His Commandments Are Not Burdensome

Some objections come out of a book. This one comes out of a life:

“I once collapsed, trapped in perfectionism and self-condemnation while trying to keep the commandments. The gospel set me free. So I know that telling people to go back to the Torah is dangerous.”

If that is your story, no one here will tell you that it did not happen. The experience of being crushed under standards is real. Some people have spent years lying awake over whether they had done enough, confessed enough, or measured up enough. It is also true that the gospel rescues people from exactly that. Both of these things stand.

Yet one question must be asked gently: what was it that crushed you? Was it God’s commandment, or was it something else that came to you wearing the name of God’s commandment? That question deserves a second look, with the Bible open.

The Pack

Picture a friend who sets out on a long mountain trail. Two hours in, he collapses on the path, gasping, and says, “This trail is impossible. Nobody should ever walk it.”

You kneel beside him and open his pack. Inside are bricks, a cast-iron pan, three heavy books, and a bag of wet sand that someone told him every serious hiker carries. Then you read the trail guide’s packing list, and not one of those things is on it.

It was not the trail that crushed him. It was the pack.

Before we decide that God’s commandments are too heavy to carry, we need to open the pack and compare what is inside it with what God actually put on the list.

Three Witnesses on the Weight

John is the first witness, and he did not write as a man who found the commandments crushing:

1 John 5:3 For this is the love of God — that we keep His commandments; and His commandments are not burdensome.

The word for keep is tereo τηρέω tay-reh'-o, to watch over, to hold on to with care. John does not present this keeping as a weight. He calls it “the love of God.” Keeping His commandments is what loving Him looks like, and John says plainly that it is no burden.

Yeshua is the second witness:

Matthew 11:28-30 Come to Me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am meek and lowly in kardia καρδία kar-dee'-ah(heart, soul-domain), and you will find rest for your psyche ψυχή psoo-khay'(souls). For My yoke is easy and My burden is light."

He is speaking to “all who are weary and burdened,” to people exactly like the one telling this story. What He offers them is not the absence of any yoke but “My yoke.” A yoke is something worn in order to work, and yet of His own He says, “My yoke is easy and My burden is light.” The rest He promises is “rest for your psyche(souls),” and it comes to those who take His yoke and learn from Him.

The third witness is the psalm:

Psalm 119:165 Great peace have those who love your Torah, and there is no stumbling-block for them.

The word for peace is shalom שָׁלוֹם shaw-lome', which means more than calm: completeness, soundness, and welfare, a life that is whole. The word for stumbling-block is mikshol מִכְשׁוֹל mik-shole', something that trips a person up and brings him down. Those who love the Torah, the psalm says, have great shalom, and nothing in their path makes them fall.

These are the three witnesses. John says that His commandments are not burdensome, Yeshua says that His yoke is easy, and the psalm says that those who love the Torah have great peace. Not one of them describes God’s commandments as the thing that crushes people.

The Burdens Yeshua Named

Yet Yeshua did speak of crushing burdens. The following verse is often quoted to show that the old law was a nightmare, but a careful reading shows whose burdens they are:

Matthew 23:4 They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on men's shoulders, but they themselves are unwilling to move them with so much as a finger.

The verse begins with “They,” and in the verses just before, Yeshua has named them: the scribes and the Pharisees (Matthew 23:2). These are burdens that men tie up and lay on other men.

The word for tie up is desmeuo δεσμεύω des-myoo'-o, to bind or to put in chains, as a prisoner is bound. Yeshua adds that “they themselves are unwilling to move them with so much as a finger.” The people who made these loads would not carry them themselves.

The word for burden is worth noticing as well. In Matthew 23:4 the “heavy burdens” are phortia, from phortion φορτίον for-tee'-on. In Matthew 11:30, when Yeshua says “My burden is light,” the word is the same phortion. There are two burdens under one word. One kind is tied up by men, heavy and hard to bear; the other is His, and it is light.

Yeshua, then, did not say that God’s Torah was the heavy load. He said that men had made heavy loads of their own and chained them onto other people’s shoulders.

Lay Down the Right Thing

This is the heart of the matter. The burden to lay down is the burden of perfectionism that people have made, and God’s Torah is not that burden.

Perfectionism says that you must be flawless or be condemned. It turns every slip into a verdict, and it keeps a ledger that it never closes. Underneath it usually lies the mistake that Part One of this book took apart: the idea that keeping commandments is how a person earns his place with God. As we saw in Chapters 1 and 2, a sinner is justified by grace, through faith, and never by works. Anyone who tries to carry the commandments as the price of acceptance will collapse, because that load was never meant to be carried. It is a brick in the pack, not an item on the list.

If the gospel set you free from that, thank God for it. That freedom is real. Messiah took the weight of your guilt, and no ledger can bring it back.

But do not let the bricks persuade you to give up the trail. When the hiker empties his pack of everything nobody asked him to carry, he does not need to abandon the walk. He needs to walk it with what the guide actually gave him. And what God gave, by the word of His own witnesses, is not burdensome but easy and light, and it brings great peace.

One more form of this objection comes from the opposite direction. Some say that the trouble is not that the commandments of the Old Testament are too heavy, but that the commandments of the New Testament are heavier still. Yeshua said of a right eye that causes you to stumble, “tear it out and throw it from you.” Who, they ask, could keep that?