I have herd about this passage and herd it was notes on a certain book of the gospel, can anyone one explain this verse for me please? Or any of the other unforgivable sins verses? thank you!
edit. I ment the verse Matt 12:31-32
Should I fix your thread topic to refer to Matt 12 then?
No I fixed it. I was in a rush when I created this. thanks though
Meanwhile, on Matt 12:31-32 (GosMatt’s version of the warning of the sin against the Holy Spirit), or more precisely Matt 12:22-45, which gives the whole incident in context (with an important foreshadowing information in Matt 9:32-33).
Despite the sin against the Holy Spirit being mentioned in the middle of this scene, the tenor of the scene as a whole involves Christ warning His opponents among the Pharisees for calling the salvation of sinners by Christ the act of Satan.
Specifically the sinner in view is the deaf/mute demented man, already healed previously by Christ on His late arrival into Capernaum, as reported by Matthew back at Matt 9:32-34 with foreshadowing as to how this was going to relate to the scene in Matt 12 later. (“But the Pharisees were saying, ‘He casts out the demons by the ruler of the demons.’”) The man who was previously only mute thanks to demon-possession returns now deaf as well as mute despite having been healed by Christ, and the Pharisees use this as a pretext to condemn Christ.
Christ explains that even if a person is exorcised, if he does not repent and fill his heart with God then his last state shall be worse than his first (v.45). Yet even this was not hopeless for the man in such a worse state!–and it is a sin against the Holy Spirit to insist that the man’s condition must have been hopeless, and so to insist that such (apparent) salvation of him must be from the devil not from God.
This of course applies just as well to interpretations of the sin against the Holy Spirit!–to interpret it as being hopeless for the one who sins that way, is to fall into the same sin one’s self. (Although the attitude of the heart in doing so makes the difference, not merely a well-intentioned error of theological misinterpretation.)
See also the same scene reported at Mark 3:28-29, where Jesus also insists (strongly stressed in the Greek) that every sin whatever shall be forgiven men: it is necessary to interpret verse 29 by verse 28, or vice versa, but to interpret 28 by 29 is to claim (in effect) that where grace exceeds sin super-exceeds for not as the grace is the sin.
Note that Christ’s repeat of the warning (at a later scene during the final approach to Jerusalem) reported at Luke 12:8-10, is given under the opening warning to “Beware the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy.” The Pharisees were willing to contradict their own principles of judgment in order to condemn Christ for saving a man who, by natural expectations, should have been permanently lost.
In other words, not only is this warning not really about hopeless punishment when read in narrative and thematic context, and not only does the whole scene actually involve evidence in favor of Christian universalism, it’s actually a very strong warning against insisting on no salvation for some sinners.
(Relatedly, when people quote the Petrine epistle about false teachers whose last state is worse than their first, as though this means their case is hopeless?–Jesus indicates, with the exact same terminology, that He can and will still save such people from their sins. While castigating false teachers for insisting otherwise. Insert multiple levels of irony as appropriate.)
Thank you for the explanation Jason! I wish I knew about this back in april, because we talked about this in a religion class I had taken at my high school. What happened was we where talking about reconciliation and my teacher was telling us how A priest can’t give penance and how God forgives all sins except one, which kinda struck me as weird seeing how all the time they told us God forgave all sins but I guess they forgot about that part. Now I wish I could tell my teacher about this seeing how I moved on to college.
There is of course a sense in which there is one sin even God cannot forgive: the sin we insist on continuing to do and not repent of. God can still reach out in preparation to forgive in various ways, but so long as we insist on it the sin is not forgiven. (George MacDonald has some very good things to say about this, as does his student C. S. Lewis–although Lewis, unlike MacD, regards it possible and even in some cases certain that people can put themselves in a position where it is not only impossible for them to repent but impossible for God to lead them to repentance.)
On the other hand, from God’s perspective even those sins have been forgiven in some way, probably looking forward to future fulfillment (although traditionally this has been explained as being forgiven potentially instead of actually. The scriptural references, including GosMark’s version of the sin-into-the-eon which stresses that all sins whatever shall be forgiven, are much stronger than mere potentiality though.)
But we can repent at anytime and God would forgive us right?
Right. It’s only an unforgivable sin so long as we don’t repent.
Consequently, (almost) every non-universalistic system (whether ECT or annihilationistic, and whether Calvinistic or Arminianistic) is based strongly on explaining why it’s impossible (one way or another) for someone to ever repent of their sins. For Arm and Calv annihilationists, the explanation is because the sinners are annihilated out of existence, for example.
I say ‘almost’ because I’ve seen some versions of Arminianism which, following the apparent example of Judas Iscariot, acknowledge that perma-damned sinners will sorrow and repent for their sins eventually, but it will be too late: God won’t accept their repentance. This is typically more of a popular theology stance in my experience than a scholarly one, though. ECT or anni could theoretically go this route (for example people learn too late and sorrow and repent but God still annihilates them out of existence), but I’ve only ever seen this position among ECT proponents–probably because ECT is far more popular than anni.