WWUTT 2008 Blasphemy Against the Holy Spirit (Matthew 12:30-37)

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Reading Matthew 12:30-37 where Jesus says that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is the one sin that will never be forgiven, and who has committed that sin. Visit wwutt.com for all our videos!

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Jesus said that those who have committed blasphemy of the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven.
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And so, I've sometimes been asked, how do I know if I've committed that sin? Well, if you have to ask the question, then you haven't committed it.
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When we understand the text.
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This is When We Understand The Text, a daily Bible commentary to help encourage your time in the Word.
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Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday we feature New Testament Study, an Old Testament book on Thursday, and our Q&A on Friday.
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Now here's your teacher, Pastor Gabe.
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Thank you, Becky.
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In our study of Matthew 12, we're on to the next section today, picking up where we left off yesterday.
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So I'm going to start reading in verse 30, and we'll go through verse 37 out of the Legacy Standard Bible.
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Hear the word of the Lord.
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He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters.
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Therefore, I say to you, any sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven people, but the blasphemy against the Spirit shall not be forgiven.
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And whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him.
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But whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, either in this age or in the age to come.
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Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad.
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For the tree is known by its fruit.
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You brood of vipers, how can you, being evil, speak what is good? For the mouth speaks out of that which fills the heart.
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The good man brings out of his good treasure what is good, and the evil man brings out of his evil treasure what is evil.
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But I tell you that every careless word that people speak, they shall give an accounting for it in the day of judgment.
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For by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.
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Perhaps you remember something that was rather popular online about 15 years ago called the Blasphemy Challenge.
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I think this came about shortly after the advent of YouTube, which would have gone online in 2005.
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And so it kind of became a popular thing among atheists to put your money where your mouth is, and blaspheme the Holy Spirit.
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Because if you don't believe that God exists, then you can't possibly be threatened by this blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, which the Bible says would permanently condemn you to hell, and for which you can never be forgiven.
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So this Blasphemy Challenge went like this.
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It was atheists that would film themselves and post their videos online saying that I deny the Holy Spirit.
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And they believed that by that utterance, if the Bible is true, then they would be condemned to hell.
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But of course, they believe that the Bible is not true and God doesn't exist, and I'm showing how much I believe that God does not exist by committing this blasphemy that I can never be forgiven for.
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But that is not the right understanding of this particular passage.
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Although the fact that it was such a popular thing for a little while has led to many people coming to me.
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I've fielded this question many times of those coming to me and have said, have I committed blasphemy against the Holy Spirit? Have I done something for which I'm condemned and I can never be forgiven? So let's come to a proper understanding of what Jesus is talking about here in Matthew 12, 30 to 32.
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And we'll also go on to that third section.
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I want to remind you once again our outline.
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So in this section that goes from verses 22 to 37, the first part is in 22 to 29, which is kind of the setup.
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Jesus heals a man who is demon-possessed, and this spiritual affliction that he's suffering because of this demon has also affected him physically in that he is blind and mute.
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But Jesus casts out the demon and heals his physical ailment so that the mute man spoke and saw.
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That's the scenario is set up there in verse 22.
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The crowds think that this is proof that Jesus is the son of David.
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This is the one that is promised to us, the Messiah that would come in the line of David.
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But the Pharisees are kind of worried seeing that the people are following this man who's been calling out their false teaching.
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And so to try to win back the people, they make this accusation of Jesus and say in verse 24, this man does not cast out demons except by Beelzebul, the ruler of the demons.
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And so Jesus, knowing their hearts, responds to them, any kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and any city or house divided against itself will not stand.
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How can Satan cast out Satan? He would be destroying his own kingdom if he were to do that.
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So he's pointing out how illogical they are being.
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Jesus says, if I by Beelzebul cast out demons, by whom do your sons cast them out? Your sons, they're saying they cast out demons.
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Are they doing it by Beelzebul? So for this reason, they will be your judges because the Pharisees actually were of Beelzebul.
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So Jesus says, but if I cast out demons by the spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.
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Or how can anyone enter the strong man's house and carry off his property unless he first binds the strong man, and then he will plunder his house? And that's what Jesus is saying is going on right now with his ministry and what will continue even with his disciples after Jesus is gone, after he is ascended back to the father, that the gospel will go forth.
