Blasphemy Against The Holy Spirit Explained – The Unforgivable Sin

Blasphemy Against The Holy Spirit Explained – The Unforgivable Sin.

There is one sentence Jesus said that has terrorized believers for 2,000 years. Not a prophecy of war, not a vision of judgement, not even a warning about hell. One verse spoken in broad daylight to a crowd of ordinary people. And the strangest [music] thing about it is this. The people who fear it most may be the last people he was warning. Whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven either in this [music] age or in the age to come. Matthew 12:32. That sentence has a way of finding people in the dark. It doesn’t usually visit at noon. It visits [music] at 2:00 in the morning and it asks the same question every time. It isn’t a fear of hell in the abstract. It isn’t a fear of dying unprepared. It isn’t even a fear of God’s anger. It’s smaller than that and somehow worse. It’s the suspicion that somewhere in a moment you can’t quite locate, you crossed a line [music] you didn’t know was a line. And that everything you’ve done since, every prayer, every Sunday, every quiet morning with the Bible open on the kitchen table has been a performance over a file God already closed. For 2,000 [music] years believers have read Matthew 12 and felt the floor move. Pastors get the calls. Counselors hear it whispered. There are men and women sitting three rows back in the church you went to last Sunday who have never told another human being that this is the verse they can’t read without their hands going cold. So before this fear takes another person tonight, look at what Jesus actually said. To understand what he was pointing at, you have to look at the moment he said it. He wasn’t teaching in a quiet field. He wasn’t writing a treatise. He was standing in the middle of a confrontation [music] and the people he was confronting weren’t pagans, weren’t atheists, weren’t enemies of Israel. They were insiders, [music] men who had spent their lives in the scriptures, who more than anyone else should have recognized [music] what they were looking at. Matthew 12 sets the scene. A man is brought to Jesus, blind, unable to speak, oppressed by something the text calls a demon. Jesus heals him. The man sees. The man speaks. And the crowd begins to ask the question that the religious leaders had spent their entire careers [music] trying to control. Could this be the son of David? The Messianic question. The one that if answered the wrong way would unravel everything they’d built. So, they answered it. Not by denying the miracle, they couldn’t. The man was right there. But by reassigning it. It is only by Beelzebub, the prince of demons, that this man drives out demons. Matthew 12:24. They took the spirit’s work and publicly called it the work of hell. That’s the moment. And the Greek word behind blasphemy here is blasphemia, which doesn’t mean a bad thought or a careless word, but slander. The deliberate act of publicly assigning a corrupt identity to something sacred. The Pharisees weren’t confused. [music] They weren’t searching. They weren’t a person in grief saying something they didn’t mean. They were watching, knowing, and reversing the verdict on purpose. >> [music] >> So, if the sin Jesus described wasn’t a word, what was it? Here’s where the picture changes, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it. The Holy Spirit across the New Testament has one signature work, and Jesus names it himself [music] in John 16:8. The Spirit convicts. He brings to the surface what we’d rather keep buried. He’s the reason a verse you’ve read a hundred times suddenly stops you. He’s the reason a prayer breaks open in the middle and you don’t know why. He’s the reason the dream won’t leave. He’s the inward alarm. The wiring inside a believing person that registers God’s voice and won’t let it be filed away. Now, hold that thought next to the Pharisees. They had stood in front of the Spirit’s work, visible and undeniable, in a man who could now see, and they had publicly called it demonic. Not once, sustained, deliberate, with full knowledge of what they were doing. Imagine doing that long enough that the inward alarm goes quiet. Imagine reaching the point where the Spirit speaks and you no longer hear it. Because every time he has spoken, you have trained yourself to call it something else. That’s what Jesus was warning about. Not a word, a wiring change. The Puritan [music] pastor John Owen wrote 300 years ago that there’s a difference between a heart that’s hard and a heart that’s broken. Both ache in a way, but only one of them can still feel. And this is the contrast [music] scripture gives us, quietly, if you read it slowly. The Pharisees, after they accused Jesus of working by Satan’s power, went home. They ate dinner, they slept. The text gives no indication that the moment cost them anything. Judas couldn’t sleep. He walked into the night and couldn’t bear what he’d done. Both betrayed. One was still wired to feel it, one wasn’t. So, when Jesus says this particular blasphemy will not be forgiven, not in this age, not in the next, the warning isn’t about God’s reach. God’s reach hasn’t changed. The warning is about something else. What happens to a person who systematically dismantles the only instrument inside them that could carry them home? The unforgivable sin isn’t unforgivable because God won’t. It’s unforgivable because the part of [music] you that would ask has been turned off. That’s a sobering sentence. But it’s also, for the right listener, the most freeing sentence in this passage, because the person whose alarm has been turned off doesn’t lie awake at night listening for it. If if you’re watching this and you’re the one I’m describing, the one who’s been quietly carrying this fear for months, maybe for years, stay with me for a minute. I want to be careful with what I say next. I’m not going to tell you what you’ve done. I can’t see your life. I don’t know what you’ve said, what you’ve thought, what you’ve been through. Only the Spirit can [music] tell you what the Spirit is doing in you. And only the Spirit can tell you what he isn’t. But here’s what scripture is willing to say. The sin Jesus described is the sin of a person who no longer cares, who hears the inward voice and has trained themselves over time to call it nothing, who isn’t troubled, who isn’t afraid, who sleeps well. So sit with this for a second. The fact that you’re still afraid, the fact that this verse still finds you in the dark, the fact that you’ve been replaying conversations from years ago, wondering if one of them was the moment, the fact that you’ve prayed the same prayer of repentance 40 times because you couldn’t tell if any of them landed, the fact that you opened this video at all, none of that is the behavior of a person whose wiring is gone. That’s an alarm. [music] And an alarm only rings in a house where the wiring still works. I’m not telling you you’re forgiven. That isn’t my sentence to give. I’m telling you what the Spirit’s continued [music] movement in a person looks like. And what you’ve just described to [music] yourself in your own private fear, in the prayer you keep restarting, in the verse you keep avoiding because it stings, that’s movement. A heart the Spirit had left wouldn’t [music] ache like this. A conscience that had been fully extinguished wouldn’t be reading this sentence and feeling its eyes sting. The thing you’re afraid of having lost is, by the very evidence of your fear, still in the room with you, there’s a kind of grief, and the older theologians knew this, that is itself the work of grace, not a sign of disqualification, a sign of contact. So, listen. Whatever the precise reach of Jesus’ warning, whatever [music] the exact line he was drawing in that confrontation with men who decided in the noon light to call God’s work the devil’s, that line does not run through someone who’s still asking where it [music] runs. Why would you be here? Why would you be afraid? Why would you be reading the next sentence with the same ache that brought you to [music] the first one? Something in you is still listening. Something in you is still waiting to hear that the file isn’t closed. That isn’t theater. That’s a man or a woman with a working conscience. Sit with that. Picture a dark room, late. Everyone in the house is asleep, except [music] for one person who’s sitting on the edge of the bed, listening. Somewhere on the wall, an alarm is still ringing, quiet, but there. The wiring is intact, the current is still moving, and the system is still doing the one thing it was built to do. You are not the file Jesus was closing in Matthew 12. You are the one still listening for the sound. If someone in your life has been carrying this fear in silence, [music] send this to them. They haven’t told you. They won’t tell you. But somewhere tonight, they’re sitting on the edge of a bed, listening for an alarm they’re afraid has stopped. It hasn’t.