The Unpardonable Sin (Matthew 12: 31-37)
2690.
I. Introduction.
After all Jesus has said so far about inner righteousness and unconditional salvation it is surprising to find him talk about an unforgivable spoken by Jesus the Saviour of all people.
31 And so I tell you, every kind of sin and slander can be forgiven, but blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. 32 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. 33 “Make a tree good and its fruit will be good or make a tree bad and its fruit will be bad, for a tree is recognized by its fruit.
(Matthew 12: 31-33)
So startling is what Jesus says here that some wish to take away the definiteness of the meaning. They argue that this is just another example of that vivid Middle Eastern dramatic way of saying things. The classify it as hyperbole like when Jesus said that a man must hate father and mother to be a true disciple. They say you don’t need to interpret it literally, but it simply means that the sin against the Holy Spirit is something terrible. In support certain Old Testament passages are quoted, like.
"But the person who does anything with a high hand, whether he is native or a sojourner, reviles the Lord, and that person shall be cut off from among his people. Because he has despised the word of the Lord, and has broken his commandment, that person shall be entirely cut off"
(Numbers 15:30-31 ).
Or
"The Lord of hosts has revealed himself in my ears. 'Surely this iniquity will not be forgiven you till you die,' says the Lord God of hosts"
(Isaiah 22:14).
Some Bible experts point out that these texts say much the same thing in the Old Testament as Jesus says here in the gospels, and that they are only emphasising the serious nature of the sin in question. However, these Old Testament texts do not have the same air about them, nor do they produce the same effect in the mind of the reader. There is something very much more alarming in hearing words about an unforgiveable sin from the lips of him who was the incarnate love, and whose teaching began to move us away from religious legalism towards a more grace-based salvation of God.
However, there is one section in this saying which is undoubtedly puzzling. We read today from the NKJV which is translated as, 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. The RSV version translates it as, a sin against the Son of man is forgivable, whereas a sin against the Holy Spirit is not forgivable. If these interpretations are correct, it is indeed a difficult saying to interpret.
Matthew has already said that Jesus is the plumbline of all truth in Matthew 10:32-33; so, it is difficult to see what the difference between the two sins is. However, another interpretation can be reaching if we misunderstand what Jesus meant by the phrase “Son of man” . We have already in Matthew 12:1-8, that the Hebrew phrase a “son of man” can simply mean that we are speaking about a gentile, a non-Jewish person. So, the term, “Son of Man”, can be used prophetically of the Messiah, and a ”son of man can be used to describe a non-Jewish person. So, a possible interpretation can say any sin against an ordinary person can and will be forgiven; but if anyone speaks a word against the Holy Spirit it will not be forgiven.
In other words, it is entirely possible that we may misunderstand a human messenger from God, or we may sin against our fellow man accidently or deliberately; but we cannot misunderstand, except deliberately, when God speaks to us through his own Holy Spirit. A human messenger is always open to misinterpretation, but the divine messenger speaks so plainly that he can only be wilfully misunderstood. It certainly makes this passage easier to understand, if we regard the difference between the two sins as a sin against God's human agents, which is serious, but not unforgivable, and a sin against God's divine messenger, which is completely wilful, and which, as we shall see, can end by becoming unforgivable.
II. The Old Testament View of the Holy Spirit.
So, let us then try to understand what Jesus meant by the sin against the Holy Spirit. One thing is necessary and that is we must grasp the fact that Jesus was not speaking about the Holy Spirit in the full Christian sense of the term as we experience Him today. He could not have been experienced this way for Pentecost had to come, this was before the Holy Spirit was available to men and woman in all his power and life and fulness. So, this saying must be interpreted in light of the Jewish conception of the Holy Spirit, and prior to the gift of the Holy Spirit made to believers following the ascension of Jesus. According to Old Testament teaching the Holy Spirit had two supreme functions.
First, the Holy Spirit brought God's truth to people.
Second, the Holy Spirit enabled people to recognize and to understand that truth when they saw it. As the Jews saw it, we needed the Holy Spirit, both to receive and to recognise God's truth. We may express this in another way, in that that both in the Old Testament and for non- believers today there is within everyone a Spirit-given faculty which enables them to recognize goodness and truth when we see it. Also, by the way to innately know the difference between good and evil.
The next step in understanding the context of this is noting he said this by following on what we saw yesterday when noted Jesus talked about how a person can lose their spiritual gifts if they refuses to use them.
This is true in any sphere of life. It is true physically; if someone stops using certain muscles, they will weaken and eventually atrophy. It is true mentally; many people during their time at school or college can acquired knowledge of, for example, Mathematics or music; but that knowledge is soon lost if they do not continue to practice its use. Evidence has been shown that someone can lose their ability to understand the great works of literature or may lose the ability to grasp the nuances of great poetry if they read nothing but pulp fiction.
Spiritually I believe this can also be true morally or spiritually, in that we may lose the faculty of enjoying healthy pleasures if we begin to find pleasure in things which are degraded and morally tainted.
Furthermore, I believe, people can lose their ability to recognize goodness and truth when they see it. If we shut our eyes and ears to God's way for long enough and turns our back to the messages which God is sending us. If we for begin to prefers our own ideas to the ideas of God, in the end we come to a stage where we cannot recognize God's truth and God's beauty and God's goodness when we see it. In It can even get to the point when that which is evil can appear good, and what is of good and of God’s will can seem evil to us.
