If that’s true, then coming to belief is a worthless exercise. Eternal is eternal.
? That makes no sense and contradicts God’s plan of redemption. Repent and believe is the common theme throughout the word of God. 
Exactly.
Most of us–if not all–have at some point been in a state of unbelief. That cannot ever be forgiven, according to Aaron, therefore if what he says is true, pretty much no one can be saved. It’s too late for me anyway–I went through a stage of genuine unbelief in my life. I’m doomed. I can never truely repent again, since I’ve committed the unforgiveable sin of unbelief. 
Sonia
Actually, he did. Scripture refs, please!!!
I have one:
“The mind of man does not submit to God, nor can it.”
I will keep posting this verse until you address it, Aaron.
There are a vast array of motivations behind each and every one of our actions, many that have sources other than ourselves and ultimately have nothing to do with us, thus the heredity of the sin nature. Fighting some of these motivations can only be rooted in other such motivations.
Do you know what it means to be a slave to sin, Aaron, to be locked into eternal death?
Unbelief IS the sin Jesus came and successfully destroyed.
Come on guys you are not understanding this at all. Unbelief done in ignorance is not the unforgivable sin issue here. All sin and blasphemies… none of them are beyond the scope of God’s divine forgiveness if one truly repents of them. But Jesus distinctively separates the sin of blaspheming the Holy Spirit from all other sins and blasphemies.
To blaspheme the Holy Spirit is an extreme, and at the same time settled, condition of the heart and mind that may well manifest itself in various attitudes and actions in one’s daily life in willful and knowing opposition to God’s Spirit of grace. It is “a state of hardness of the heart in which one consciously and willfully resists or renounces God’s saving power and grace” (Holman Bible Dictionary, p. 198). To again quote the Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Jesus is “not speaking of an isolated act, but a settled condition of the soul” (vol. 8, p. 645). Dr. Gerhard Kittel, in his classic Theological Dictionary of the NT, said, “It denotes the conscious and wicked rejection of the saving power and grace of God towards man. Only the man who sets himself against forgiveness is excluded from it” (vol. 1, p. 624).
You completely forgot your citation this time, bub.
So what I gather here is that God is persuasive enough to capture a certain amount of people with his grace, but some are just too difficult?
OK. So you think the pharisee who shouted out that Christ was healing people by a ‘bad’ spirit - KNEW he was dooming himself? Then why would he do that unless he was insane. Of course, Christ doesn’t ‘forgive’ insanity - he cures it.
Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit may find expression and come to its culmination in some specific way, but essentially it is a settled attitude of mind and heart. No one can stumble suddenly into irremediable sin; but men may drift into it after the fashion of the Pharisees. Selfishness and pride, and not least religious selfishness and pride, may slowly harden the heart and sear the conscience and seal the eyes, until men come to call good evil and light darkness" (Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels, vol. 2, p. 788)
Nonsense. Calling the Holy Spirit evil does not spring from a ‘settled mind.’ Christ’s warning is to the insane, especially, the religiously insane, who are most apt to say such things.
Acts 7:51 speaks of those who “are stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears,” who are “always resisting the Holy Spirit.” Such continual resisting of the Spirit’s efforts to impact one’s life will in time lead one to become so hardened that the Spirit will no longer be able to enter and transform the life of such a person. Such a one is said to have reached “the point of no return” – they cannot be brought to repentance, and thus are lost. ( Al Maxey)
All speculation, trying to conform reality to one’s interpretation of the good book instead of just observing reality in the Spirit of truth and trying to see how scripture makes sense in light of that.
Jason,
I’m not sure Calvinists would agree that this paragraph of yours agrees with their pov. As far as I’m aware, a Calvinist would probably argue that all people deserve hell and are because “all though they knew God, they did not glorify him …” The Holy Spirit works generally in the world, making them without excuse–therefore all people are condemned. Everyone has enough knowledge of God to be guilty of rejecting Him, and “all have turned aside, there is none righteous–no not one.” The grace of God, to a Calvinist, is that He chooses some people for special treatment and interferes, so to speak, with their natural choice, actively changing their hearts so that they are able to love Him and accept His salvation.
At least, that’s what I would have said a few years ago (even though I was never a true calvinist, since I always believed that Christ’s sacrifice was for all). I would never have agreed that the sin against the HS could possibly imply any sort of universalism… However, one of the biggest objections to that would, I think, have come from my belief that any opportunity for repentance was strictly limited to this lifetime, where we can obviously see that not all come to Christ.
Sonia
Everyone
I welcome to continue this discussion over to my new post: Believers and Unbelievers committing the Irremediable sin!
