Grace Party: Escape to Reality Greatest Hits, Volume 3 (5 page)

I have heard of people who lived
their entire lives thinking that they were cursed because they, or their parents,
had committed the unforgivable sin. It was partly this conviction that made
Søren Kierkegaard the gloomy Dane. He thought his father had committed an
unforgivable sin and, as a result, his family was beyond redemption. This made Kierkegaard
a great existentialist philosopher, but it also made him a deeply unhappy man.
If you think you are beyond saving and without hope, you wouldn’t be happy
either.

One of
the greatest sources of anxiety among believers is confusion over issues of sin
and forgiveness. Telling a confused Christian that there is an unforgivable sin
is like throwing petrol on a fire. So is there an unforgivable sin and, if so,
what is it?

The bottom 10 list

Here is a list of candidate sins
that I have gleaned from various sources. You may have committed one or all of
these sins, but rest assured that none of them is unforgivable:

1.
     
an attitude that calls evil good and
good evil

2.
     
a lack of reverence

3.
     
being stubborn and unteachable

4.
     
not loving the Lord with all your
heart, mind and strength

5.
     
willful or intentional sin

6.
     
unconfessed sin

7.
     
unrepented sin

8.
     
harboring unforgiveness in your heart

9.
     
taking the Lord’s Name in vain

10.
  
having disrespectful thoughts about the Holy Spirit

There is some bad stuff on this
list that can hurt you. For instance, if you harbor unforgiveness you’ll end up
bitter and twisted. But it is not helpful to tell a young mother whose husband
has run off with her best friend that she must forgive him or face eternal
damnation. You might as well ask her to walk on water.

The
power to overcome sin — and forgive the unforgivable — is not found in fearmongering.
So, in the hope of breaking a few manmade yokes, let’s review some of these
so-called unforgivable sins.

Unforgivable sins?

Some say that the unforgivable sin
is a bad attitude or a lack of reverence or it’s being stubborn and
unteachable. This is nonsense! Jesus didn’t suffer and die to enter us into a
reverence contest. We neither earn points for being quick learners nor get
punished for being dimwitted. Attitude is certainly important as it will affect
the way you live and whether you reign in life. But you are neither
disqualified by a poor attitude any more than you are qualified by a good one.

Others
say the unforgivable sin is not loving the Lord with all your heart, mind and
strength. It’s putting Sunday football ahead of Jesus. This mindset leads to a
system of religious score-keeping. It’s the debits versus the credits. But God
is not counting the number of hours you put into church versus the number of
hours you spend kicking a football (or watching someone else kick a football).
You don’t qualify for eternal life because you maintain a positive or pious
attitude and we don’t love God to stay on his good side. We love him because he
first loved us and saved us and redeemed us and did everything we needed, even
while we were sinners (Romans 5:8).

What
about willful sin? That sounds serious. Is willful sin unforgivable? Well if
Jesus can’t forgive the sins we’ve done on purpose then no one can be saved.
Happily, his best is greater than your worst and his grace is greater than your
sin!

I’ve
heard many people say that unpardonable sins are those we neither confess nor
repent of. (This would include suicide.) They seem to forget that Jesus went
around forgiving people who neither repented nor asked for forgiveness. They
also forget that he forgave us long before they were born.

Here is
a recipe for dead works: “I must repent and confess to get God to forgive me.”
That’s back to front. We don’t repent to get forgiven but because we are
forgiven. Repentance is how we receive the gift that has already been given in
Christ. It’s the same with confession. We don’t confess to make God forgive but
because he has forgiven us. Confession helps us to receive the grace he has
already provided.

What
about harboring unforgiveness in our hearts? Didn’t Jesus say forgiving others
was a precondition for receiving God’s forgiveness (Matthew 6:15)? If it is
then there’s no such thing as grace. Read your Bible through the lens of the
cross. Jesus preached conditional forgiveness to those who trusted in the law
to silence their self-righteousness and to reveal their need for a Savior. We
are not under law but grace. We forgive others because Christ first forgave us
(Colossians 3:13).

What
about taking the Lord’s Name in vain? This is one of the 10 Commandments and
was a stoning offense under the old covenant:

Anyone
who blasphemes the name of the Lord is to be put to death. The entire assembly
must stone them. Whether foreigner or native-born, when they blaspheme the Name
they are to be put to death. (Leviticus 24:16)

If you have taken the Lord’s Name
in vain, then thank God that you live under a new and better covenant! Thank
God for Jesus who has set you free from the curse of the law and who said:

Anyone
who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven… (Matthew 12:32a)

You may have cursed God, but he
has blessed you! I wish I could go back to 19th century Copenhagen, find the
gloomy Dane and tell him the good news. “Søren, all your sins were forgiven!”

