Unpardonable Sin

This question was emailed to me at the ministry by a previous inquirer who knew that I was also a former atheist. Being an atheist himself, this was the first of many questions he had for me. Any reference to the questioner's identity have of course been edited to preserve their privacy.

QUESTION:

don't you think you and I will both go to hell, regardless of future piety? I thought intentionally renouncing God was the only unforgivable sin.

RESPONSE:

When one speaks of the one unpardonable or unforgivable sin in Christianity, they most often are speaking of that which is mentioned in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew:

“Assuredly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the sons of men, and whatever blasphemies they may utter; but he who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is subject to eternal condemnation” – because they said, “He has an unclean spirit.” (Mark 3:28-30)

“Therefore I say to you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven men. Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man, it will be forgiven him; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it will not be forgiven him, either in this age or in the age to come.” (Matthew 12:31-32)

I will assume these are the teachings that you are referring to simply because there are no other verses in Scripture that speak of any action of man as being unforgivable. Thus we see that Scripture does indeed teach that there is an unpardonable sin, and it is the sin of blaspheming the Holy Spirit. We again face the task, as we should every time a reasonable question shows up, of identifying exactly what is being spoken of in these instances. If and when we figure that out, we may have a better idea as far as what sin we may commit that will never be forgiven, even by Christ’s blood.

To come to a correct understanding of these passages, it is absolutely necessary to look at the context in which they were spoken (or written). Some will wave a flippant hand at context, but such people are only proclaiming their ignorance in the realm of logic and meaning. The exact same words can mean something totally different in two different contexts. We are not interested in skewing our final interpretation to meet our own subjective opinions. When it comes to claims to objective truth, of which this is one, we should never ask the question “What does this mean to you, the reader?” Such a question is quite plainly idiotic. That is completely irrelevant. What matters is what Jesus meant when he said them. The author carries the meaning, never the reader.

Before we proceed, I should mention that what we are about to look into necessitates a view of Scripture as being true to begin with. As an atheist, this is not a logically permissible stance. I understand that. If atheism is true, the question itself makes no sense. There is no God and there is no Hell. It would be like asking if my older sister likes to travel by teleportation. I neither have an older sister nor does teleportation exist as a means of travel at the time of this writing. It is a question that should simply be rejected as nonsensical. So, in order to avoid this sort of immediate irrelevance, let’s at least temporarily assume the truth of Scripture and the historical accounts which it records.

In the context of the Mark quotation, Jesus was casting out demons and his Jewish opponents (the political/religious leaders of the Jewish people at the time) were accusing Him of doing so in the name of Beelzebub, ruler of the demons. Famously Jesus responds to them with reason and pronounces that a house divided cannot stand. Of course this must be true. If a house is made up of a unified body of members, and its membership becomes divided, then the house as it was once known cannot exist. It could be that one demon would ACT as if he were opposing another demon, thereby committing deception that favors both of their interests, but they could never directly oppose one another. This is why Satan exists to begin with, as he directly opposed God.

The real issue at hand in the context of this historical event was that the Jewish leaders, upon seeing Jesus cast out demons, KNEW that Jesus COULD NOT be genuinely casting out demons by demonic power. However, their deep seeded emotional pride prompted them to reject what they plainly saw to be true and accuse Jesus of something that simply could not be. There are always multiple “possible” explanations for any event. Upon witnessing the events recorded in Mark, one could have seen reasonably thought that they were hallucinating, but everyone would have been seeing the same hallucination, making that extremely unlikely. They also could have thought that Jesus was a trickster or that the supposedly possessed people were just faking or confused. There were many more possible explanations as well. The truth almost always ends up being the most probable of the possible explanations, but the truth is NEVER one of the logically impossible explanations. Yet, this is what Jesus’ opponents proclaimed to be true.

The Jewish leaders KNEW it was impossible, and so they must have KNOWN that Jesus stood in righteous opposition to demons, and was therefore on the side of God the Father. They were not naturalists, postmoderns, skeptics or atheists. They were people who knew God existed, knew His character, knew His attributes and knew what they were seeing was from God. They knew that in the man of Jesus was something working with the power of God. The Bible tells us it was the Holy Spirit. Yet, they said Jesus was acting the part of a demon that was controlling Jesus and performing these actions. They called the Holy Spirit a damned demon KNOWING (not just suspecting) full well that whatever was working within Jesus was from God.

Jesus then issues the statement we are looking at. Jesus says that blaspheming the Holy Spirit is an unforgivable sin after all of this had taken place. And then the author of Mark offers something more. He tells us WHY Jesus made the statement. Jesus made the statement because the Jewish leaders were saying Jesus had an evil spirit. They knew without a doubt the opposite was true, but their pride welled up and accused that which HAD TO HAVE BEEN entirely good as being evil. They blasphemed the Holy Spirit.

