WHAT IS THE UNFORGIVABLE SIN?
I have a friend who attended a legalistic Christian School as a child. He once told me about the day when one of his teachers taught a lesson about the possibility of a lost salvation.
“Once upon a time,” she began, “there was a good Christian man who had lived a good Christian life and he was certainly headed for glory... until one day...the last day of his life. On this day he was riding his horse when a snake appeared in the road. His horse reared up in fear and threw the man to the ground where he broke his neck and died on the spot.”
She then paused to listen to the children gasp...before offering the Coup de Grace:
“On his way to the ground,” she continued, “the man cried, ‘well, I’ll be damned!’.. And do you know what children? HE WAS!”
My friend is now a born again believer who only tells the story as a painful memory of bad-theologies-past. When he told me this story, his face screwed up into a tortured expression of both frustration and perplexity that was meant to communicate the confusion this woman’s statement created in his mind at the time.
“I heard that,” he said, “and I asked myself, ‘so what’s the point in following Jesus faithfully all my life if I can blow it all with a careless word in my final moments? What’s the point?!”
What’s the point indeed? I think of this story every time I hear Christians agonize over Jesus’ words regarding the “unforgivable sin” (Matt 12:22-37, Mark 3:22-30, Luke 12:10). “What if I’ve trusted in Jesus and I make a mistake and utter a blasphemy in a weak moment?,” they ask. I believe that at the heart of their question is the question “am I really saved by grace at all?”
LET’S GET REAL
First of all, let me begin by saying that if one could blow one’s salvation, purchased once and for all by the willingly shed blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, then I would be the last guy you would want to come to in order to seek comfort. I am every bit as much an object of God’s unmerited favor today as I was when I first dropped to my knees on Saturday, January 19, 1991. Thankfully, I know that my salvation is not based upon my ability to refrain from being an object of grace. That’s why when I read about the “unforgivable sin” I no longer worry about whether or not I can commit it, I can’t, and if you are a believer in Jesus Christ today, you can’t either.
HERE’S MY CASE
First of all, when you came to faith, you followed the leading of God the Father, for Jesus said “no one can come to me unless the Father, who sent Me, draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day” (John 6:44). Secondly, in that moment that you believed, you were saved, once and for all (John 5:24), and you were simultaneously given the Holy Spirit (Gal 3:1), sealed by that same Holy Spirit (Eph 1:13-14) as the guarantee of your inheritance to come. The Spirit of God is not given for a fortnight, He is given forever (John 14:16).
Now, consider the meaning of “forever” and then let’s move on.
The Spirit of God is a package deal with Jesus; we can argue about “second blessings” and such until we are blue in the face but we cannot argue with
the biblical truth that Jesus and the Spirit are a simultaneous blessing. If you have one you have the other and if you DON’T have one, you DON’T have the other (Rom 8:9-I can just hear Frank Sinatra singing “you can’t have one without the ottthhhherrr!”). SO... if you have the Spirit of God living within you, you are blessed with certainty because He cannot deny Himself (2nd Tim 2:13) and, therefore, such blasphemy against the Holy Spirit (the subject of our lesson) is not even possible for a redeemed child of God. Our very prayers are empowered by that very Spirit of God (Rom 8:26) and the utterance that brings our salvation is empowered by the very same source: “No one can say “Jesus is Lord,” Paul wrote, “except by the Holy Spirit” (1st Cor 12:3) and your very salvation is rooted in your having already said that very thing (Rom 10:9).
BUT WHAT IF I COMMITTED BLASPHEMY BEFORE I CAME TO FAITH?
