It's His Load To Bear

“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Mt 11:28-30 AV)

There is much conjecture regarding the heavy load one is laboring under.  Almost all commentators agree this load is some aspect of sin.  Some assume the load is the additional traditions that the Pharisees had put upon the people.  The yoke, they assume, is salvation by grace.  Others suggest the load is sin itself.  However, those who disagree rightly point out that sin itself is not a load.  It is a pleasure and laboring is not all that necessary.  John Gill and others suggest it is the labor one exerts to free himself from the guilt and shame of sin.  To this, I agree.  This is common to all religions.  We fall into sin and then attempt to overcome the consequences of it in our own power and effort.  Whether it is self-destruction or good works, our labor is useless.  The guilt and shame remain.  The answer is to take upon our souls the yoke of Jesus Christ.  In this metaphor, the application would be lost if we focused on what the yoke is rather than what the yoke does.  If we can answer the latter, then the former will come into view.

In reading about oxen, I learned several facts.  For example, an ox is not a breed.  It is a job description.  An ox is any bovine that is trained to perform tasks at the command of the drover.  In one article I read, the author is making a case for oxen over a tractor for small farms or homesteads.  He performs a cost analysis.  He describes several tasks that would be more suited for oxen rather than a tractor.  The only task he could think of which a tractor would best the oxen is log pulling.  The article then went into the basics of training a cow to be an ox.  If one were to start them off as calves, a halter would be used.  This halter is used to accommodate the ox to a load and also to learn the five basic commands.  Left, right, forward, backward, and stop.  The calf may then be hooked to a wheeled sled and taken up a slight incline.  The purpose of which would be to halt without stepping backward.  When basic commands are learned, then it is time to introduce the yoke.  The yoke is used when two oxen are working as a team.  The device is called a halter if only one ox is working.  A yoke is for two animals.  Did you catch that?  A yoke is always used for a team of oxen.  Never does a single ox use a yoke.  They work together and in unison at the commands of the drover to accomplish that which the drover desires.  What a picture!

What our Savior is saying is overcoming the consequences of sin is impossible to the single sinner laden with a load of guilt and shame.  But if we come under the yoke which Christ is bearing and pull with Him, the guilt and shame are much easier to bear.  Our precious Savior is bearing all the load of our guilt and shame and all we need to do is get under that yoke, allowing Christ to do most of the work.  On Calvary, He took our sin.  All of it.  Even that sin which we have not done yet.  The load rightly belongs to us.  Every ounce of it.  We know this.  What we tend to do is to take on that halter and try to plow the field all on our own.  We cannot begin to move that plow.  Pull as we may, it will not budge and the more we try to pull our own load, the heavier it becomes.  Jesus has excepted the load of our sin.  He is under the command of the Drover.  That would be our Father.  He does as He is instructed to do.  He came to die for our sin and take upon himself a load of our guilt and shame.  He wears that yoke whether we chose to bear it with Him or not.  There He is.  In the field.  He is standing there with the yoke we deserve.  The strongest ox to bear the yoke Himself.  But to lighten our burden, we must come alongside Him.  We must yield to His strength to carry the yoke of our guilt and shame.  He calls it His yoke.  It belongs to Him.  Not to us.  We learn of Him.  That is, we learn of His ability to bear our burden of guilt and shame as we trust in God’s forgiveness and mercy.  What a picture of the intercessory work of Christ.  What a picture of a Savior who loves us more than we could ever know!