Why is there an unforgivable sin

Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. Our God is a compassionate and merciful God. He desires that no one should be lost, but that all should come to salvation through repentance and personal faith in Jesus as Savior and Lord 2 Peter ; Acts Billy Graham: Confusing Evil with Good.

Billy Graham: Freedom Through Truth. To depreciate the power of the Holy Spirit, they defamed him by the name of Beelzebub Mt. If ignorance joined with unbelief made him obtain pardon, it follows, that there is no room for pardon when knowledge is added to unbelief. Do you read of any other in the word of God? And if you do not read of any there, what ground have you to think any such thing? What other rule have we, by which to judge of such matters, but the divine word?

If we venture to go beyond that, we shall be miserably in the dark. When we pretend to go further in our determinations than the word of God, Satan takes us up, and leads us. But what reason can you give for it, if you have no word of God to reveal it? Is it because you cannot see how the mercy of God is sufficient to pardon, or the blood of Christ to cleanse from such presumptuous sins? If so, it is because you never yet saw how great the mercy of God is; you never saw the sufficiency of the blood of Christ, and you know not how far the virtue of it extends.

Some elect persons have been guilty of all manner of sins, except the sin against the Holy Ghost; and unless you have been guilty of this, you have not been guilty of any that are peculiar to reprobates.

It will be helpful at this point to use the tools of these great minds from our Christian heritage to make sense of these incredible compact passages of Scripture. Feel free to use these observations in your sermon outlines. It certainly feels strange to us that Jesus would permit his own rejection. But he is making a very generous accommodation for human psychology.

But the Spirit encounters us in a way that is identifiable as God himself—it is the direct speaking of God to the human heart. The more directly God encounters the individual, the more consciously they must reject God and the forgiveness he offers. In other words, what makes the unpardonable sin so unforgivable is that it is the explicit rejection of forgiveness itself. Augustine argues that, since the Holy Spirit was dispensed to the church at Pentecost, the true unforgivable sin is the rejection of the church itself, since the Spirit and the church cannot be separated.

The church is necessary, important, and the proper place in which God desires to dispense salvation and its benefits to the world. Luther is right to distinguish between active blasphemy and passive blasphemy. When he speaks of passive blasphemy as those self-sabotaging ideas which the Devil insidiously plants in the brains of believers, he is happy to include believers in the population of individuals who are susceptible to such an attack.

Yet, if you know anything about Luther, he would never in his wildest imaginings permit that a believer could have their very forgiveness from God stripped from them against their will by the Devil.

This, Luther believes, does not qualify as the kind of unrepentance which justifies condemnation. Active blasphemy, alternatively, is the conscious rejection of the Holy Spirit.

Luther uses words here that indicate a roving sentinel—the human mind that delights in blaspheming God, rejecting the Spirit, speaking words of spite against Him, and perpetuating doubt among the world about His worthiness to be worshipped.

This, Luther believes, is the sin which is unforgivable, because it despises the faith by which God saves all humankind. Edwards makes the interesting point that the unforgivable sin is the sin that only unbelievers can commit. On its face, this point is redundant, but at a deeper level, Edwards is saying something profound. This question has been parodized by atheists on YouTube who, as an expression of their fearless disbelief in God, consciously, verbally, and willingly blaspheme the Spirit as a gimmick.

But how can we square this with the horrifying overtones of definitive judgment in the gospel passages? Jesus does not say that if you reject the gospel once in your life, and hence blaspheme the Spirit, you can never accept it again. Rather, he frames this issue in terms of the final judgment. Take the Apostle Paul. Use these insights as a guide to your own reading of the relevant passages of Scripture in order to acquire a proper understanding of the unforgivable sin.

With these resources in hand, you can be equipped to achieve precisely what Christians have always sought to achieve with these verses:. These are sensitive pastoral issues that should be addressed with a light hand.

Too light, and you may fail to share the gospel with someone who truly needs it. Too heavy, and you may crush those who have not committed the unpardonable sin and feel discouraged by their own doubt and sin. The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content. Our minds shake off the conviction of the Spirit.

We become cynical of conscience. And although the grace of God is still available to us, we push away from it. These scribes had become Jesus-resistant because of the time-lapsed attitudes of their own evil hearts. Note the relationship between the words scribe and scribble. These men had copied and recopied the Old Testament.

Every day they copied an ancient Scripture scroll by hand. They had copied Isaiah 53 , about the Suffering Servant. They had copied Psalm 22 , about the death of the Messiah. We can go to church and read the Bible so much that the words no longer register with us. By ascribing the miracles of Jesus to Satan, the religious leaders were denying the deity of Jesus Christ.

They were saying He could not be God. Yet by His miracles He was showing Himself to be nothing and no one less than God. Only God Himself could do what He had done. His followers believed in His deity. So when you refuse to accept the ministry of the Holy Spirit or you ascribe His ministry to Satan, you give up the final opportunity to be saved.

You must believe in Jesus as the Son of God. A: There are many sins recounted in the Hebrew Bible but none are ever called unforgivable sins. Sometimes the punishment for sinning is death, but repentance is always possible before punishment. In the Christian Scriptures, there are three verses that take up the subject of unforgivable sin. In the Book of Matthew , we read, "Therefore I say to you, any sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven men, but blasphemy against the Spirit shall not be forgiven.

And whoever shall speak a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him; but whoever shall speak against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, either in this age, or in the age to come. The same idea that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is unforgivable is found in Luke and Mark What constitutes such blasphemy is not so clear, but generally the idea is that rejecting God and God's good news for salvation is the most radical and thorough rejection a person can make, and thus it separates the blasphemer most profoundly from the community of faith.

This is not so much a punishment for the sinner as it is a fact about the sinner's willful rejection of God's grace. If I were to translate this sentiment about unforgivable sin into my own life list, I'd probably include the following sins as fundamental, although the concept of unforgivability from a forgiving God is not sensible to me and one that I cannot accept into my own faith life. I believe that God can forgive all sins provided the sinner is truly contrite and has repented for his or her offenses.

Here's my list of unforgivable sins:. These are more than unforgivable to me; they are incomprehensible. They violate the most basic dignity of the human person and, as such, deny God in our broken world.