God’s Sense of Smell

Did Jesus smell the fish grilling on the shore of Galilee? Did He notice the fragrance of blossoms when He walked through the hills of Judea? Was He aware of the stench from the unwashed bodies He touched? Jesus was fully man so, yes, He had the sense of smell.

He is also fully God, which leads me to the question, what does God smell? I suggest three answers which I don’t believe are complete but they keenly relate to us.

1. God smells our prayers. We begin to speak from the fulness of our hearts and the fragrance of our prayers wafts into God’s presence with a satisfying aroma. Priests of old burned incense on altars to please Him and we do the same when we pray. In Revelation John records what he saw in heaven.

Angels “holding golden bowls, full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints” (5:8). “Another angel…was given a great quantity of incense to offer with the prayers of all the saints” (8:3).

2. God smells our sacrifices—the humility of our hearts in repentance, the giving of our time and goods, the relinquishment of selfishness. The cost of our sacrifice rises as a pleasing fragrance to Him. Read Numbers 15:3:

“Offer to the Lord… a sacrifice, to fulfill a vow or as a freewill offering or at your appointed feasts, to make a pleasing aroma to the Lord.”

3. God smells our lives—the way we live emits a scent that pleases Him and reveals God to those around us. The apostle Paul says that Christians spread the fragrance of Jesus 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

Friends, let us walk in love and exude the fragrance of a life that belongs to God to a world that needs Him.