The Easy Yoke

The devil, of course, cannot create anything.  He can't innovate, update, produce, design, or form.  The most he can do is take what God has already made and alter, dilute, adulterate, take out of context, subvert, and change it.

For example, the Lord has stated that discipleship to Him is as an easy yoke, and that His burden is light.  "Come ye, all who are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."  So if God does not laden us with heavy burdens, who does?

I find that one of the tools the devil uses is to manipulate God's moderate reality into two seemingly opposite extremes, then claim a false dichotomy.  Either man should be heavy laden with a hedge around the law, or man should not be laden with a law at all.  Either man is saved entirely by grace with no human intervention, or we must listen to hellfire and brimstone at church every week.  Either we can cavort like pagans on Fat Tuesday or we must mortify the flesh days afterward.  Even better if we can be convinced to do both.

The reality God has created, however, does not lie comfortably in any such dichotomy, simply because the adversary has co-opted the discussion and is controlling both sides of the debate.  Neither the ascetic nor the hedonist are in the right; instead, the right is somewhere in the middle, and most likely off to the left a little bit, away from where the devil has convinced us the issue lies.

As a result, real discipleship doesn't conform to what the world understands.  It's a stumbling block to them, it's foolishness...yet it is also eternal reality, so we need to understand what discipleship is, what it means, and what happens because of it.  It's hard, because our individualistic society doesn't get why we have to devote ourselves to anyone other than ourselves; it's easy because once we do,  we know exactly where we can get hope and salvation.  It's hard because we have to kill the natural man; it's easy because the natural man isn't what we want to be anyway, and we see such a better alternative.  It's hard because everything that surrounds us calls us to think as the world thinks; it's easy because One calls us to think as He thinks.

So ultimately, it's an easy yoke, but it is a yoke.  It's a light burden, but it is a burden.  Only when we accept the idea that medicine really does taste yucky, but not too yucky, will we finally arrive at the middle ground the Lord created in the first place.