"Beware of how you treat this message:
for all of the sins of humankind will be forgiven, along with all of their blasphemies.
But there is no reconciliation for those who blaspheme the Holy Spirit.
This transgression is eternal."
--Jesus
Years ago, while visiting with some neighborhood friends, their young daughter soberly confessed that she had "committed the unpardonable sin". I don't recall what she thought she'd done that created the genuine fear she expressed. But I do recall thinking, "that's weird...such a young child to think that way. I wonder where she got that notion from?" Wondering, of course, if her parents knew what weighty theological concepts their daughter was wrestling with, and even suspecting that maybe they weren't going to the "right" church.
What I failed to appreciate, however, was the child-like sensitivity to God's spirit and her earnest desire to be pleasing to Him!
What the human race fails to appreciate, by and large, is how much we need God in our lives! Especially in the lawless age we live, how desperately we need a sense of the holy, sacred, beautiful, good, righteous and divine to cleanse a vile, vulgar, and blasphemous generation.
He has surely made us capable of living outside a relationship with Him while still benefiting from His blessings. We can ignore, disregard and even live in open hostility to him.
Yet He loves and forgives and loves where He cannot yet forgive. For the only sin God cannot forgive is the sin we will not stop doing!
Blasphemy? We live in a world choking itself with blasphemy, for there is nothing sacred that cannot be poked fun at, criticized, or reviled, ala South Park, the Simpsons, and nearly every American so-called "comedy". (Comedy, it has been noted, is the doorway to bypass a person's natural defenses against the immoral, illicit and vile.) Add to that the unlimited pornographic images; the vulgar, unruly behavior presented as "normal" kid stuff; disrespectful and disruptive acts of violence in the classroom and school buses; appalling conversations regarding sex among the youngest of children. Therein is the recipe for a blasphemous generation.
There is a terrible price to pay when a blasphemous spirit takes hold of a person and, consequently, like a cancer spreading, takes hold of a society. MacDonald describes the fruit of that spirit:
When a blasphemous spirit denies truth,
When a blasphemous spirit says there is no truth,
When a blasphemous spirit says that the truth you see is not true,
When a blasphemous spirit says that which is good is of Satan,
When a blasphemous spirit says that which is bad is of God...
When a blasphemous spirit consciously resists duty,
Then a man denies the Spirit of God, shuts out the Spirit of God, and he cannot be forgiven.For with out the Spirit no forgiveness can enter the man to cast out the blasphemy.
Without the Spirit to witness with his spirit, no man could know himself either convicted of sin or forgiven of that sin, even if God appeared to him and said so."
(adapted from "It Shall Not Be Forgiven" by George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons II)
In essence, then, the blasphemy of the Spirit is when a man or woman so cuts themselves off from the redemptive work of God's Spirit that they cannot experience repentance, forgiveness and grace. This is, Jesus warned, an eternal, absolute, fixed condition of the relationship between human beings and their Triune Creator.
Clearly my young neighbor friend had nothing to worry about. But sometimes it's hard to see God's smile through the clouds of our own doubt!