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It will be proclaimed, the forgiveness of sins for those who will believe in Christ who died on the cross as an atoning sacrifice and rose again from the dead.
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Whoever believes in him will not be judged under the righteous judgment of God, but they will be saved and they will have fellowship with God.
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So as the disciples will go out preaching that message, those who believe will be rescued out of the kingdom of darkness, out of Satan's kingdom, which is coming to destruction, and they will be rescued into the eternal kingdom, which lasts forever.
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The kingdom of Christ and of God.
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So Jesus goes on to say in verse 30, now he's directly confronting the heart behind this accusation that the Pharisees have made about Christ.
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In verses 30 to 32, this is part two of this particular section.
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So Jesus says, he who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters.
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So this is about that gospel effort to go out and win people out of the kingdom with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
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Those who believe have been brought to belief by the Holy Spirit, by the regenerative work of the Holy Spirit that has happened in their hearts.
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So they go from being children of Satan to children of God.
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That's what's stated about us in Ephesians 2, that before we came to Christ in faith, we were dead in our trespasses and sins in which we once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience among whom we once lived.
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So we were once children of Satan, but now putting faith in Jesus Christ, we've gone from being children of Satan to children of God.
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And so by that gospel work, we're being gathered into the kingdom of God.
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But Jesus says, whoever is not with me will scatter.
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He's not gathering with me, but he's scattering them back into Satan's kingdom, which will eventually come to destruction.
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Now the rebuke that Jesus is going to make of the Pharisees later on, when we get to chapter 23, he says of them, woe to you Pharisees, who, when you cross land and sea to make a proselyte, you make that person twice as much a son of hell as yourselves.
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So as they are proselytizing, they're not winning people to the kingdom of God.
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They're actually continuing to make those people twice as much condemned because they don't profess that Christ is the son of God, the savior who has come.
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So they'll proselyte, they'll try to win people into their religion, but they just make them twice as condemned.
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They're still children of hell.
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So he who does not gather with me scatters, Jesus says.
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Therefore, I say to you, any sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven people, but the blasphemy against the spirit shall not be forgiven.
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And whoever speaks a word against the son of man, it shall be forgiven him.
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But whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him either in this age or in the age to come.
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So you could say something blasphemous about Christ.
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You could take his name in vain.
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You could use his name as a curse word.
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You could say that Jesus was just a great teacher, but he was not really God.
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Something to that effect, that would be a blasphemy against Jesus because it wouldn't be true.
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The statement that you make against the son of God being something false would be a blasphemy.
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You could blaspheme Christ and you'll be forgiven that because you made that blasphemy in ignorance.
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But whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him.
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So here would be how this would go then.
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If you don't know that Jesus is God, you don't know because you are still blinded.
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You're still a son of Satan, again, according to Ephesians 2, other passages that go along with it.
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Jesus says that in John 8, you are of your father, the devil, okay? So if you are, if your heart is darkened, your foolish heart is darkened, you don't know that Jesus is God.
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You don't recognize your sin and need for a savior and that Christ is that savior.
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Then any blasphemy that you make against Jesus is simply done in ignorance.
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But if the Holy Spirit has revealed to you that Jesus actually is the son of God and you see that the miracles that he did were genuine, you see that he was given as a sacrifice.
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He died on the cross for sins and rose again from the grave and yet you continue to disbelieve.
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You continue to blaspheme Christ.
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You continue to utter things against him that are not true, though the Spirit has revealed to you that he is who he said that he is.
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That would be blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.
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It is a willful rejection of the Spirit's revelation of who Jesus Christ is.
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And that's going on right here in the presence of the Pharisees.
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They even acknowledge that Jesus is casting out demons, which can only be done by the work of God.
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Jesus draws out that they know that later on when he says, if I by Beelzebul cast out demons, then by whom do your sons cast them out? Well, the Pharisees would have said God.
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It's by God that they cast out demons.
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So the Pharisees understand that the only person who can really cast out demons is somebody that is in the power of God.
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But they're accusing Jesus of being of Beelzebul.
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And they acknowledge that Jesus is actually casting out demons.
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So once again, verse 24, when the Pharisees heard this, they said, this man does not cast out demons except by Beelzebul, who is the ruler of the demons.
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So they're, they're acknowledging that he is casting out demons, but he's doing it under the power of Satan.
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So they're attributing to Satan that which can only be the work of God.
