Metaphor 5, continued: A Burden
--Of all the metaphors the Bible uses for sin, that of a burden is one which modern people should understand the best, but often we don’t comprehend,.
--Modern people are continuously bothered by this profound sense of guilt and regret and failure everyone feels, a heaviness which philosophers talk about as sorrow or nausea or angst and how to rid ourselves of it.
--The world’s way of solving the problem is to basically either deny the weight (by trying to talk people out of believing they have sinned) or else try to do away with it yourself (by performing some adequate task to alleviate the weight). But none of this works because the weight is both real and far too heavy for us to lift ourselves.
--But God’s way is to take the weight off of you by having Jesus take it upon Himself on the Cross.
--Biblically, the word sin connects with a weight, and this is what leads to the scapegoat concept, which is a “beast of burden” that carries the sin burden of the community symbolically outside of the city. And since we know Jesus is the ultimate truth the scapegoat points to, we see that He carried our burden symbolically in carrying his own cross (representing the death-bringing mechanism for punishing sin).
--So when the Gospel comes in, it doesn’t negate any of the evil we have done (or might do in the future), but it does liberate us from the weight of those things. So we become free to be honest about them and grateful for the alleviation, even as we no longer feel any of the burden they convey.
--And so, the lightness of Jesus’s burden is really meaning the ease of being that He deserves for having lived a perfect life, which He transfers to us in exchange for the massive burden we all deserve. This transfer of load or weight is what the Gospel accomplishes and which He made possible on the Cross.
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