of our lives lived before Him in all the circumstances of our lives. When we do good and honor Him, He sniffs it out as “an odor of a sweet smell.”
I guess the best question we could ask is, “What does God smell when He smells me?”