There are a lot of scriptures verses on sin in the Bible but this one in particular has a haunting overtone to it - it is about the one sin that is unforgivable.
The scene that precedes these words of Jesus in Matthew 12 is this: A man who was both blind and mute has just been healed. Matthew tells us that this man was possessed by a demon, and that Jesus ordered the demon out of him. Once the demon left, then the man was able to see and speak.
It should have been a moment of great rejoicing, because the man could see the faces of loved ones and friends. He could see the beauties of nature, and he could communicate with people for perhaps the first time in his life.
But it was not a time of rejoicing for everyone. Hard-hearted Pharisees were upset by what Jesus had done. They could not deny His miracle, but they could attempt to explain it away. So they said, "It is only by Beelzebub, the prince of demons, that this fellow drives out demons" (Matthew 12:24).
Jesus responds to them by stating that He and Satan have nothing in common with one another and that He is the stronger of the two.
It is then that Jesus talks about the one sin that is unforgivable - that of sinning against the Holy Spirit.
I hear it often from people - "I have committed the unpardonable sin." What exactly does that mean?
Before we can answer that question correctly, we need to know the responsibilities that God has given to the Holy Spirit today.
Listen to this promise that Jesus made in John 14:16-17, "I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Counselor to be with you forever - the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept Him, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him . . ."
Notice that word, "Counselor." In some translations you’ll find the word "Comforter" instead. The Greek word here is "paraclete" and it means "one who stands alongside."
In the Greek courts a "paraclete" was a witness who came to testify in your defense. Your lawyer, your defense attorney who used all his ability to speak on your behalf was also called a "paraclete."
The Bible tells us that the Holy Spirit comforts us in time of trouble or sorrow; He helps us to overcome temptations and to live the way we ought; He educates our conscience; He helps us to pray as we ought; and He bears witness to God on our behalf that we are children of God.
Jesus also said two other very important things about the Holy Spirit in John 14:16-17. Did you notice them? He promised that the Holy Spirit would be with us forever, and also said that the Holy Spirit would not be known or received by everyone - but just by those who are Christians.
The Holy Spirit is God’s final contact, God’s last attempt to reach man and save him from sin. The Holy Spirit is God’s agent in the world today showing us the great love of God & offering us His salvation.
To the Christian, the Holy Spirit is God’s great Helper - helping us where we are weak, lifting us up when we fall, comforting us in trouble or sorrow, guiding us in the way we ought to go, and standing alongside us as a witness for our defense before God on that great judgment day.
At the time that Jesus was speaking, the Jews had their own teachings about the Holy Spirit. According to Jewish teaching the Holy Spirit had two supreme functions.
First, the Holy Spirit brought God’s truth to men; the Holy Spirit was God’s instrument in helping us come to know God’s will for us.
Second, the Holy Spirit enabled men to recognize and understand God’s truth when they saw it; the Holy Spirit works upon the heart & minds of men.
Therefore, man needs the Holy Spirit both to receive and to recognize God’s truth. To put it another way, the Holy Spirit is working on us to cause us to believe in Jesus Christ, and to bring us to accept Him as our Savior & Lord.
But we dare not forget a very important principle of life, "What you don’t use, you lose." This principle is true in almost every area of life.
1. It is true physically. If we cease to use & exercise certain muscles, they will weaken and become unusable.
2. It is true mentally. Most of us learned things in school that we have since completely forgotten - because we haven’t used them in years. Maybe it was a foreign language - or how to play a musical instrument. The knowledge we once had has long since gone because we did not exercise and make use of it.
3. It is true morally. We can lose the ability to enjoy good clean fun - if we spend long enough in seeking our pleasure among those things which are soiled & degraded. What we see and hear, & with what kind of people & pleasures we indulge ourselves can really be a matter of life & death.
We can also lose the ability to be moved or changed by God’s goodness and truth when the Holy Spirit presents it to us.
If we consistently shut our eyes and ears to God’s way, and insist on our own way; If we continually refuse to listen to the guidance God’s word offers to us, & turn our backs upon the messages which the Holy Spirit brings; if we continue to prefer our own ideas to the ideas that God is seeking to put into our heart and mind; then in the end we will come to the stage where nothing the Holy Spirit seeks to do will move or change us in any way.
But why should that sin be unforgivable? What makes it so much worse than all other sins? The answer is simple. When someone reaches that stage, repentance becomes impossible.
1. If we cannot recognize good when we see it, we can’t desire the good.
2. If we do not recognize evil as being evil, we can’t be sorry for it, and hate it, and wish to change for the better.
3. If we cannot love the good and hate the evil, then we can’t repent; and if we do not repent, we cannot be forgiven, because repentance is a vital condition for forgiveness.
It was to that stage that the Pharisees had come. They had so long been deliberately blind and deaf to God that they had lost the ability to recognize God when they were confronted by Him.
It was not God who had shut them out; they had shut themselves out, for years of resistance to God had made them what they were. They stopped hearing God and they resisted who God was.
There is a story of a farmer who was in the office of a city friend, with the roar of the traffic coming through the windows. Suddenly the farmer said, "Listen!" "What is it?" asked the city man. "A grasshopper," said the farmer.
Years of listening to country sounds had attuned his ears to country sounds, sounds that a city man’s ear did not hear at all.
On the other hand, let a coin drop, and a banker will hear it immediately, while the farmer might not hear it at all.
Only the expert, the man who has made himself able to hear it, will pick out the note of each individual bird in the chorus of sounds.
Only the expert, the man who has made himself able to hear it, will distinguish the different instruments in the orchestra.
It is the law of life that we hear what we have trained ourselves to hear. Day by day we must listen to God’s word, so that God’s voice may become, not fainter and fainter until we cannot hear it at all, but clearer and clearer until it becomes the one sound to which our ears are attuned.
We must train ourselves to be "listeners of God" - attuned to the Holy Spirit on a daily basis.
So what is the greatest sin of all - it is the sin of resistance to God. It is not hearing His direction for our lives. It resisting His voice and it is refusing to follow His will. We must all pray for pliable and softened hearts. We must yield ourselves totally to God's leading and presence. It is only then that we won't commit the worst sin of all.
No comments:
Post a Comment