|
About Jesus Steve Sweetman The
Unforgivable Sin So is
there really a sin that God can’t or won’t forgive?
Well, when I was very young every so often some of us would ask
our Sunday School teachers what blaspheming against the Holy Spirit was.
We called this the unpardonable sin in those days. We
never got a straight forward answer. The
reply usually went like this. “If
you have to ask this question, you haven’t committed the sin, so
don’t worry about it”. That
answer never really satisfied me. My
guess is that our teachers didn’t want to admit that they didn’t know
the answer. So I had
to figure things out on my own, which can be dangerous according to some
of my friends. With
the reasoning of a child I concluded that the unforgivable sin was a
sexual sin. I had good
reason to believe this, because no one wanted to talk about sex, and no
one wanted to talk about the unforgivable sin.
So because of the silence on both issues I just figured that both
must be related to each other. Of
course my knowledge about both subjects was limited. A pastor
friend of mine once told me that blaspheming against the Holy Spirit, or
the unforgivable sin was “attributing the work of Jesus to the
devil” as seen in Mark 3. I
wasn’t really satisfied
with that answer either. The
Pharisees accused Jesus of castintg demons out of people because they
believed He was associated with the devil. (Mark 3:22)
I believe my pastor friend was on the right track, but he fell
short in his explanation. If you
look closely at Mark 3:20-30 the Pharisees were doing more than
attributing the work of Jesus to the devil.
They were actually attributing Jesus to the devil.
They were claiming that Jesus was associated with
satan, and not God. By
saying this they were denying the divinity of Jesus because Jesus
couldn’t be God in human flesh and also be associated with satan at
the same time. Blasphemy
against the Holy Spirit is simply denying the divinity of Jesus, and His
divinity has a lot to do with the Holy Spirit.
The way the Pharisees denied Jesus’ divinity was to associate
Him with the devil. Others
may deny the Deity of Christ in other ways.
Therefore, not believing in who Jesus really is cannot be
forgiven. As Mark puts it,
it’s an “eternal sin”. (Mark 3:29) This only
makes sense. If Jesus called
everyone to repent and believe in Him, why would He then say it’s okay
not to believe in who He really is.
If this was the case, all of what Jesus did on earth would
have been in vain. God could
have just pronounced everyone forgiven without sending Jesus to the
cross. All of what the early
apostles preached and experienced
would have been worthless. And
all of our Christian activity today would be meaningless.
If all sin is forgivable, including not believing in who Jesus
is, then all are saved. I
know that’s a popular teaching these days, but it’s just not
Biblical. All sins
can be forgiven upon true repentance and trust in Jesus, but believing
that Jesus isn’t divine, well, where’s the logic in saying that’s
forgivable. Besides, if you
deny who Jesus says He is, you have to question everything He said,
including His claim to deity, making all of His teaching questionable.
If He ‘s wrong on one point, then He could be wrong on other
things He said. At this point the foundation of our Christian life falls
apart. OF course
if you repent and turn from not believing who Jesus really is, then you
don’t have to worry about this sin any more as my Sunday School
teachers said. The bottom
line to all of this is that Jesus’ death provides
forgive for all sin, except the sin of not believing in who He
really is. By denying the
deity of Jesus you blaspheme the Holy Spirit, the One who descended upon
Jesus at His baptism, showing Him to be the Son of God.
The Holy Spirit is also the One who speaks to ours hearts by
convicting us of sin and pointing us to Jesus our Saviour. When we deny
the One the Holy Spirit is pointing us to, we blaspheme or denounce the
Holy Spirit as a liar.
|