The Unforgivable Sin
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2013 · 5 May 2013
This evening, we are focusing on Matthew 12:31-32. Let us see again that the Lord Jesus Christ lived in total submission to God the Father and the power of the Holy Spirit. In Matthew 3:16, when He was baptized, we see the Holy Spirit descending upon Christ at the initiation of His ministry. We believe that Jesus was conceived by the Spirit of God and indwelt by the Spirit of God. But there was a unique empowering by the Holy Spirit for His ministry that began at His baptism.
And according to Mark 1:12, “Immediately the Spirit drove Him into the wilderness.” So the Holy Spirit begins to energize what He says and does, and where He goes. A little further after His baptism, Luke tells us what happened next in Luke 4:14, "Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit to Galilee.”
Then Luke 4:18 tells us that Jesus says, “The Spirit of the LORD is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed; 19 to proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD.” In that verse, we see His preaching, healing, and deliverance from demons, all of it is because the Spirit of the Lord was upon Him.
With that in mind, we approach this passage in Matthew 12. The Jews of Jesus' time had seen all of the miracles, witnessed all of the deliverances, heard the preaching and teaching and felt the magnetism of the person of Jesus Christ. There was no question about the evidence; there was little argument about the manifestation of divine power. But were they willing to give the Spirit the glory and honor for what they saw?
Matthew 12:22 gives us what happened that brought it all to a head, "Then one was brought to Him who was demon-possessed, blind and mute; and He healed him, so that the blind and mute man both spoke and saw." In other words, He not only brought physical healing, but also a casting out of a demon.
Now we come to verse 23, “And all the multitudes were amazed and said, 'This is not the Messiah, is it?'" This amazement led to the accusation, because the Jewish leaders couldn't tolerate the people concluding this was the Messiah because Jesus was such a threat to their security. So they said in verse 24, 'This fellow does not cast out demons except by Beelzebub, the ruler of the demons.'" In other words, "His power is satanic."
When they said that, who were they actually blaspheming? The Holy Spirit, because it was the Holy Spirit that was ministering through Jesus, for in His voluntary humiliation, taking the form of a servant, He had given Himself over to the power of the Spirit. That, then, becomes the sin of blaspheming the Holy Spirit.
Blasphemy is to speak evil against the Holy Spirit, and the most evil that you could possibly speak against the Holy Spirit would be to say that He is the Devil, that He is Satan. That is what the Pharisees said about the power of the Holy Spirit; that was their accusation.
This accusation, then, leads to the answer in verse 25. Jesus has to respond to their accusation, and He does it in three ways. First of all, He says, your accusation is absurd. In verse 25, He says, "Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand.”
In other words, He gives them a basic human truism: you can't survive an internal revolution, or the dividing of what you are trying to hold together. Therefore, verse 26 says, "If Satan casts out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then will his kingdom stand?"
Secondly, Jesus says their answer is not only absurd but prejudiced. Verse 27, "And if I cast out demons by Beelzebub, by whom do your sons cast them out? Therefore they shall be your judges." Their disciples, believed that they were exorcists who could cast out demons.
So Jesus said, they are doing on the surface the same thing I'm doing. You say they are of God but I'm of the Devil; that is arbitrary bias, and only manifests your prejudice. The fact that you would come up with such an inconsistency shows that all of you are just prejudiced against Me.
Thirdly, you are also rebellious. In verse 28 it says, "But if I cast out demons by the Spirit of God, then the Kingdom is near.” If I'm doing it by God's power, then you are seeing God's Kingdom. Jesus is saying, if I can control the demons of Satan, then I must be able to tie up the Devil himself. If I am the one who can tie up the Devil, then God is in your midst. Your problem is that you are rebellious, and will not believe Me, so you are against Me.
They had cursed the Spirit of God, and now God through Christ is going to curse them. They have committed a sin that is unforgivable. Verse 31, "Wherefore," in other words, based on all that He has said and all that has gone on, "I say to you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men.”
That is a very simple statement; sin and blasphemy are, in a sense distinct, although blasphemy is sin. Sin is a large category of evil deeds, thoughts or attitudes. Blasphemy is one kind of sin within that broad category. Blasphemy is the unique sin of speaking evil against God, saying things about God that are not true, speaking of God in a derogatory manner; that is blasphemy.
Jesus begins by saying, "All that kind of sin and blasphemy is forgivable." It will be forgiven when all conditions are met. And the condition for forgiveness and sin is very clearly given in the New Testament as repentance toward God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. When you confess your sin, and turn from your sin to Christ in faith, believing and receiving Him as Savior, then God will forgive all your sin and blasphemy.
Look back to Psalm 32:5 where David says, "I will confess my transgressions to the LORD and You forgave the iniquity of my sin.” Psalm 103 says God forgives our sins and removes them as far as the east is from the west. Isaiah 43:25 says that God will blot out your transgressions for His own sake; and He will not remember your sins. In 1 John 1:9, "If we confess our sin, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and cleanse us from all unrighteousness."
God will graciously forgive any sin, even the sin of blasphemy. You say, "Would a Christian do that?" Christians do that too; any time you think a thought or say a word that speaks against God, you have blasphemed, spoken evil of His name. If you have said, "God, that wasn't fair," even that is blasphemy.
What Jesus is saying there is that even a redeemed person may have to deal with the reality of blasphemy in his life, when he says to God, "That isn't right, or not fair, or wasn't wise; why did You do that?" When you are angry at God, in a sense you are speaking evil against God. But all that is forgivable.
