The Sin Beyond Forgiveness

Matthew 12:31-33


Let us try to understand what Jesus meant by the sin against the Holy Spirit. One thing is necessary. We must grasp the fact that Jesus was not speaking about the Holy Spirit in the full Christian sense of the term. He could not have been, for Pentecost had to come before the Holy Spirit came upon men and women in all His power and light and fullness. This must be interpreted in the light of the Jewish conception of the Holy Spirit.


According to Jewish teaching, the Holy Spirit had two supreme functions. First, the Holy Spirit brought God's truth to men and women; second, the Holy Spirit enabled them to recognize and to understand that truth when they saw it. So people, as the Jews saw it, needed the Holy Spirit, both to receive and to recognize God's truth.


If we shut our eyes and ears to God's way for long enough, if we turn our backs upon the messages which God is sending us, if we prefer our own ideas to the ideas which God is seeking to put into our hearts, in the end we come to a stage when we cannot recognize God's truth and God's beauty and God's goodness when we see them. We come to a stage when our own evil seems to us good, and when God's good seems to us evil.


Why should that sin be unforgivable? What differentiates it so terribly from all other sins? The answer is simple. When anyone reaches that stage, repentance is impossible. If people cannot recognize the good when they see it, they cannot desire it. If they do not recognize evil as evil, they cannot be sorry for it and wish to depart from it. And if they cannot, in spite of failures, love the good and hate he evil, then they cannot repent; and if they cannot repent, they cannot be forgiven, for repentance is the only condition of forgiveness. 


It would save much heartbreak if people would realize that the very people who cannot have committed the sin against the Holy Spirit are those who fear that they have, for the sin against the Holy Spirit can be truly described as the loss of all sense of sin.


~William Barclay~  "Daily Devotionals"