Certainly, they’ll usually (always?) acknowledge this, too. But it still conflicts with their basic explanation for why the non-elect have NO POSSIBILITY WHATEVER of repenting and coming to Christ: because the Father does not send the Holy Spirit to them to empower them in any way whatever to do so. Calvs, in my experience, will go pretty far in denying any meaningful operation of the HS in a sinner’s life, if that sinner is supposed to be non-elect. But that denial of operation stands in contrast to what they have to otherwise admit, that the Holy Spirit testifies in the heart of everyone concerning righteousness.
Consider it from this angle: a Calvinist acknowledges that although the non-elect know God they did not glorify Him. Okay, but how could they even possibly glorify Him? Only if the Father chooses to send them the Holy Spirit: only if God goes Himself to them to empower them to do so. To judge someone for not doing what they could only do if you gave them the ability yet you chose not to do so, is… well, no polite description comes to mind.
But just as much to the point, the non-elect (just like the elect) wouldn’t even be able to know God without the express operation of the HS in their lives. So the HS is being sent after all to operate in their lives–as Calvs have to acknowledge eventually. But it makes no sense for the HS to operate to lead a person to acknowledge God (which doesn’t happen immediately for anyone, even among the elect, as Calvs are well aware), or even to basically acknowledge some real goodness, yet not to empower the person to choose one way or the other. The only way out is for Calvs to say that God refuses to work any good at all, even remotely, in the lives of the non-elect. Yet clearly the HS is still acting!–so the HS must be totally acting against or without goodness in regard to the non-elect. (Some Calvs are content with this, and will cite scripture along that line; others, realizing that such a position can only involve God being a direct worker of iniquity, will then back off and try to claim the HS doesn’t remotely operate at all in the non-elect, thus cannot be operating against or without the good in them.)
Well, of course not; not without becoming a universalist. 
If one is ideologically committed against that, first and foremost, then one will have to look for some other way around it; perhaps by going Arm. And, to be fair, it’s an obscure line of thought which requires putting together several pieces in an unexpected way.
I remember that some univs say that the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is not forgiven in this age or the next, but that the ages will end (Hebrews, I believe) and that Ephesians says that there are “ages” (plural) to come. ANyone familiar with that argument? Aaron? Jason?
Roooooof!
Yes. And it has some merit - Christ did come bearing a sword against that generation. The Jewish age did come to an end in 70ad with the destruction of sacrifices and the temple. It’s over and it’s been over for 2000 years.
But all Israel will be saved. Even religious crazies. While IT may be unforgivable, the rest of man’s sin are forgiven.
The sin is so special that Christ must warn specifically about it. The vindictiveness against life-itself (every man knows it and has his being in it) is so self-destructive that forgiveness is not the cure. It must be eradicated by annihilation. God will do right in this - He will save the self-destructive crazy per His will and love.
I have only met one person who was convinced they had committed this sin and he committed suicide. But he was more sinned against than sinning - a product of an upbringing that produced a self-destructive insanity. If I can say a prayer for him now and then certainly Christ will - ‘Forgive them - they don’t know what they are doing.’
Those who condemn their fellow human beings are just as insane in my book. A blasphemy against life-itself and all the promises of it. But being is extended to all beyond death.
I’m familiar with the argument. It has quite a bit of scriptural merit, although it has at least two problems: first, it depends totally on a particular eschatological schedule being true (broadly similar to the one popularized in the Left Behind series for example.) To the extent that that schedule has problems, so will this argument.
Second–and most problematic to me–I can’t see it accounting well with the use of multiple-age phraseologies for punishment, and while they’re rare they do occur in the scriptures. Usually multiple eons are referenced for other purposes, the most common perhaps being the glory of God. The three multiple-eon punishment duration statements that occur to me offhand (and that I can find in a quick concordance run-through) are all in RevJohn–which will doubtless please RanRan and any members of the Church of the East. 
For those of us who accept RevJohn’s canonicity, though–which naturally includes those who go with an LB-ish eschatology schedule–the phrase does indicate punishment continuing past any hard cutoff point. (And I should caution, that I am not sure there aren’t other places in the NT, not to say the OT, where multiple ages of punishment are in view.)
Put another way, the view explains well enough why the kings of the earth might be going into the city at the end of RevJohn: they remained impenitent through the age to come, Christ’s 1000 year reign, but repented in the age to come after that (namely after the lake of fire judgment). The view doesn’t explain well enough why Satan, the Antichrist and the False Prophet will be pounded on “into the eons of the eons”.
…And, lest we forget, tattoo artists.