What is the Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit?

The Listener’s Question About the Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit

All right, this email comes to us. Well, I don't know where it's from. So, by the way, when you send me an email, make sure that you let me know at least city, state, or what general part of the world that you're from.

So all I know is the name of the person who sent me the email, and the email comes to us from Bree, okay? Her name is Bree. Okay, so Bree writes and says, Hi Chris, I have a 10-year-old daughter who is beginning to read the Gospels.

She's starting with the first three per her Sunday school teacher, and I wish you could have heard her try to read the genealogy in Matthew. Yeah, I can't give you any advice there except for just keep slugging through and learn that kind of stuff.

Anyway, but you should have seen it because of her frustration. I told her to start with Mark, which doesn't have a genealogy in it. Anyway, when she got to the part about the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, I explained it the best I could, but it was a bit complex.

Please help. The only comfort I could give was that she probably would never do it, and my understanding that sits best is attributing things of the Holy Spirit to other sources, our forces, and vice versa.

Can you email me back? Actually, I'm going to answer this on the air. So that requires us, since we're looking at the Gospel of Mark, we're looking at the tail end of the Gospel of Mark chapter three, by the way.

The tail end of the Gospel of Mark chapter three. Let me pull this up in my computerized Bible. All right, and let me read the text in question, and then I'll show how to answer this. Okay, so here's the text in question.

It starts at Gospel of Mark chapter three, starting at verse 22, and I'm reading from the ESV, the English Standard Version. Here's what it says. The scribes who came down from Jerusalem were saying, he, Jesus, is possessed by Beelzebub, and by the prince of demons, he casts out demons.

And he called them to him and said to them in parables, how can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand.

And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but is coming to an end. But no one can enter a strong man's house and plunder his good unless he first binds the strong man.

Then indeed he may plunder it. Truly I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the children of man and whatever blasphemies they utter. But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin, for they were saying he has an unclean spirit.

The Gospel of Mark’s Opening Claim About Jesus

Okay, so first and foremost, right there in the text itself, verse 30 gives us an interpretive key. And that's the idea. The reason why Jesus said this is because they, that would be the scribes who came down from Jerusalem to basically warn the people, you know, about Jesus.

These scribes were saying of Jesus that he has an unclean spirit, that Jesus is demon possessed, that Jesus is evil. Okay. And that's why, because what's going on now, that's the key, the interpretive key.

Okay. So let me give you the quick answer. Okay. The quick answer is this, the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is attributing to the devil, the work of God. Okay. Attributing to the devil, the work of God, especially, you know, God, the Holy Spirit.

Okay. So that's really what it comes down to. And if you really want to boil it down to its nubbins, okay, the nubbins is this, it's refusal to believe that Jesus is Lord, that he is God, that he has died for you for the forgiveness of sins.

Right. It's persisting in unbelief. And then that unbelief takes the, you know, takes the shape of casting on good evil. That's the idea. So that's what these people have done. So I remember when I was young and was first reading the Bible for the first time, this was a passage that scared me to death.

And I went and talked with my youth pastor about it. And he gave me a little bit of advice. He said, Chris, I see that you're worried about this. And of course, you know, you read something like that and you want to, ah, how do I know I haven't, you know, here's the deal.

If you're worried about it, you definitely haven't committed it. Okay. And what is it, what is it that we're to do? We're to believe that Jesus is who he claims to be. And what I would do is I would point your 10-year-old daughter back to really the flow of the entire Gospel of Mark up to this point.

Let's just do a quick survey of it real quick. Okay. There's something that the Holy Spirit is really getting at in the Gospel of Mark, and it's fantastically done. Okay. And that is it's trying to point you to who Jesus is.

And it starts off right immediately in the opening passage. Here's what it says, in the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, as it is written in Isaiah, the prophet, behold, I send my messenger before your face who will prepare your way, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.

Now, what you'll notice here is that God, the Holy Spirit, has inspired Mark to take two passages, one from Malachi and one from Isaiah, and squish them together. God, the Holy Spirit, has the, let's say, the right to do this.

And the reason why he has the right to do this is because he's the author of Scripture. He is the one who inspired Malachi. He is the one who inspired Isaiah. And when the Holy Spirit is doing stuff like this, he's giving us the sense, this is literally God, the Holy Spirit, interpreting parts of the Old Testament for us.

Okay. And if you pay close attention, when you, like, if you look up these passages in Malachi and Isaiah, what you find, you know, this is Isaiah chapter 40, verse 3, by the way, what you find is, is that God, the Holy Spirit, had Mark change the pronouns.

Okay. Something's going on here. There's something really important going on here. And that is, is that the prophecy of the one who would be, who would prepare the way of the Lord, John the Baptist is the fulfillment of that, is that it's prepare the way of Yahweh.

