If not the result of a strain or an injury, a neck problem may be due to a “yoke of bondage”. Has someone placed a “yoke” on your neck — one that’s difficult to wear and hard to bear? Some yokes are placed by well-meaning religious people who equate service with suffering (Acts 15:10; Galatians 5:1)
Having been a dairy farmer for nearly four years in my teen years, I am acquainted with yokes in the simplified form of poles attached to the necks of cows with leather straps. They hung vertically and prevented cows from pushing their way through horizontal fence wires. But they were for the good of both cows and fences, whereas the kind placed on the necks of God’s people are heavy and are designed to pull heavy bondages that don’t belong.
Such bondages may include an over-emphasis on money: enforced tithing rather than giving freely according to ability. Or healing as the main evidence of a believer’s faith rather than of one of many signs of growing faith. (Yes, Divine Healing is in the Atonement, but it is a constant that can be prevented by over-eating or lack of exercise, or other variables. Some even claim that our longevity goal should be 120 years of age — and good on them; but Genesis 6:3 appears to me to be how long God would allow things to continue before sending the Flood. These are some of the yoke-like restrictions that some would put on fellow Christians.)
Some thoughts to help you put off or not put on yokes of bondage:
The Pharisees were skilled at making ‘yokes’ of religious bondage and placing them on the ‘necks’ of people. They were in the form of Do’s and Don’ts. Jesus ‘broke off’ such ‘yokes’ by eating heads of grain with his fingers while passing through a wheatfield, and by healing the sick on the Sabbath.
In so doing, Jesus was not breaking the spirit of the Law, any more than a Jewish farmer was when he led an ox or donkey from a stall and watered it on the sabbath day. Jesus never once broke the spirit of the Law, which is “holy, just and good”.
We can and should break off the bondage yokes God’s people wear, no matter what form they may take — the one exception being the “yoke” that Jesus has placed on those who follow him, which is one of loving service for our Lord and his people. His yoke is light to bear and easy to wear, and we who love him and them wear it gladly! (Matthew 11:28-29)