Smelling Like Jesus

Every time I walk into my house and my wife has been cooking bacon, I say the same thing:

“It smells like love in here.”

When I smell bacon, I know my wife is cooking bacon; when my wife is cooking bacon, I know my wife loves me.  As it turns out, God has the same sort of reaction to a certain smell.

Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and took some of every clean animal and some of every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And when the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma, the Lord said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done. While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” (Genesis 8:20–22)

How interesting.  God is described as having a sense of smell and it’s not just in this verse; 43 times in the Old Testament, God describes an offering (of meat, wine, or grain) as having a “pleasing aroma.” Three of those times, he is jealous because the offering is not being made to him, but to other gods. (I can’t imagine my wife making bacon for another man.)

We no longer have to fire up the George Foreman Grill to make a sacrifice to God because the final sacrifice has been made. And this sacrifice, well, it smelled pretty good to God:

Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. (Ephesians 5:2)

Because of Jesus’ sacrifice, his followers smell like him and not just to God, but to everyone around us.  When people see our lives, and hear about what Jesus has done for us, they smell Jesus…they smell life.

Thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. (2 Corinthians 2:14–16

It smells like love in here.

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