Verle Bell M.D.
[Originally published as God Smells!]
God Smells!
Or rather, he is able to smell and loves certain odors:
- In Philippians 4:18, the gifts of the Philippian church to Paul are described as “an odor of a sweet smell, a sacrifice acceptable, well pleasing to God.”
- In Ephesians 5:2, when Jesus in love gave himself for us as a sacrifice to God and an offering it was a sweet-smelling odor to God.
- In 2 Corinthians 2:15–16, for we are unto God a sweet savour of Christ, and a savour of life unto life in them that are saved.
- In John 12:3–8, Jesus greatly honored Mary for annointing him with a vast amount of costly perfume.
- In Exodus 30:22–38, God gave Moses specific instructions for making perfumed annointing oil and solid incense to use in concecration and worship.
- In Leviticus 10, God struck Levi’s sons dead when they offered their own incense on their terms to God.
- In Genesis 8:21, When Noah was finally allowed to leave the Ark, he offered burnt offerings in gratitude, “And the LORD smelled a sweet savour; and the Lord said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground.”
- In Leviticus, God spells out the kind of “sweet savours” he wants to smell: sacrificed rams, oil and bread, wine, flour and oil, frankincense, and animal fat.
- In Psalm 115:6, God derides man-made gods as having noses that can’t smell.
- In Leviticus 26:31, God predicts that when the Israelites refuse to listen and obey God, he would refuse to smell their offerings.
- In Amos 5: 21–22, this prediction came true as God says, ”I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies. Though ye offer me burnt offerings and your meat offerings, I will not accept them: neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts.”
Smell is a very special sense. Unlike sight and sound, when smells are picked up, they go directly to the identification brain and then to the memory and emotion, bypassing the amygdala. They are retained and last longer than other sensory perceptions. Smells are powerful at bringing back memories.
In therapy, we used to have an adult smell a box of crayons, and then they would be flooded with memories from their childhood. Now the composition has changed, and children play with videos rather than create with crayons.
Being disgusted by certain smells is important for identifying and motivating us to deal with danger such as mold, corpses, poop, and general rottenness. This forms powerful mental pictures of the grossness of sin, which is why God hates the stench of disobedience, self-will, fashioning and worshiping our own gods, etc.
We can become desensitized to bad smells and quit dealing with their source. God wants us to be passionately disgusted with the stench of sin and love the smell of righteousness.
I, God, have made the stink of your camps to come up unto your nostrils: yet have ye not returned unto me. (Amos 4:10)
So may we live so that our lives are a sweet savour to the Lord and to those around us. May we pause and smell the roses, remembering to worship God not just for visual beauty and music but for the wonderful gift of smell that we share with him.