That is the stage to which these Scribes and Pharisees had come. They had so long been blind and deaf to the guidance of God's and the promptings of God's Spirit, they had insisted on their own way for so long, that they had come to a stage when they could not even recognize God's truth and goodness when they saw them. They were at this point we see described here when they were able to look on incarnate goodness and call it evil; they were able to look on the Son of God and say he was inspired by the devil.
The sin against the Holy Spirit is the sin of us sinning so consistently and refusing God's will that in the end it cannot be recognized when it comes and presents itself before us. However if that is the case, why should that sin be unforgivable? What differentiates it so obviously from all other sins?
The answer is simple. When someone reaches that stage of denial then repentance becomes impossible. If we cannot recognize good when he sees it, then we cannot desire it. If we do not recognize evil as evil, we cannot be repentant about it, nor can we wish to move away from it. And if we cannot, , love what is good and hate what is evil, then we cannot repent; and if we cannot repent, we cannot be forgiven, for repentance is the only condition of forgiveness.
As Christians we can take great comfort in the fact that we cannot have committed the sin against the Holy Spirit questions the fact that we might, even a second done that. For the sin against the Holy Spirit can only be truly understood when it recognised it can only be described as the complete loss of all sense of sin.
It was to that stage that some of the Scribes and Pharisees had come to this day in this passage. They had so long been deliberately blind and deliberately deaf to God that they had lost the faculty of recognizing him when they were confronted with him. It was not that God who had banished them beyond the realm of forgiveness; they had shut themselves out. Years of resistance to God had made them what they were.
There is a serious warning here. We must seek Gods presence all our days so that our sensitivity is never blunted, our awareness is never dimmed, our spiritual hearing never becomes spiritual deafness. It is a law of life that we will hear only what we are listening for and only receive what we have prepared ourselves to receive. It is also the law of life that we hear what we have trained ourselves to hear; so day by day we must listen to God, so that day by day God's voice may become louder, not fainter, and fainter until we cannot hear it at all. We must listen to what God is saying to us every day, because then it will become clearer and clearer until it becomes the one voice to which above and to which our ears are spiritually attuned.
III. Hearts And Words.
Jesus finishes with this section by challenging our level of insight when he says: You can only tell a tree's quality by its fruits, and a man's character by his deeds." But what if we have become so blind to God that we cannot recognize goodness when we sees it? Continuing.
34 You brood of vipers, how can you who are evil say anything good? For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of. 35 A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in him, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in him. 36 But I tell you that everyone will have to give account on the day of judgment for every empty word they have spoken. 37 For by your words you will be acquitted, and by your words you will be condemned.”
(Matthew 12:34-37)
It is little wonder that Jesus chose to speak here about the potentially awful power and responsibility of the words we use. The Scribes and Pharisees had just spoken the most terrible of words this day. They had looked on the Son of God and called him an ally of the devil. Such words were dreadful words indeed.
In response Jesus lays down two principles.
(i) The state of a someone’s heart can be seen through the words they speak. Anything which is in our heart can only come to the surface through the words that exit from our mouths.
There is nothing as revealing as words we speak. We do not need to talk to someone for long before we discover whether he has a mind that is healthy or a mind that is corrupt. We do not need to listen to them long before we discover whether they have a mind that is kind and encouraging of others, or a mind that is cruel. We do not need to listen for long to a man who is aims to lead others by teaching or lecturing or preaching to find out whether his mind is clear and pure or whether it is muddled and destructive of others. We are continually revealing who we are by what we say.
(ii) Jesus also laid it down that a everyone will have to give and account for their idle words. The word that it used for idle is the Greek term meaning to be without. It describes that which was not meant to produce anything. It is used, for instance of a dead tree, or fallow land, or even a day when no work could be done. This is any words we use when we speak without thinking, the words which we utters when the conventional restraints are removed, which really show what he is like.
One the other side of this verbal coin may also be carefully spoken words that are a calculated hypocrisy. When someone is consciously on their guard, he will be careful what they say and how they say it to avoid giving their real intentions away.
However, be warned and be equipped by understanding that when we are off guard, our words reveal our real character. It is quite possible for our public utterances to appear fine and moral, and yet our private conversations can be abrasive and scandalous. In public we may carefully chooses what we say but in private we will inevitably let our guards drop, and angry or corrupt intentions may slip out.
We often say in anger what we really think rather than keeping control and using mature judgment in what we say. Some people in public appear a model of charm and politeness when they know they are being watched and are deliberately careful about the words they us. Yet in their own homes they are a dreadful example of irritability, sarcasm, temper, criticism, complaining and bitterness.
It is a humbling thing to remember that the words which show what we are, are the words we speak when our guard is down.
This principle can be applied in our watching of other people but also should be used in understanding what we also say and our motivations for saying things. It is often these words which cause the most damage in life. We may say in anger things we would never say if we maintained controls of ourselves. We may say afterwards that we never meant to say what we said. However, that does not free us from the responsibility of having said what we said. The fact is that an evil word can leave a wound that nothing will repair and erects a barrier that nothing will take away. We can let slip an evil word that should never have been said and that is very thing that may lodge in someone's memory and stay there forever. Once the hurting word is spoken nothing can bring it back; it runs free in the world sometimes fuelled by gossip pursues its own course of damage wherever it goes. (See James and the taming of the tongue).
Jesus say, “let us examine our words that we may discover the true state of our hearts. And let us always remember that God will not ultimately judge us by the words we speak with care and deliberation, but by the words we speaks when our guard is down or the restraints are off and the real feelings of his heart come bubbling to the surface.