Look at verse 31 again, "All kinds of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven men, but,” and that little word “but” makes all the difference, "the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit shall not be forgiven men." Now we are introduced to something that is not forgivable. This is the only sin in the Bible of which it is ever said that it is unforgivable.
Do you know the penalty for blasphemy in the Old Testament? Leviticus 24:14-16 says that the penalty was death by stoning. If anyone spoke an evil word against God, they stoned him or her. When you look at the wretched and wicked society of the anti-Christ that exists at the end time, and read Revelation 13, 16, and 17, you will find that it is characteristic of that day that they blaspheme the God of Heaven.
This sin is further defined in verse 32, and we'll see what it means. "Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man, it will be forgiven him." If you speak against the Son of Man, that's forgivable. But the emphasis comes from the words 'Son of Man,' and that is a title that designates not His deity, that is 'Son of God,' but His humanity.
So He is saying, "You can speak a word against the Son of Man, and that would be forgivable because you may speak against Him, seeing nothing more than His humanness." In other words, your perception may not even allow you to be dealing with deity as a factor; you are condemning what you perceive in His humanness (even though you're wrong), you may just not know the facts; who He really is.
Nevertheless, when you speak against the Holy Spirit, that will not be forgiven you, not in this time period or in the time period to follow, because when you begin to speak against the Spirit, then you are saying, "I recognize the supernatural, I see the supernatural, only I think it is from Hell, not from Heaven." For that, you won't be forgiven.
When you have seen the supernatural and the ministry of the Spirit of God through Christ, and you conclude that it is of the Devil, you can't be forgiven because now, you are speaking against the Spirit of God, the power of God, as made manifest through Christ. So now you're speaking against His deity, His divine nature, and calling it satanic.
The Jews once said, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" They weren't impressed with the human elements of Jesus; but that was a far cry from saying, "Yes, we've seen His supernatural power, seen His miracles, heard His teachings, seen Him cast out devils, and our conclusion is that His power is out of Hell." That was unforgivable.
Why? Forgiveness is based on repentance and faith in Christ. If they concluded that Christ was filled with the Devil, they certainly weren't going to listen to His message about repentance and put their faith in Him. The reason they could never be forgiven is because they would never believe.
If you only knew a little bit about Jesus Christ, you could be brought along to know a little more and a little more, until it finally dawned on you what the truth was. But if you have known all the truth, and you have concluded that He is satanic, you're hopeless. For them, it became a permanent state; that's why, at the end of verse 32, it says, "It will not be forgiven him, either in this age or in the age to come."
So it isn't as if God is simply arbitrarily saying, "I don't like the way you're treating My Son; I will never forgive you, even if you come to Me." No, what He is saying is, "You have had so much evidence and you have drawn your conclusions, therefore it is obvious you will never come to Me. So you will never be forgiven."
"Is this a sin unique to that era?" No, to commit this specific sin, you would have to know everything that there is to know about Jesus and then still reject Him, so there may be a possibility that this very same sin will be committed again in the Kingdom when Christ returns.
When He is back on the earth, and does what He does miraculously at that period of time, there will also be people who will rebel. Revelation tells us that there will be a host of them from around the world who will fight Him, so that very specific sin of attributing the works of the Spirit to Satan could be committed again.
However, when Jesus comes back the second time He will not be in humiliation mode any longer, but He will be in an exaltation mode, and all He does will be His own works, though certainly in harmony with the Spirit. At that time, they will be blaspheming Him for His own works, and that too would be unforgivable if they have seen enough so that they have all the light that could possibly be given.
Less than forty years after the Jews rejected Jesus, God destroyed the entire Jewish society in 70 A.D. He destroyed the temple, wiped out the city of Jerusalem, massacred 1.1 million Jews, and in the years that followed, conquerors came through and slaughtered the Jews of 985 towns and villages. Because only a remnant believed, and the rest said, "He is of the Devil."
However that kind of sin is not unique, because it came in the very next period. Hebrews 6 describes the period that immediately follows the life of Christ, and we see the same kind of sin occur again. Hebrews was basically written to Christian Jews, but periodically, there are warnings to unsaved Jews, who have had all of the intellectual information and evidence but still will not come to Christ.
The Jews at that time had received very much the same kind of evidence that the Pharisees had received. They had heard the message, not preached by Christ, but by His apostles, who had His commission; they had seen miracles, the power of the Holy Spirit manifest through the apostles.
The warning comes in Hebrews 6: 4-6, “For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted the heavenly gift, and have become partakers of the Holy Spirit, 5 and have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come, 6 if they fall away, to renew them again to repentance, since they crucify again for themselves the Son of God, and put Him to an open shame.”
It says, "They tasted the heavenly gift." That is the salvation message, the Gospel, bound up in Christ. How? They followed Him around, saw His power, heard His message and saw His miracles. They didn't eat His flesh and drink His blood, as John 6 says they would have had to have done. They just dabbled in it, just tasted it.
Jesus said in John 6:54, “Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day." He didn't say, "Taste the blood." You had to drink it; so there was a total commitment. They tasted it, knew its character and quality. If you're there at the point of highest revelation, you'd better believe at that point, because if you don't, you will become an apostate - unredeemable, forever and ever.
You say, "What about this age?" In this age, the same principle is valid. If you have been exposed to all of the truth concerning the Gospel that God can give, in other words, you have enough knowledge to make a decision, and your final conclusion is that it is not the truth, you are unredeemable.
I'm not the judge of when that happens, but there will come a time when God turns out the lights, where you can never find your way back. I think that is the spirit of Jesus when He says, "Believe while you can," and Paul when he says, "Now is the acceptable time to believe." Let's pray.