The same situation is described in Matthew. The same people are accusing Jesus and Jesus responds in the same way. However, we are told of one additional comment made by Jesus in Matthew. He declares that He is casting out demons by the “Spirit of God.” So, in essence, Jesus is stating the obvious to the Jewish leaders. They knew that to be true before Jesus said anything. Furthermore, because of Jesus’ additional statement, they KNEW that Jesus KNEW that He was acting by the Holy Spirit! Jesus drew the line, knowing it was obvious and knowing the Jewish leaders knew it was obvious. He may have been warning them not to speak their thoughts, or perhaps he was setting the stage knowing full well that they were going to accuse Him. At any rate, the Jewish leaders openly falsely accuse GOD HIMSELF of EVIL… all the while KNOWING what they were doing.

So that is the context. It is one thing to denounce God because you don’t believe in Him, or don’t like Him, or don’t know about Him. It is another to meet God face to face and call Him Satan. For this reason, many Bible scholars don’t even believe you can commit this sin today, for they say it would be necessary to meet Jesus face to face, being perfectly filled with Holy Spirit in His entirety, and call Him filled with an evil spirit knowing that to be false. I am not convinced of this position myself. The context and the statements do not provide a clear cut definition of what constitutes blaspheming the Holy Spirit, but it does give us some profound insights and a high probability of the truth.

To further dismiss the notion that anyone who denies the deity of Christ and His being filled with the Holy Spirit, we need only flip a few pages to the right. Here we come to the book of Acts where Paul, one of those Jewish leaders who hated Jesus and His followers, is directly approached by the resurrected Christ and is chosen to be saved. If anyone had come close to “blaspheming the Holy Spirit,” that apparently did not do it, it must have been Paul. And yet, Paul is author of most of the New Testament after the gospels. I would think it to be VERY probable indeed that Paul is in Heaven.

So, neither I nor you KNOW with absolute certainty when the Holy Spirit is acting in a given situation. We may suspect He is, or we may reject the notion as ludicrous. However, in our rejection, we are acting out of naivety, or skepticism based on what we perceive to be correct reason. None of these stances were permissible to the people whom Jesus denounced and condemned. For these reasons, I personally do not believe neither you nor I are necessarily condemned. There is no Biblical reason to take such a stance, and it simply does not stand up to proper logical scrutiny.

However, I will also say that it is at least possible that we are both condemned for past actions. There is still the tiniest of cracks in that door, and as such I think we would do well to entertain the implications of such a scenario. First, if it were true that we were to be condemned, then atheism would necessarily be false. Deism would also be false. Deism admits a “divine kickoff” to creation and then a non-active, non-interested deity that, if it didn’t exist, would in no way effect the ways of the universe. Such a god would necessarily be incapable of moral implementation, issuance of any laws, or active judgment of any kind. Thus He could not condemn nor save anyone. The moral framework in deism necessarily follows the moral framework of atheism… there is none.

So, if we were to assume our condemnation be possible, we must assume an active, moral, good God that has the power and desire to judge and to save from judgment. We could construct many gods with these qualities, but for the present purposes, let us say that we are dealing with the true God of the Bible. That is, we must necessarily also assume that an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent, just, merciful, gracious, creator of the universe exists and desires the best possible moral life for each individual person He created. If we claim to assume our condemnation is even possible, we must claim to KNOW that to be true.

Faced with that knowledge, let us look at the situation we would be in as condemned people living on earth, if that were the case. We would know God to be absolute good. We would know His decrees are the best things for our lives. We would know that He created us. We would know that disobedience to His will would be fruitless and miserable. We would know with absolute certainty a vast number of truths about ourselves and about God. Some of these truths (including the assumed truth of our condemnation) might make us very angry or sad. They may even cause us to hate God. Yet even our strongest emotions would not change that which is objectively and absolutely true. We would be acting emotionally and idiotically to act in any other way besides in accordance with the truth. Would I be enormously emotional if God were to tell me I was going to Hell for eternity? Yes. Would I deserve it? YES!!

That’s an incredibly important thing to remember throughout this discussion. We don’t make the rules of eternity. God does. He has the right to. He has the perfect ability to. Are we required to like them? No. Are we going to play by them for eternity? Yes. As people who have been disobedient to God, do we deserve any and every bad thing that comes our way? Yes. Do we deserve any objectively good thing at all? No. End of story.

God is not required to save anyone. In fact, if fairness were the only rule in play, God would be REQUIRED to send us all to Hell! Yet, even if that were the case, He would still be God. We could not escape Him and his decrees would still exist. Who would we choose to serve? Ourselves? That doesn’t make much sense, as we would know we are evil and would lead ourselves into despair both in this life and in the next. Would we serve another person, or even Satan? The same logical flaws apply to that scenario as well. No, the only logically reasonable option would be to honor and glorify our creator, accepting His just judgment on us and crediting it to His amazing and perfect righteousness. Our condemnation, if it were true, would be our own doing, not Gods.

In conclusion, no matter which way you slice it, nothing changes. If God is not real, this whole paper is irrelevant. If He is, the only logical choice is to accept His perfection and act accordingly.