But what
about the rest of that verse:

…but
anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this
age or in the age to come. (Matthew 12:32b)

Here Jesus identifies the one and
only sin that he says will never be forgiven, namely, the blasphemy of the Holy
Spirit.

The unforgivable sin

What does it mean to blaspheme?
You might have heard that it is taking the Lord’s Name in vain, but that
doesn’t properly capture the meaning of the word. To blaspheme is to slander or
to speak falsely of someone in a manner than injures their good name. When
people accused Paul of preaching grace as a license to sin, he said their
reports were blasphemous, or slanderous (Romans 3:8).

To
blaspheme the Holy Spirit is to dismiss his testimony about Jesus. The Holy
Spirit seeks to convince the world that Jesus is who he says he is. The
blasphemer replies, “You’re lying, Holy Spirit. I don’t trust Jesus.”

Who is a
blasphemer? Religion paints a picture of a blasphemer as someone who is belligerent
and foul-mouthed, but a blasphemer is anyone who refuses to receive the grace
of God. (Need a picture? Think of the Pharisees and law-teachers of Jesus’
day.) On the outside a blasphemer may appear to be a very moral person, but if
their good deeds flow from a hard, distrustful heart, their good works are
nothing but dead works.

What is
the unforgivable sin? It is unbelief in Jesus and his finished work. It is
hardening your heart to his love and refusing the gift of his grace. This sin
cannot be forgiven because the one who commits it rejects the very thing that
would otherwise save him. This rejection may take the form of hard heartedness
(“I don’t need him”) or religious idolatry (“I can save myself”). In either
case the grace of God is ineffective because it is not received.

If you
love Jesus, there is absolutely no need to get hung up over the unforgivable
sin. Hell may be full of murderers, thieves and adulterers, but people do not
go to hell for committing murder, stealing or adultery. As terrible as they
are, all these sins have been paid for by the precious blood of the Lamb (1
John 2:2). So have the sins listed at the top of this article.

Your
choice is this: You can be sin-conscious and gloomy, or you can be
Christ-conscious and rejoice!

Happy
are those whose wrongs are forgiven, whose sins are pardoned! Happy is the
person whose sins the Lord will not keep account of! (Romans 4:7–8, GNB)

A word after

Hardly a week goes by without
someone asking me about the unforgivable sin. It turns out there are many
people who, like Søren Kierkegaard, are worried that they have done something
unforgivable.

Since an
expanded version of this article appeared in
The Gospel in Twenty Questions
,
I was reluctant to include it here. But I put it in for the sake of those who
live with Kierkegaardian levels of anxiety and guilt. If this describes you, be
free!

Recently
I heard from someone who was battling condemnation because they had had
disrespectful thoughts about the Holy Spirit. They were worried that they had
blasphemed the Holy Spirit and committed the unforgivable sin. If this has
happened to you, let me say two things.

First,
don’t take ownership for every thought that passes through your mind. As the
saying goes, you can’t stop the birds flying overhead, but you can stop them
building a nest in your hair. If a bad thought comes to your mind reject it. It’s
not your thought. You have the mind of Christ.

Second,
to blaspheme the Holy Spirit is to call him a liar and reject what he says
about Jesus. It is impossible for a Christian to do this. If you’ve had
disrespectful thoughts that may mean you don’t know him very well, but you
haven’t blasphemed him. Not even close. So be at peace — you are forgiven! —
and fortify your mind against the lies of the enemy. Ask the Holy Spirit to
reveal himself to you and you will find that he is the best friend you’ve got.

Incidentally,
you may be wondering about all these references to Søren Kierkegaard, the
gloomy Dane. I married a Dane — a happy Dane! — so I’m interested in all things
Danish. Kierkegaard is one of my favorite Danish writers. He was a deep thinker
and a quotable guy.

When I
began writing for Escape to Reality, I posted a list of my favorite Kierkegaard
quotes. I’ll leave you with this Kierkegaardian gem:

God
creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is
still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.

Now that’s good news to make you
celebrate!

The history of the world, as told
by some, runs like this: Adam disobeyed God and brought death to all humanity,
but Jesus came and put everything back the way it was. This sort of thinking
puts Adam and his everyday sin on the same level as Christ and his incomparable
gift.

