[Bill,
December 18, 2007]
Biblical interpretation
I have occasionally seen folks mentioning that the sin against the Holy Spirit is attributing God's works to the devil. Um, no. That is called a mistake.
If you read the passage, it says:
What blaspheming the Holy Spirit refers to, in my humble opinion, is the persistence of the accusers. It's not simply the mistake of calling good evil and evil good. I believe that's forgivable. It's the persistence that's the issue here. Rather than admit they are wrong, they persist in accusing Jesus. Essentially, the problem is they keep arguing to the point where they accuse the Holy Spirit of being an evil spirit.
But this persistence, I believe, must be until the end of life. I don't think the problem is the Holy Spirit is touchy and if you say something bad about the Holy Spirit you are doomed. I think it means that if you just keep arguing until the end, you're in trouble. Jesus in the above passage doesn't accuse the scribes of committing the unforgivable sin, either. He's just saying that "all sins are forgiven" except this resistence to forgiveness and deliverance. The Scribes are on the edge of committing it.
So what is the sign you have blasphemed the Holy Spirit? I think an inability to repent. Not that you haven't repented -- I mean you can't. I don't mean regular human stubbornness, denial or self-justification throughout life -- I myself have seen that drop like a curtain in one second in the Holy Spirit's presence. Both in my case and others.
But I think that human stubbornness and self-justification can eventually yield into a place in your soul where you can't repent, because you don't want to.
My two cents.
If you read the passage, it says:
The crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat. And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for people were saying, "He is beside himself." And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, "He is possessed by Beelzebul, and by the prince of demons he casts out the demons." And he called them to him, and said to them in parables, "How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. And if Satan has risen up against 'himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but is coming to an end. But no one can enter a strong man's house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man; then indeed he may plunder his house.
"Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the sons of men, and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin" — for they had said, "He has an unclean spirit."
What blaspheming the Holy Spirit refers to, in my humble opinion, is the persistence of the accusers. It's not simply the mistake of calling good evil and evil good. I believe that's forgivable. It's the persistence that's the issue here. Rather than admit they are wrong, they persist in accusing Jesus. Essentially, the problem is they keep arguing to the point where they accuse the Holy Spirit of being an evil spirit.
But this persistence, I believe, must be until the end of life. I don't think the problem is the Holy Spirit is touchy and if you say something bad about the Holy Spirit you are doomed. I think it means that if you just keep arguing until the end, you're in trouble. Jesus in the above passage doesn't accuse the scribes of committing the unforgivable sin, either. He's just saying that "all sins are forgiven" except this resistence to forgiveness and deliverance. The Scribes are on the edge of committing it.
So what is the sign you have blasphemed the Holy Spirit? I think an inability to repent. Not that you haven't repented -- I mean you can't. I don't mean regular human stubbornness, denial or self-justification throughout life -- I myself have seen that drop like a curtain in one second in the Holy Spirit's presence. Both in my case and others.
But I think that human stubbornness and self-justification can eventually yield into a place in your soul where you can't repent, because you don't want to.
My two cents.
Wow, are we agreeing! ;)
John
Now, I think that people get hung up on form over substance. People say all sorts of things when what they mean to express is some relatively simple emotional state. For example, when a man calls a woman that he doesn't like "a whore", typically he's not actually suggesting that she takes money in exchange for sex with men that she isn't married to. He's simply trying to express that she's done something that has frustrated or disappointed him.
Similarly, people can say things which take the outward form of blasphemy, but whose substance is merely that the speaker is frustrated or disappointed with something. I don't think that that's the thing which Jesus says is unforgivable. Jesus always seemed to come down on the side of substance being more important than appearance.
On the other hand, actually believing good to be evil, that's something different entirely. You can't accidentally think that good is evil. You can regret some evil incident upon a particular good, such as the pain involved in a woman giving birth, and regretting the incident evil is often hard for a human onlooker to distinguish from regretting the good, since human speech is imprecise.
But I don't think that it counts when one says, "blast it all"; no one really means that all things should be blasted. Even when a person somewhat means it (as opposed to it being merely a set of wrote words), they don't really have the intellect to consider all things and individually wish them blasted. Put simply, having far more limited intellects, we don't really have the capacity for evil that angels do. And I think that Jesus was more concerned with the evil which we could actually accomplish than the evil which we're not capable of.
So he must have meant some blasphemy which we could really mean. And they do exist. I think that it's possible that a human being could wish that God doesn't exist, or believe that nothing is good, and things of that nature. But those sort of blasphemies are very unnatural to a person. Careless speech is the easiest thing in the world, but genuine belief that all things are evil — that takes work.
And if a person twists themselves into that state — really manages to get to the point where they're calling white black &mdash how could they ever get out? It seems highly improbably for them to ever be able to accept God's help to get out of that state, because there can be no inducement to them — having denied all good, what could they be motivated by?
So, it would not be very surprising if God would never forgive a person becoming irredeemably evil.
(Forgive my rambling; my real point is just that I think it important when talking about this passage to keep in mind that Jesus always seemed more concerned with what was in a person's heart than what was on their lips. Which is of course a double-edged sword: the other side of there being physical manifestations with no sin is that there are sins with no physical manifestations.)