The Gospel in Twenty Questions (22 page)

The
nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard was a man cursed by
God. Or so he thought, for his father, Michael, had committed the unforgivable
sin.

As
a child, Michael Kierkegaard was a dirt-poor kid who battled with melancholy.
In a moment of weakness, he cursed God for his hardships, thus committing what
he believed was an unpardonable sin. He then became a successful businessman,
retired young, and lived a long and full life. But the damage had been done.
Words had been said. Michael raised his children in the knowledge that God
would take revenge. Of course, it never happened. In fact, the Kierkegaards of
Copenhagen were healthy and prosperous. But the father’s fears shaped the son.

Raised
on a diet of strict religion, Søren battled with guilt and wrote despair-ridden
books with titles like
The Sickness unto Death
. His angst made him one
of the great existential philosophers, but he was not a happy man. Indeed,
Kierkegaard was arguably the gloomiest Dane since Hamlet.

I
often hear from people who, like Kierkegaard, are worried about the unforgivable
sin. They fear they have done something that puts them beyond redemption and
hope. Certainly, one of the greatest sources of anxiety is confusion over sin
and forgiveness. “Will God forgive me? Have I gone too far?” To the anxious
mind the thought that all may be eternally lost is extremely unsettling.

Is
there an unforgivable sin? And if so, what is it? Take this question to any
Bible commentary and you’ll end up with a list of candidate sins such as the
one below. The bad news is theologians say one or all of these sins is
unpardonable. The good news is theologians are sometimes wrong. You may have
committed one or all of the sins on this list, but rest assured that none of
them is unforgivable:

1. Having an attitude that calls evil good
and good evil

2. Having a lack of reverence

3. Being stubborn and unteachable

4. Not loving the Lord with all your
heart, soul, and mind

5. Willfully or habitually sinning

6. Having unconfessed sin

7. Having unrepented sin

8. Harboring unforgiveness in your heart

9. Taking the Lord’s name in vain

10. Having disrespectful thoughts about
the Holy Spirit

There is some bad
stuff on this list that can hurt you. For instance, if you harbor unforgiveness,
you may end up bitter and twisted. But it is not helpful to tell a young mother
whose husband has run off with her best friend that she must forgive him or
face eternal damnation. You might as well ask her to walk on water. The power
to forgive the unforgivable is not found in threats and warnings. So in the
hope of breaking a few manmade yokes, let’s review some of these so-called
unforgivable sins.

Some say the
unforgivable sin is a bad attitude or a lack of reverence or being stubborn and
unteachable. This is nonsense. Jesus didn’t suffer and die to enter us into a
reverence contest. We neither earn points for being quick learners nor get
punished for being dimwitted. Attitude is certainly important, as it will
affect the way you live, but a poor attitude won’t disqualify a saint any more
than a good attitude will qualify a sinner.

Others
say the unforgivable sin is not loving the Lord with all your heart, soul, and
mind. It’s putting Sunday football ahead of Jesus. This belief leads naturally
to a system of religious scorekeeping. It’s the old debits versus the credits
chestnut. But God is not counting the number of hours you put into church
versus the number of hours you spend kicking a football or whatever it is you
do when you’re having fun. God invented fun.

The
command to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind is part
of the old law-keeping covenant. Jesus identified it as the greatest
commandment “in the law” (see Matthew 22:36
–
37). You are not under law but grace.
Under law you love because you have to, but under grace we love because he
first loved us. Law-based love is inferior and contrived. But grace-based love
is the real deal.

What
about willful sin? Is willful sin unforgivable? Well if Jesus can’t forgive the
sins we’ve done on purpose, then no one can be saved. Sin is sin. If God kept a
record of sin, who could stand (Psalm 130:3)? The good news is not that God has
only forgiven some of your sins
—
the ones you did by accident
—
but
that he has forgiven all your sins for all time.

