Have you committed the one unforgivable sin?

Known as “the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit”, Jesus describes it in Mat 12:31-32: ³¹ And so I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the 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. (NIV 1984)

Yikes, that’s scary!  Anyone who commits this sin can never be saved!  And it doesn’t distinguish about whether one was already a Christian or not, so if one were already a Christian, they would lose their salvation never to get it back.

With so much on the line, you’d think preachers and teachers would preach and teach very frequently about what this sin is and how to keep from committing it.  Reminiscent of the Pharisees, who put a hedge around the Law with their rules such that individuals wouldn’t even come within the bounds of breaking a Law, you’d think we would do the same.  That is, churches would give their members guidelines so that individuals would never even come close to committing this.

But that’s not the case—at least in my experience.  Preachers and teachers hardly even mention it.  Only on a few occasions have I heard this mentioned from the pulpit, and it’s usually followed by a time of insecurity in the church as parishioners wonder it they may have committed this sin either before or after they became a Christian.  (And by the way, that may be part of the answer as to why don’t we hear more about this from the pulpit.)

So what’s the deal with this?  It really seems like most preachers and teachers aren’t equipped to talk about this.  The strategy I’ve seen employed is to define this sin narrowly so that it’s difficult to commit. If you define it narrowly enough, you can’t even commit it at all at the present time.  For example, if you define it such that people could only have committed it if they had a physical audience with Jesus, then clearly we couldn’t commit the sin now since Jesus isn’t physically around.  Less stringently, most define it as, “One must declare that a true miracle of the Spirit was actually done by demonic powers of Satan.”  That means the sin still can be committed in modern times.

This indeed does fit the precise thing that was going on here.  That is, looking at the textual context (which of course is a great thing to do!) Jesus had just performed the very important miracle of casting a demon out of a blind and mute person.  Rather than praising God and recognizing Jesus as the Messiah (see The Three Miracles of Jesus) the Pharisees said it was done by Beelzebub, the prince of demons.  If you want interpret these verses this way, then your Gospel would read something like this:  Jesus came to take away all the sins of the world—save for one.  If in your life you ever witness a miracle of the Spirit but say that the miracle was done through demonic powers, then this one sin will never be forgiven.

If this were so, could you have committed this sin?  I’ve heard some church leaders say, “If you’re concerned that you’ve committed this sin, then almost certainly you haven’t, because one who had committed this sin would not be concerned about such things.”  Where did they get that from?  I think it is actually easier to commit than you might think, and that you could do it without knowing that you had.  Say you’re watching some church program on TV and they bring a bunch of people out in wheelchairs.  One by one the televangelist lays hands on the people—and miraculously with shaky, unsteady legs the people arise from their wheelchairs.  Say you don’t believe in this sort of thing or that it looks fake to you, so you scoff, “That’s not real!  This all fake!”  What if it wasn’t?  What if just one in the group actually was healed?  Could you have just committed the unforgivable sin?  After all, you didn’t say it was done by Satan, just that it was fake.  What if you hear some religious organization that you believe is heretical is miraculously increasing in numbers and spreading around the world.  Could you see yourself saying, “That must be Satan”?  Really declaring anything “of the devil” would be a great risk.

In fact there’d be such great risk in judging miracles that the church might even teach us to intentionally avoid casting judgment on any miracles whatsoever.  This way you won’t even come close to committing this sin.  As mentioned earlier, this is precisely what the Pharisees did in Jesus’ time.  They came up with many rules (“tradition of the elders” see Mat 15 for an example) so that people wouldn’t come within the boundaries of breaking a law.  If committing this sin had such serious ramifications, then such measures would be justified.

Perhaps looking into what blasphemy means could help.  The dictionary says, 1) The act or offense of speaking sacrilegiously about God or sacred things; 2) The act of claiming the attributes of a deity.  It’s an odd sounding word because it’s a transliteration of the Greek word βλασφημία (blas-phay-mia).  Why was the word transliterated instead of translated?  Probably because it was a special religious word and there weren’t individual words in other languages that fully represented its meaning. 

What is unique about the word “blasphemy” is its application to God.  In Mat 12:31, the word occurs twice; but in at least one translation, the NIV-WS, the first use is translated “slander”. In all translations, the second use is translated “blasphemy”. Here in Mat 12:31, Jesus himself is speaking and using the words himself, but in the other five places in the NT (Mat 26:65, Mark 14:54, Luke 5:21, and John 10:33 and 36), it’s used by the Pharisees against Jesus.  Read each verse and you’ll find the Pharisees weren’t accusing Jesus of slandering God or saying bad things about him; instead, they are angry that Jesus was calling himself God.  For the Jews this was the word’s primary purpose:  to blaspheme God was to claim that you were God.

In Mat 12’s two uses of “blasphemy”, which of the two definitions is Jesus intending? The first time it’s clearly #1: every slander against God can be forgiven. But in the second use I believe it’s #2: someone claiming to be God, but in a somewhat figurative sense.

What I believe Jesus means here is that anyone who rejects the Holy Spirit is claiming they don’t need God, and as such–whether they know it or not–is saying they are like God or equal to God.  In Gen 3:5, Satan tells Adam and Eve that if they eat the fruit, then they will become like God, knowing good and evil.  That is to say, they will no longer need to rely on God to tell them what is good and what is evil, but will know it themselves.  However, God had only given them one command, which clearly cannot define all that is good and evil. God did not need to define good and evil because as long as Adam and Eve didn’t have the knowledge of good and evil, they would rely on God’s grace and unconditional love.  The fact is that the indwelling of God’s Holy Spirit in us is salvation.  You might say, “forgiveness of sin is salvation.”  But I say the forgiveness of sin allows for salvation–it is restoration of God’s Spirit in us, lost in Adam, that saves us.

What then is the sin of blasphemy of the Spirit?  Simply put, it is rejecting God’s Spirit which by definition bars one from salvation.  It makes sense then why it is called unforgivable: because if someone rejects God’s indwelling Spirit, there is no other means of salvation; thus, on the Last Day, they will face God devoid of the free gift of His Spirit which will not be forgiven. This is why Jesus says at the end of verse 32, “…either in this age or in the age to come”. We think of the word “unforgivable” from a temporal standpoint, which, once committed, cannot be forgiven. Instead, I believe the meaning is, while the Spirit does not indwell in a person, they are spiritually dead and lost in this realm and the realm to come; with the Spirit they are spiritually alive now and destined for Heaven.