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What was done to you was done using the name of God and the authority of Scripture. That does not mean God authorized it. People have weaponized Scripture against women, against children, against abuse survivors, against the questioning and the doubting β for as long as Scripture has existed. Jesus spent a significant portion of his ministry confronting exactly this. You are in company with people he defended personally.
Get These Verses Daily β FreeβStand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.β
The yoke Paul names here is not immorality β it is a religious system that added conditions to belonging that God never placed there.
βCome unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.β
Jesus uses the same word for burden here that he uses elsewhere for legalistic religious load. This invitation is specifically for the religiously exhausted.
βShe said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.β
When religion was used against this woman as a weapon, Jesus declined to participate. This is who he is β not who the system said he was.
βBut woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.β
Jesus named this publicly, directly, at personal cost. You are not wrong to name what was done to you in his name.
βThe Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound.β
Jesus claimed this mission personally. Liberty for captives. Opening of the prison. He intended this for those imprisoned by false religion too.
βThere is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.β
Condemnation is a legal verdict. What was weaponized against you was not God's verdict. His verdict, for those in Christ, is already in β and it reads differently.
βThe LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.β
A shepherd owns the sheep β they belong to him, not to the institution. What was taken from you cannot separate you from the one who calls you his own.
Religious trauma is real. It produces measurable harm β anxiety, distorted relationships with authority, shame responses disconnected from actual wrongdoing, hypervigilance around religious language and practice. The fact that it occurred in a Christian context does not make it less traumatic. In some ways it makes it more so, because it damages the categories through which healing would normally come.
What Scripture offers here is not a quick return to the system that harmed you. It offers a distinction that the system often deliberately blurred: between God and the institution claiming to represent him. Jesus made this distinction repeatedly and forcefully. In Matthew 15, when the Pharisees accuse his disciples of violating tradition, Jesus responds: "In vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men." Tradition and doctrine built by humans and presented as divine command was something Jesus specifically identified and rejected. You are not rejecting God when you reject a system that added to his Word things he never said.
The freedom Paul describes in Galatians 5:1 β "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage" β was written to people who had been manipulated back into religious performance as a condition of acceptance. The yoke of bondage Paul names is not immorality. It is a religious system that put conditions on belonging that God never placed there. Paul treats this as worth an entire letter and some of his sharpest language.
Commentary is from a charismatic Protestant perspective, drawing on KJV text and public-domain sources including Spurgeon, Andrew Murray, and Matthew Henry.
Galatians 1:6β7 contains Paul's most alarmed statement in any of his letters. He writes: "I marvel that ye are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel: Which is not another; but there be some that trouble you, and would pervert the gospel of Christ." The Greek for "pervert" is metastrepsai β to turn something completely around, to invert it. The gospel, inverted, becomes something that harms rather than liberates. Paul saw it happening in his own lifetime. The inversion that produces religious trauma is not a modern development.
The encounter between Jesus and the woman caught in adultery in John 8 is the clearest single scene of Jesus intervening against religion used as a weapon. The scribes and Pharisees bring a woman for public shaming, using law as a tool for humiliation, and Jesus does something structurally remarkable: he declines to participate. He refuses to be the religious authority the crowd is trying to use him as. Then he asks who among the accusers is without sin. The crowd disperses. Jesus asks the woman where her accusers are. There are none left. "Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more." He addresses both the system and the woman β and his priority is clearly her.
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