Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?
2 Corinthians 6:14 (NIV)
Which Way You Pull
The extracting shed at noon smells like warm wax and the inside of a candle. Two women are working the frames, and neither one is quick about it. Quick hands get stung. One holds the frame while the other draws the knife down the comb, and the honey comes off in a sheet and takes its time getting to the tank.
A yoke puts two animals under one bar. They go the same way at the same speed, and whatever one of them pulls toward, the other one arrives at. Paul reaches for that picture when he warns the Corinthians about being yoked together with unbelievers. People have used those words to end engagements and to tell a woman her marriage was a mistake she made against God.
The pairs he sets against each other are conditions and powers: righteousness and wickedness, light and darkness, Christ and Belial. The bar he’s describing is a shared direction. The last pair he names is a believer and an unbeliever, and he doesn’t soften that one. He is telling Christians not to take up a shared direction with someone who isn’t going that way, and he means it about the arrangements people build their lives inside.
So if you’re reading this with one particular face in mind, the question arrives at you before it gets anywhere near them. What has the right to set your direction on an ordinary Thursday, and what are you already harnessed to without having agreed to it?
And if you opened this because somebody said this verse over your house, the question is still yours to answer, about your own life and what it pulls toward. Paul wants a whole allegiance and an open heart from the same person, and he asks for both in a letter where he’s speaking as a man speaks to his own children. Whatever anyone has already decided about your marriage, he didn’t decide it here.
By two the last frames out of the far hives have gone cool, and cool honey won’t leave the comb however long you stand over it. They stop with the tank half full. “We’ll get the rest when it’s hot again,” one of them says, and the other one sets her knife in the warm water and leaves it there.
A Prayer to Remember
Right now I want a ruling more than I want a question, God. Show me what’s actually pulling me this week. Stop me from using your words to pass sentence on anyone. If someone has already used them on my house, steady me while I work out what’s true. And make me slow the next time I’m certain I’ve got a person figured out.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