You probably did. I know I have... both before I was a believer and, probably, since. I am in my 60s now and as such I make frequent midnight visits to the facilities. Whenever I have set my bare feet on sharp objects in the darkness between my pillow and my favorite water tank (and when you live in a house with five people and three cats such mishaps are bound to happen) I have been known to speak in tongues (and I don’t mean the Holy Spirit variety). In the midst of my midnight soliloquies I may have uttered a blasphemous phrase or two (don’t tell anybody!) but, fortunately, my salvation is NOT dependent upon my response to the snake that breaks my neck, it is dependent on the grace and mercy of a loving God who already died for me and has already risen from the dead as the proof of the sufficiency of His own sacrifice (Rom 4:25). He is coming for me without an angry face and if you are a believer today He is coming for you with exactly the same benevolence (Heb 9:27-28).
SO WHY THEN JESUS SPEAK OF AN UNFORGIVABLE SIN?
Because there is such a thing as an “unforgivable sin” and the Pharisees, to whom Jesus was speaking when he spoke of it, were doing it even as He spoke. Let’s remember that these men knew the Scriptures as well as any unregenerate men in history ever knew the Scriptures. They knew the signs of the coming Messiah and there is good evidence that they recognized a great many of those signs in Jesus when He arrived. So why didn’t they fall to their knees and worship Him? Because their God was not the God of Israel; their God was their position as the religious leaders of the Israelites. Their God was their wealth and importance in the culture in which they lived and their ‘eternal heaven’ was only found in the moment in which they were living. I don’t have to guess at this, they said it themselves. When Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead (as sure a sign of the incarnation as any of the myriad of signs He showed them) they had the following discussion:
“What are we accomplishing?” they asked one another in John 11:47, “here is this man performing many miracles...”
This admission alone is astounding. They were forever demanding signs (miracles) from Jesus, promising they would believe in Him if He would just show them one (John 6:30). Yet, privately, they admit here that He was giving them MANY such miracles with which to verify His authenticity! Make no mistake, these men knew from Whom all true miracles came and when they accused Jesus of “doing miracles by the power of Satan” they knew who it was they were blaspheming. Why did they do it then? Because their true God was not the true God but instead their own “place” in this world. Satan had once promised Jesus all the world’s riches and glory. The god of this world doesn’t offer it to Jesus alone but to anyone who will worship him. Jesus refused such an offer but apparently these men did not.
What’s more, their response had nothing to do with the worship they’d promised, it had to do with calculated resistance. In verse 48, they lament, “if we let Him go on like this, everyone will believe in Him, and then the Romans will come and take away our temple and our nation.” Apparently
the Jewish leaders of Jesus’ time considered the Romans more powerful than God and they were terrified that should Jesus be allowed to be the Messiah He was obviously sent to be, they would lose “their” temple and “their” nation, a clear indication of their true motivation in doing the things that they did. And, as if that weren’t enough, they then plotted to kill Lazarus as well, in order, evidently, to cover up the evidence of Jesus’ faith inspiring miracle (John 12:9-11).
In Matthew’s account of Jesus’ teaching on the “unforgivable sin”, he tells these same Pharisees the following: “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters. And so I tell you, every kind of sin and slander can be forgiven, but blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.” (Matt 12:30-32). THIS is the context of the “unforgivable sin”. God gives a call to all men but only a few will come (Matt 22:14). Some, while refusing to come, will blaspheme the Spirit who bids them “enter” and in so doing they will make their condemnation sure.
BUT WHAT IF I DID IT BEFORE I CAME TO FAITH?
You didn’t, for if you had, you would never have come to faith; your conscience would be seared and the very question over whether or not you had committed the “unforgivable sin” would be the last thing over which you would be spending an ounce of worry. Paul too was a blasphemer before he was saved (1st Tim 1:13) but he was, he wrote, “shown mercy because of my ignorance and my unbelief”. The same has been true of you, you poor worrisome Christian.
So, rejoice! When Jesus warned of the unforgivable sin, He was not speaking to believers. You are safe, you are redeemed, you are already as good as seated in glory (Eph 2:6) and your glorification is so certain that Paul spoke of it in past terms two thousand years ago (Rom 8:28-30).
VJH