Matthew 12:31 - The Unpardonable Sin; The Sin God Cannot Forgive.
Matthew 12:31 - The Unpardonable Sin; The Sin God Cannot Forgive.
Matthew 12:31 (NLT) Every sin and blasphemy can be forgiven -
except blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, which will never be forgiven.
Matthew 12:31 (MSG) There's nothing done or said that can't be
forgiven. But if you deliberately persist in your slanders against God's
Spirit, you are repudiating the very One who forgives.
There is in man a Spirit-given faculty which enables him to
recognize goodness and truth when he sees them... A man can lose any
faculty if he refuses to use it. This is true in any sphere of life. It
is true physically; if a man ceases to use certain muscles, they
will atrophy. It is true mentally; many a man at school or in his
youth has acquired some slight knowledge of, for example, French or
Latin or music; but that knowledge is long since gone because he did
not exercise it. It is true of all kinds of perception. A man may
lose all appreciation of good music, if he listens to nothing but
cheap music; he may lose the ability to read a great book, if he reads
nothing but ephemeral productions; he may lose the faculty of enjoying
clean and healthy pleasure, if he for long enough finds his pleasure
in things which are degraded and soiled. Therefore a man can lose
the ability to recognize goodness and truth when he sees them. If he
for long enough shuts his eyes and ears to God's way, if he for long
enough turns his back upon the messages which God is sending him, if he
for long enough prefers his own ideas to the ideas which God is
seeking to put into his mind, in the end he comes to a stage when he
cannot recognize God's truth and God's beauty and God's goodness when
he sees them. He comes to a stage when his own evil seems to him
good, and when God's good seems to him evil.
That is the stage to which these Scribes and Pharisees had
come. They had so long been blind and deaf to the guidance of God's
hand and the promptings of God's Spirit, they had insisted on their
own way so long, that they had come to a stage when they could not
recognize God's truth and goodness when they saw them. They were able to
look on incarnate goodness and call it incarnate evil; they were able
to look on the Son of God and call him the ally of the devil. The
sin against the Holy Spirit is the sin of so often and so
consistently refusing God's will that in the end it cannot be recognized when
it comes even full-displayed.
Why should that sin be unforgivable? What differentiates it so
terribly from all other sins? The answer is simple. When a man reaches
that stage, repentance is impossible. If a man cannot recognize the
good when he sees it, he cannot desire it. If a man does not
recognize evil as evil, he cannot be sorry for it, and wish to depart from
it. And if he cannot, in spite of failures, love the good and hate
the evil, then he cannot repent; and if he cannot repent, he cannot
be forgiven, for repentance is the only condition of forgiveness.
It would save much heartbreak if people would realize that the one
man who cannot have committed the sin against the Holy Spirit is the
man who fears he has, for the sin against the Holy Spirit can be
truly described as the loss of all sense of sin....
It is a law of life that we will hear only what we are
listening for and only what we have fitted ourselves to hear. There is a
story of a country man who was in the office of a city friend, with
the roar of the traffic coming through the windows. Suddenly he
said, "Listen!" "What is it?" asked the city man. "A grasshopper,"
said the country man. Years of listening to the country sounds had
attuned his ears to the country sounds, sounds that a city man's ear
could not hear at all. On the other hand, let a silver coin drop, and
the chink of the silver would have immediately reached the ears of
the money-maker, while the country man might never have heard 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 the
birds....
It is the law of life that we hear what we have trained
ourselves to hear; day by day we must listen to God, so that day by day
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 above all our ears are attuned. [Barclay Commentary]
Our Lord warns that the human heart can be so pounded and beaten
down with the traffic of sin that it becomes completely insensitive
to the gospel. This is the heart that knows no repentance, no
sorrow over sin, no guilt, and no concern for the things of God. It
allows itself to be trampled by an endless procession of evil thoughts,
cherished sins, and ungodly activities. It is careless, callous,
indifferent, never broken up or softened by conviction or sorrow for
wrongdoing This is the heart of the fool described in Proverbs. The fool
hates knowledge, and resists instruction. The fool despises wisdom
and says in his heart there is no God. He will not hear. His mind
is closed. And he does not want to be bothered with a gospel
invitation. [John F. MacArthur, Jr.; Time With God SB re Mat.13:1-17]
A PICTURE WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS:
http://www.itiswritten.com/tvprogram/episode/2009/09/1076
