"He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters. And so I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. 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."
I have heard confusing sermons and messages and teachings about this passage most of my Christian life. I expect that is because most of the people I have heard teach about it are at least partially guilty of the very thing Jesus is addressing.
Let me put this back into the context in which Jesus was speaking. Religious leaders were accusing Jesus of using the power of Satan to cast out demons and do miracles. They didn't understand Jesus. They didn't understand His paradigm of The Kingdom of God. They didn't like that He was shaking things up and confronting many of their sacred traditions (not the actual Law, just their traditions). Because they didn't like or understand what He was doing or how He was doing it or even why He was doing it, they accused Him of participating with the enemy.
Jesus' response is staggering. We need to grasp this and take it to heart. This is spiritually critical. Jesus, in essence, told them: If you are not working with me, you are working against me -there is no spiritually neutral ground. If you malign me and misunderstand me, that can be forgiven. In fact all sin can be forgiven. There is only one thing that cannot and will not be forgiven. If you malign and lie about and falsely accuse the Holy Spirit of evil, that cannot be forgiven.
We tend to assume that we would never do such a thing. We would never accuse the Holy Spirit of evil. Yet, I have heard many Christians do the exact same thing that Jesus is addressing. They look at brothers and sisters in Christ who pray for healing, speak in tongues, or worship in ways that they do not understand or that they have been taught to avoid and immediately make the accusation that it must be demonic. Christian Be Careful! If the Holy Spirit is ministering to or through someone and we falsely accuse, we are on dangerous ground.
It might help us to understand why Jesus would say such a thing. Here is what I think. Since the Holy Spirit is our connection to God -He is the One that speaks to us and indwells us and ministers to us -if we slander the Holy Spirit and cut off our connection with Him, we have actually cut off our only intimate connection to the Father and to the Son -and to forgiveness.
This passage does lead to another serious question. How can we know if we have (through lack of understanding or bad teaching) already blasphemed the Holy Spirit? I'm going to be pragmatic about this one, and not just theological. Since the Holy Spirit not only provides intimacy with God and leads to truth and right relationship with God, but also convicts of sin, if we feel the conviction of sin in our lives, we have not crossed that line. Basically, if we are honestly pursuing God and worry that we may have crossed the line, we haven't.
That being said, we still need to be careful that we do not ever look at what God is doing and call it evil. If we don't understand something, pray about it. Ask God for wisdom and discernment. We should never be more interested in defending our pre-existing spiritual and theological paradigms than we are in learning Truth from God Himself. And, God doesn't need us to defend Him -He is capable of defending Himself. If someone is actually doing evil in Jesus' name, he will answer to God. We don't need to assign guilt or blame -we just need to get it right ourselves and serve God and love people as Jesus taught us to do.
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