Any Jew reading these passages from the Old Testament and then seeing them inserted here in the Gospel of Mark would immediately go, wait, whoa, wait a second. The guy who's going to prepare the way is preparing the way of the Lord, capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D.

Exactly. That's who's just come on the scene. Jesus is the Lord, capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D. That's what's going on here. So right out of the shoot, you have these, you have confronting you right in your face, our claims regarding the very deity of Christ.

So that's what's going on. That's part of the drama of how this is unfolding in this text. Just a little fast forward now. When you go then to Mark chapter two, okay, you've got another confrontation with this as the punchline.

Let me read it. And Mark chapter two, verse one, and when he returned to Capernaum after some days, it was reported that he was at home. Jesus is at his home in Capernaum here. And many were gathered.

So many were gathered that there was no room, not even at the door. And he was preaching the word to them. And they came bringing to him a paralytic carried by four men. And when they could not get near him because of the crowd, they removed the roof from above him.

And when they had made an opening, they let down the bed on which the paralytic lay. And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, son, your sins are forgiven. Now some of the scribes, now notice again, notice the key here, the scribes here, the passage that we were looking at in Mark three, the scribes from Jerusalem had come down.

So here we got scribes. Scribes were sitting there questioning in their hearts. Notice they weren't saying this out loud. They were questioning this in their hearts. Why does this man speak like that?

He is blaspheming who can forgive sins, but God alone. Perfectly great question. That's the right question to be asking, but notice something here says they said this in their heart. And then it goes on to say that immediately Jesus perceiving in his spirit, that they thus question within themselves said to them, why do you question these things in your hearts?

There's so much going on here and you got to get the, this is, it's a little bit subtle, but it's really not. Scripture is clear that only God can perceive what's in the heart of a man. There are passages that bear this out so clear.

So here we've got Jesus doing two things that only God can do. One, forgive sins. Two, see into the heart of man. How is he doing these things? But they asked the right question. Who can forgive sins, but God alone.

So Jesus knew what they were thinking and feeling inside of their very hearts, which is something only God can do. And he says to them, why do you question these things in your hearts? Which is easier to say to the paralytic, your sins are forgiven or to say, rise and take up your bed and walk.

But so that you may know that the son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins. He said to the paralytic, I say to you, rise, pick up your bed and go home. And he rose and immediately picked up his bed and went out before them.

So that all were amazed, glorified God saying, we have never seen anything like this. Now this leaves the scribes sitting there, scratching their heads. What just happened? Who is this Jesus? And that's the right question.

Who is it? So what happens is, is that the Holy Spirit here is inspiring Mark to really be confronting us with story after story after story that makes us have to deal with who Jesus is. And Mark doesn't leave us any room.

And that is, is that over and again, the claims are that Jesus is Yahweh, that he's the God of the Old Testament in human flesh. Now we'll fast forward to Mark chapter three, same kind of showdown is going on here in Mark chapter three.

Again, he, Jesus entered the synagogue and a man was there with a withered hand. Okay. So it's Saturday. Jesus is in the synagogue and there's a guy in the Greek here says that his hand is all dried up.

So he's got a dried up hand. And so they watched Jesus to see whether he would heal him on the Sabbath so that they might accuse him. The Greek's a little stronger here. It's so that they could bring charges against him.

Okay. So here's the setup. Okay. You now have these guys following Jesus around looking for him to make a misstep because their intention is to bring charges against Jesus. Okay. But like I said, there's something going on in the gospel.

Mark, we're constantly being confronted with the deity of Christ. So Jesus said to the man with the withered hand, come here. And, uh, and he said to him, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm to save life or to kill?

But they were silent. They wouldn't even answer him. So Jesus looked around at them with wrath. The Greek here is stronger than anger. He has wrath and he was grieved at their hardness of heart, their complete refusal to believe, right?

He was grieved at their hardness of heart. And so he said to the man, stretch out your hand. And he stretched it out and his hand was immediately restored. Okay. And watch the response. The Pharisees went out and immediately held council with the Herodians.

These are people who are politically their enemies. Okay. So Jesus heals on the Sabbath. The response is the Pharisees go out and now they're going to hold a council with the Herodians so that they could figure out how to destroy Jesus.

Talk about hardness of heart. Okay. So, I mean, you got these things that are going on. Okay. You got these things where over and again, in another instance where Jesus heals on the Sabbath, Jesus makes a point of saying that he is the Lord of the Sabbath.

In fact, let me find that real quick. Yep. It's right here. Just flip the page backwards. Mark chapter two, verse 23. It's the last piece right before chapter three. Watch this. Okay. One Sabbath, Jesus was going through the grain fields.