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They would even acknowledge by their own teaching, it could only be the work of God, but they're accusing Jesus of being of Satan.
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So within this here, there's two possibilities.
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When Jesus is saying what he says about blasphemy against the Holy Spirit in verses 30 to 32, either he is saying the Pharisees are committing that blasphemy and they won't ever be forgiven.
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And so warning the people who are around them, don't do what they're doing.
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That's one possibility, one explanation of this.
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Second explanation could be that he's not saying that they have committed that, but they're dangerously close to it.
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They're really dangerously close to this.
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And so he's given that warning since he's addressing the Pharisees, both to warn them and to tell them to repent.
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Don't go any further than what you're doing right now because you're about to cross a line that you can never come back from.
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When I've been asked this question by people who have come to me and have said, how do I know if I've committed blasphemy against the Holy Spirit? My common answer to that question is, if you have to ask that, then you haven't committed blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.
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Because a blasphemy against the Spirit would be such a hardness of heart, you would not even be concerned.
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You would hate Christ.
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You would not worship him.
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But you're asking that question because you want to worship Christ.
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You actually want to honor God.
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I want to know that I am a follower of Christ.
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I want to know that God's affection is still for me, and I haven't done something that has cast me out of his presence forever.
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A person who's committed the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit wouldn't be asking that question.
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They wouldn't even be seeking for ways that they could follow Christ because they don't love Christ.
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They hate him.
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Now, you might be asking, but isn't that the problem with the atheists? Don't they hate Christ? And therefore, they're making this blasphemy against the Holy Spirit simply by denying him? No, because once again, as I gave the explanation earlier, they're making that attestation in ignorance.
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They don't really know that Jesus is God.
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They don't really know that there is a Holy Spirit.
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Or maybe they do, but that would not be for me to determine.
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Maybe they do know Jesus is God, but they're going to deny him anyway, or that there is a Holy Spirit and they blaspheme him.
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Maybe they do know that, but if their heart has gone that far, only God would know that, I wouldn't know that.
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So it is still upon me that I must share the gospel with everybody who has breath in their lungs, understanding that if God is going to do a work to change that person and bring them from unbelief to belief, then that is God's doing.
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My responsibility is to share the gospel with anybody.
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Whether a person's heart is going to be closed to it or receptive of it, I don't have the power to determine that.
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So ultimately, this rests in God's hands.
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Who has truly committed a blasphemy of the Holy Spirit and who is still savable? We can't know that.
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From our vantage point, we can't know this person can truly be saved and this person cannot be saved.
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It's the same argument with regards to the elect.
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We don't know who the elect are.
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God knows who the elect are.
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We must preach the gospel to everybody.
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God will do the work to bring those from darkness into his kingdom.
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And he has mercy on whom he has mercy, and he will have compassion on whom he has compassion, as he said to Moses, and we see that repeated again in Romans 9.
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So let's finish up this section.
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We got the third part right here with verses 33 to 37, where Jesus talks about how a heart is revealed by their words.
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So he continues to expound upon whether or not you know these Pharisees are with Christ or against him.
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So he says in verse 33, either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad, for the tree is known by its fruit.
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This is the same thing Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 7.
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So he brings that illustration back up again to show, here's how you know these men, they are not with me.
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Or maybe even Jesus saying this, that they may test their own hearts, they may examine themselves, lest they do commit the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit.
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If it's the case where they're really close to committing that blasphemy, but they haven't yet.
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Jesus is giving this, that they may examine themselves and stop from going any further committing a sin from which they can never come back.
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So verse 33, well that's the verse I just read, a tree is known by its fruit.
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Verse 34, he says, you brood of vipers, how can you being evil speak what is good? For the mouth speaks out of that which fills the heart.
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So they're evil, Jesus is saying.
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So how can you do anything good? How can you speak anything good? You can't know me as the Son of God because of how evil you are.
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And he calls them a brood of vipers.
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Well those attributions to the serpent, to a snake, what is he essentially calling them? He's calling them sons of the devil.
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He's calling them the seed or the offspring of Satan.
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You have in Genesis the curse that is given to the serpent in Genesis chapter 3.
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This is after Adam and Eve ate the fruit that God told them not to eat because the serpent had tempted Eve.
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And so God says to the serpent, cursed are you above all the livestock.