I’ve
heard some say the unpardonable sins are those we neither repent of nor
confess. They seem to forget that Jesus went around forgiving people who
neither repented nor confessed nor even asked for forgiveness. They also forget
that he forgave us long before we were born. If you think, “I must repent or
confess before God will forgive me,” you’re trusting in dead works. You’re
putting price tags on grace. The blood of Jesus paid for the sins of an
unrepentant world.
[37]

What
about harboring unforgiveness in our hearts? Didn’t Jesus say, “God won’t
forgive us unless we forgive others”? He did, but only to prove a point to some
law-minded Jews. Think about it. If unforgiveness is a sin and God won’t
forgive us for harboring it, then God himself is sinning by harboring
unforgiveness toward us. A sinning God is bad news. But a God who forgives all
our sins is good news indeed.
[38]

As a child, I knew
that saying the name of Jesus in an inappropriate manner was a serious sin. It
was something
you just didn’t do
. What would happen if you did? I never
did it so I never found out. However, I knew people who did and contrary to all
expectations, they weren’t zapped by lightning. Nor were they taken outside the
camp and stoned to death, as happened under the old covenant (see Leviticus
24:15
–
16).

If
you have cursed God or taken the Lord’s name in vain, be thankful you live
under a new and better covenant. Thank God for Jesus who said:

Anyone who speaks a word against the Son
of Man will be forgiven … (Matthew 12:32a)

You may have cursed
God, but he has blessed you. You may have spoken ill of him but he speaks life
over you. You may have acted like his enemy, but the good news is God loves his
enemies.

But
what about the rest of that verse?

… but anyone who speaks against the Holy
Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come. (Matthew
12:32b)

Here Jesus
identifies the one thing that cannot be forgiven, namely, speaking against the
Holy Spirit.

I regularly hear
from people who are worried sick that they have committed the unforgivable sin.
Some are afraid because of the bad things they have said about God. One man
told me,

I called God an evil spirit. I don’t even
know why I said it. At the time I didn’t know God and now that I do I wouldn’t
say such things. I’ve confessed and repented with tears but I’m afraid. Please
help.

Others are worried
because they have had doubts about God and they fear their doubts have
disqualified them from the kingdom. Another man wrote to me and said:

I was raised a Christian but went through
periods of doubt. About a year ago I was watching a video of Christians and
atheists debating. For a brief moment I thought, “That makes no sense. God must
not be real,” and then I said to myself, “I just became an atheist.” I began to
feel sick and said, “No, I’m a Christian.” I went back and forth a few times
and felt terrible. I don’t know why I said what I did, but I have been worried
about it ever since.

These aren’t small
concerns. A mind that can’t find rest in Jesus tends to become hyperactive and
prone to breakdown. One illness I hear about again and again is obsessive
compulsive disorder. OCD is an anxiety disorder characterized by hard-to-shake
thoughts and repetitive behaviors done in the hope of making the anxieties go
away. In a Christian context, anxieties about the unforgivable sin can lead to
relentless religious activity, as this story illustrates:

I have struggled with the issue of
unforgivable sin for the last twenty years. I have the most terrible thoughts
against the Holy Spirit. I hate these blasphemous and angry thoughts and my
inability to stop them. Often my days are filled with confession over these
terrible acts. The more I confess, the worse it gets. I was recently diagnosed
with OCD.

These are
heart-breaking tales, and so unnecessary. They are the bad fruit of bad
theology. When you’ve been told your salvation depends on your ability to say
the right things, believe the right things, and never stumble, disaster is
inevitable. We are simply not designed to carry such heavy burdens.

We’ve
all said things we regret and done things we wish we hadn’t. That’s life. The
bad news of religion says you must pay for your bad choices, but the good news
of grace says Jesus can make all things, including your messes and mistakes,
work together for good. He is our great redeemer. He takes broken people and
makes them whole. Abraham was a doubter; God turned him into our father in the
faith.

If
you’ve said bad things about the Holy Spirit, it probably means you don’t know
him very well. As for those bad thoughts that sometimes come to mind, don’t
take ownership of them. As the saying goes, you can’t stop the birds flying
overhead, but you can stop them building a nest in your hair. You have the mind
of Christ, so send those evil thoughts packing.

If
you’re worried that you have committed the unforgivable sin, don’t panic. You
haven’t crossed some line of no return. How do I know? Because worrying that you
have committed the unforgivable sin is a sure sign that you haven’t.

So
what does it mean to speak against the Holy Spirit?