And as they made their way, his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. And so the Pharisees were saying to him, look, look, look, look, why are they doing what is not lawful or right on the Sabbath?

So he said to them, hmm, have you never read what David did when he was in need and hungry? And he, and he, and those who were with him, how he entered the house of God in the name of Abiathar, at the time of Abiathar, the high priest, and ate the bread of the presence, which is not lawful for any, but the priest to eat, and also gave it to those who were with him.

Watch this response. So Jesus said to them, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. And here's the punchline. So the son of man, he's, that's me, Jesus is pointing to himself. The son of man is Lord even of the Sabbath.

The son of man is the Lord of the Sabbath, which is crazy, right? Because where, who's the Lord of the Sabbath? Well, the Lord who revealed the commandment regarding the Sabbath at Mount Sinai is the Lord of the Sabbath.

Right. Exactly. That's who Jesus is. Okay. So the reason I'm bringing all of this up here, let's go back to chapter three and put this then in its bigger context. So as you're reading through the gospel of Mark, okay, this is a drama that's unfolding, okay?

And in some senses, this was meant to be heard or read in one setting. So you need to, as you read it across multiple days, you kind of have to keep the pieces together and not apart so that you can see how this drama is then unfolding.

Okay. So when we get to Mark 3 .22, which we just read about how these scribes came down from Jerusalem and they were, okay, things have escalated. At this point, the scribes, the Pharisees and the scribes of the Pharisees have conspired with the Herodians and now they have a plot and their goal is to destroy Jesus.

Okay. Part of their plan now has unfolded. And the way they're going to do this is they're going to publicly claim that Jesus is possessed by an unclean evil spirit, not just any spirit, but Beelzebub, the prince of the demons himself.

They can't deny that he's performing miracles. So instead of denying that he's performing these miracles, because everybody knows that he's performing them, they're instead not going to attribute them to God.

They're going to attribute them to Satan and Beelzebub, right? That creates the context by which we then understand what's, what is the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit? What is the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit?

It's none other than to literally slander God by claiming that Jesus's work is evil, that it's not of God, that it's of something else, the devil or whatever, right? That's the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit.

And it comes out in the drama of the context itself. But there's, I want to point this out too, then there's a comforting little punch line here immediately right after where Jesus talks about the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, not being forgiven, attributing to Christ satanic intent and power, right?

That's what this, that really is, is that there's this fun little gospel punchline right here at the end of Mark, and here's how it goes. So immediately after that, so let me read verse 34, they were saying, he, Jesus has an unclean spirit.

Mark 3, 31 then says this, and his mother and his brothers came and they were standing outside and they sent word to Jesus and called him. And the crowd was sitting around Jesus. The Greek on this is wonderful because it has, you can literally just picture this perfectly the way the Greeks said.

So literally lounging and sitting around, around, around, totally around Jesus is this crowd, right? And so the crowd says, look, look, your mother and your brothers are outside seeking you. So Jesus answered them, who are my mother and my brothers?

And looking around at those who were sitting around him, the Greek is wonderful in this, looking around at those who were sitting around him said to him, here are my mother and my brothers for whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother.

Okay. This little text stands in juxtaposition to the other one, because why? Because here we have a crowd of people who are literally sitting around, hanging on every word that Jesus is saying and they believe in him.

This is the opposite of the Pharisees and the Herodians and the scribes from Jerusalem who are busy working out their plot to destroy Jesus, even to the point of claiming that he has a demon, right? The opposite of that is to sit at the feet of our Lord, to sit around him, sit and listen to him, to sit and let him teach you to sit and believe.

And those who are sitting there, listening to him, Jesus says, are they're the ones doing the will of God. And they are Jesus's brother, sister and mother. You see, when we look at the story where we find here in this text, the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, put it in the broader context of the drama that's already unfolded in the gospel of Mark, and then bring in the comforting words right there at the end of those who are sitting and believing and hanging on every word of Jesus.

The juxtaposition helps clear up what the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is. And it's a good way to teach, not just yourself, but also your children. All right. We are up on our first break. If you'd like to email me regarding anything you've heard on this edition or any previous editions of Fighting for the Faith, you could do so.

My email address is talkbackatfightingforthefaith .com. Or you can subscribe on Facebook, facebook .com forward slash pirate Christian or follow me on Twitter. My name there at pirate Christian, a couple of little bits of business we need to on the other side of the break.

And then shortly after that, Pastor Charmly will be preaching to us about the King Jehu and how he is a type and shadow of Christ coming in judgment. Don't want.

To miss it. We'll be right back. No itching ears are scratched here. You're listening to Fighting for the Faith.