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And he says, I will put enmity between you and the woman against your seed and her seed, your offspring and her offspring.
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He shall crush your head, but you shall bruise his heel.
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And so then from then on in Genesis, you see this divergence between the seed of Satan and the seed of the woman or the promised seed because you have the line of Cain who rises up against his brother Abel and kills him because Abel was righteous.
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That's the work of Satan right there, contrary to righteousness, hating righteousness.
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And then you also have the seed or the line of Seth, which continues in righteousness for a time until the people just become evil.
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And then you have the whole scene with Noah being the one righteous man that is left on earth and through Noah, God preserves the human race.
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So anyway, all that just to say you see this divergence from the seed of Satan and the seed of the woman.
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And so Jesus calls these Pharisees here brood of vipers to say that they are the offspring of Satan.
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How can you being evil speak what is good for the mouth speaks out of that which fills the heart.
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So that might very well be an argument then in Matthew 12, in Matthew 12, 34, that might very well be an argument for how the Pharisees have committed the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit.
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And from that, they cannot come back.
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And Jesus can make that declaration because he's the one who knows mind and heart.
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We had that said back in verse 25, knowing their thoughts, he said to them.
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So he knows whether they've committed this sin or not.
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Jesus would know that.
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So in verse 35, he goes on to say, the good man brings out of his good treasure what is good and the evil man brings out of his evil treasure.
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What is evil again? You will know them by their fruit.
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So a good tree produces good fruit, a bad tree produces bad fruit.
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What are these Pharisees producing? That which is bad.
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They're blaspheming the son of God and quite possibly the Holy Spirit as well.
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So in verse 36, he says, but I tell you that every careless word that people speak, they shall give an accounting for it in the day of judgment.
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That should be a warning to us all to be careful with what we say with our mouths.
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We should take extra special precaution with what it is that we say and not think even as Christians that we have a right to say whatever we want to say.
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For one of the fruit of the Spirit, as we read about in Galatians 5, is self-control.
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And we need to have control over our own tongues, speaking those things which are honoring of the Lord.
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And even as Ephesians chapter 4 verse 29 says, that what we speak would be gracious.
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We would be gracious with our words, building one another up instead of tearing each other down.
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For we are going to have to give an account for every careless word that we speak.
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In verse 37, Jesus saying, for by your words, you will be justified.
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And by your words, you will be condemned.
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This doesn't mean that you can speak enough flowery things to be saved.
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It's rather, once again, as Jesus said in verse 36, that what comes out of your mouth is going to be a demonstration of what's in your heart.
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So if you have been justified, if you've been made innocent by God, and His Holy Spirit dwells within you, then what comes out of your mouth will be the language of the one who is justified.
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It will be the good treasure.
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It will be the good fruit.
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But the one who is not of Christ, what comes out of his mouth will be an illustration of his condemnation, that he is not with Christ, but he is standing condemned.
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And so you think about those atheists who have done the blasphemy challenge, they're still demonstrating by their words that they're under the wrath of God.
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John 3, 36, he who has the Son has life.
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He who does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.
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So these atheists are just demonstrating that they're still under the wrath of God.
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But they can be saved, justified by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
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And when that transformation happens, and they are indwelt with the Holy Spirit, and they do know there is a God, Jesus is His Son, and He is our Savior who forgives us, who cleanses us of our sins, who justifies us by faith.
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When they come to know that, then what comes out of their mouths will no longer be this blasphemy, but it will be utterances of praise and worship to the God who saves.
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And if that's you, may that be the language that you speak.
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May your actions demonstrate the justification that has happened by the merciful, gracious hand of God.
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That you gather with Christ.
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That out of your good treasure comes good things.
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That out of this good tree that you should be, planted by streams of flowing water, as it says in Psalm 1, who bears fruit in its season.
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May what comes from you be that which honors God and testifies of the goodness of Christ to others.
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Let's finish there with prayer.
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Heavenly Father, we thank you for saving us, for sending your Son to die on the cross for our sins, and rise again from the dead, so that whoever believes in Him, our sins are forgiven, and we are justified, declared innocent, made right with God.
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And so then may Psalm 1914 be our testimony.
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Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Yahweh, my rock and my Redeemer.
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We declare the goodness of God that has been shown to us in the gospel, so that others may come to faith in Jesus Christ and so be saved.
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And it's in His name that we pray, Amen.