God who causes us to triumph

For we are to God the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing.               2 Corinthians 2:15

Certain smells trigger memories – whether it is a perfume that makes you think of a certain romance or the smell of an oven baking oatmeal cookies, which makes you think of your grandmother.

Think with me of the moral character of those to whom Paul’s second Corinthian letter was addressed. Among them were immoral men and women, which Paul mentions when he wrote to the Corinthians in his first letter. He said, “And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Corinthians 6:11).

What they had been pales in the light of what they became, their lives having been forever changed through an encounter with Jesus Christ. Then Paul pictures them as following Christ in a victory procession. Paul alluded to the Roman conquerors who came back victorious after their battles and paraded through the streets of Rome or Pompeii, leading their prisoners of warfare in chains. He also mentioned the smell of incense from a pot swung back and forth by a pagan priest who led the procession. But Paul is reminding these frail citizens of the Kingdom that it has been God who delivered them from the bondage that characterized their lives, and that He has given then victory over their failures.

Paul says that the redeemed have taken on a certain fragrance, a sweet fragrance to those who are being saved and a stench to those who are being lost. Paul referred to it as “the aroma of Christ.”