What was
Jesus’ greater work? Elsewhere I have argued that the common answer to this
question — Jesus made everyone alive — is dead wrong. Jesus did not come from
heaven simply to resurrect the corpse of humanity and repair Adam’s sin.
Certainly, Jesus
did
right Adam’s wrong, but if that was all he did,
then his wouldn’t be a greater work and Jesus wouldn’t be the Great Redeemer.
He would just be a cosmic Mr. Fix-It.

So in
what sense did Jesus do a greater work than Adam? For the sake of convenience,
I shall reduce the splendor and majesty of his finished work to three words
beginning with R. I appreciate that much will be lost in doing so but I trust
you will see past my clumsiness, be inspired, and then ask the Holy Spirit to
fill in the gaps.

What did Jesus accomplish?

1. Redemption:
The guilty verdict has been over-turned. In Adam we were
branded sinners but in Christ we are declared righteous. We are no longer
counted with the condemned but are numbered with the justified. Satan has
nothing to accuse us of and God remembers our sins no more. If you would know
how much better the gift is than the trespass, then go ask someone on death row
whether they would prefer freedom to captivity.

How did
he do it? When you responded to the call of the Spirit and said yes to Christ,
he gave you a glorious new past — his past. You were included in his death on
the cross severing all ties with your old man (Romans 6:6). The person you used
to be is dead and gone along with your sin and any relationship you had with
the law (Romans 7:6). The old order is no more (Galatians 6:14). Your former sources
of identity and security have been replaced with something infinitely better
and your past has never looked so good!

2. Resurrection:
You have been raised to new life. This is not more of the
same old life. It is brand new
zoe
-life. Indeed, Christ is your life
(Colossians 3:4).

How did
he do it? Christ gave us his life which includes his acceptance (Ephesians
1:6), his Spirit (Romans 8:11), his righteousness (Romans 1:17), his holiness
(1 Corinthians 1:30), indeed, his eternal perfection (Hebrews 10:14). As he is
so are you in this world (1 John 4:17), so obviously you do not have a sinful
nature. You are not one person on Sunday and another on Monday. Sure, you can
still walk after the flesh and reap what you sow, but you are not defined by
what you do. And when you sin, you have a mighty Advocate who speaks to the
Father on your behalf (1 John 2:1).

3. Reigning:
The grace cure is greater than the disease. Grace not only
cures us from the fatal condition of sinfulness, it inoculates us against reinfection.
Grace doesn’t just remove all traces of past sins, it empowers us to sin no
more!

Born of
the Spirit we have been rewired to resist sin and please the Father. We are not
just freed captives; we are kings and priests called to reign with him here and
now (Romans 5:17). We are no longer victims; we are more than conquerors
through him who called us.

How did
he do it? Jesus has not returned us to the garden, he has taken us to the heavenly
throne (Ephesians 2:6)! From this position of rest we rule and reign with him
here on earth.

Jesus
did a complete number on us. His act of obedience dealt with our past
(redemption), our present (resurrection life), and our future (reigning with him).

The old
Adamic way of life has gone. If anyone is in Christ, he is a completely new
creature. Since redemption always leaves you better than you started, the new
life we now have in Christ is infinitely superior to the lonely and unaided
life experienced by unfallen Adam. This is the greater work Jesus has done.
Unfallen Adam tried to rule alone and failed. We get to reign with Christ
forever and ever.

A word after

In some circles it is popular to
equate first Adam with last Adam like this: “If first Adam condemned all to
death, then last Adam must raise all to new life. Since Adam condemned all
humanity, Jesus must save all humanity, or his is a lesser work.” But one does
not follow the other.

The
gospel is not the story of Adam’s great sin, but God’s great love. Do you see?
Because of Jesus no one is going down for Adam’s mistake. His sin, along with
yours and mine, were done away with at the cross (Romans 8:3). Because Christ’s
work was so completely complete, all sin has been removed from the equation.

In
Romans 5 we read that last Adam did a greater work than first Adam. What Christ
offers us far exceeds what Adam lost. Paul writes that if death reigned on
account of Adam’s trespass “how much more will those who receive God’s abundant
provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the
one man, Jesus Christ” (Romans 5:17).

The
newest Christian has advantages infinitely superior to what Adam had. Adam
occasionally talked with God, but we have God living permanently within. Adam
knew what it was like to be apart from God, but we need never know, for God
will never leave us. Adam was seduced out of his crown by the devil, but we
have the Holy Spirit to protect us and guide us in the path of life.

Because
of Jesus, we have it far better than Adam ever did. This is the greater work.
This is the how much more that is ours to enjoy in Christ.