Truly I tell you, people can be forgiven
all their sins and every slander they utter, but whoever blasphemes against the
Holy Spirit will never be forgiven … (Mark 3:28
–
29a)

Although you may
fear you have done something unforgivable, Jesus said that there is only one
thing that cannot be forgiven, and that is speaking against or blaspheming the
Holy Spirit. What does it mean to blaspheme someone? I used to think a
blasphemer was someone who spoke the Lord’s name inappropriately, but that’s
not quite right. To blaspheme is to slander or to speak against someone in a
manner than injures or discredits their good name. Here’s an example from the
Bible:
[39]

Why not say—as some slanderously (
blasphēmeō
)
claim that we say—“Let us do evil that good may result”? Their condemnation is
just! (Romans 3:8)

When people accused
Paul of preaching grace as a license to sin, he said their reports were
slanderous or blasphemous. In other words, their claims were false and
injurious to his reputation and message.

To
blaspheme the Holy Spirit is to slander him. It’s to speak against him and his
ministry. It’s saying no when he says yes. It’s labeling as evil that which he
calls good and esteeming that which he considers detestable.

To
understand what it means to speak falsely of the Holy Spirit, we must discover
what is true about him and his ministry. Here are three things the Holy Spirit
does:

When he has come, he will convict the
world … of sin, because they do not believe in me. (John 16:8
–
9,
NKJV)

The first thing the
Holy Spirit does is seek to convince you that Jesus is the cure to sin. “In
regard to sin, see Jesus.” Whether you are struggling with sin or worried that
something you did is unforgivable, the remedy is the same. Believe in Jesus.

“But
Paul, you don’t know what I’ve done.” No, you don’t know what
Jesus
has
done. No matter what you’ve done or how bad you’ve been, his death on the cross
is the once-and-final solution for all your sin. In him you have full and
complete forgiveness for now and ever more.

We
discredit Jesus and slander the Holy Spirit by thinking we must act before God
will forgive us. “I have to repent and confess to be forgiven.” That’s back to
front. We repent (change our unbelieving minds) and confess (agree with God
that Jesus has done it all) because we are forgiven.

Forgiveness
is good, but you need more. Forgiveness gets you out but doesn’t take you in.
To enter the kingdom of heaven, you need the righteousness that exceeds that of
the Pharisees (Matthew 5:20).

When he has come, he will convict the
world … of righteousness, because I go to my Father and you see me no more. (John
16:8,10, NKJV)

The second thing
the Holy Spirit does is seek to convince you that the righteousness you need
comes as a free gift from God (Romans 1:17).

We
discredit Jesus and slander the Holy Spirit by thinking we can make ourselves
righteous and pleasing to God. That’s the faithless religion of the Pharisee.
If you would respond positively to the Holy Spirit, then allow him to persuade
you that in Christ you are as righteous as he is. Agree with him and declare,
“I am the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus!”

When he has come, he will convict the
world … of judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged. (John 16:8, 11,
NKJV)

The third aspect of
the Holy Spirit’s ministry is seeking to convince you that the prince of this
world stands condemned. You are not condemned; Satan is. If you are responsive
to the Holy Spirit’s conviction, you will declare, “There is now no
condemnation for me who is in Christ Jesus!” You will ask with wonder, “If God
is for me, who can be against me?” (Romans 8:1, 31).

We
discredit Jesus and slander the Holy Spirit by thinking we will be judged as
sinners or that God punishes us for our mistakes. That’s dismissing the cross.
It’s saying Jesus
hasn’t
carried the sin of the world and our sins
haven’t
been removed as far as the east is from the west.

What
is the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit? It is refusing to believe what the Holy
Spirit says about Jesus. It’s scorning the grace of God that qualifies us and
it’s trampling the Son of God underfoot. In a word, it is unbelief. It’s speaking
against the Holy Spirit by saying, “Jesus’ work remains unfinished, and I
remain unforgiven, unrighteous, and under condemnation.”

Perhaps
you have said something like this. Perhaps you have done all the things I’ve
just mentioned. You’ve religiously confessed your sins because you thought God
wouldn’t forgive you if you didn’t. Or perhaps you’ve worked hard to make
yourself righteous because you didn’t know the righteousness that comes by
grace. Perhaps you have spoken against the Holy Spirit again and again. Does
this mean you can never be saved? Does this mean you have committed an eternal
sin?