In Luke 12, we read that Jesus was journeying toward Jerusalem when “many thousands of the people had gathered together” to meet Him (v. 1). Chapter 11 tells us Jesus was inside a Pharisee’s house when the crowd had assembled, presumably waiting for Him to come out again and minister to the masses (v. 37).
Jesus’ arrival into the bustling crowd gave occasion for Him to focus not on the many but on the few. Turning toward His disciples, Jesus gave a handful of lessons in what one commentator calls “Courageous Sincerity,”1 teaching them that they were to live in a manner different from that of the world, as lamps shining in a dark place (Luke 11:33). In His teaching session, Jesus warned the disciples against hypocrisy, encouraged them amid persecution, and sounded the alarm concerning the sin which will never be forgiven.
A Word of Warning
To begin with, in this passage, Jesus uses the Pharisees’ behavior (Luke 11:39) to warn His disciples against hypocrisy. Simply put, hypocrisy is phony religion. It paints a picture on the outside disguising the realities of what is going on within a person’s heart.
Jesus uses leaven as a metaphor (12:1)—no doubt a familiar concept to His listeners. They knew the properties of yeast, recognizing how a very small amount would permeate an entire lump of dough. The picture Jesus has in mind is a kind of religious behavior that penetrates slowly, insidiously, and constantly into a person’s life. Indeed, the practice of saying one thing and doing another can easily spread through our lives and eat at our moral fiber, like a cancer.
The real warning comes when Jesus points out that a day of reckoning will eventually come: “Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. Therefore whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed on the housetops” (vv. 2–3).
The practice of saying one thing and doing another can easily spread through our lives and eat at our moral fiber, like a cancer.
For those who live in deception, their deceit will inevitably be found out. If we do things only for the rewards of men, as the Pharisees did, then our motives will one day be disclosed. In light of the coming judgment, we shouldn’t kid ourselves into thinking we will be able to conceal our true identity. So we do well to beware of hypocrisy. It’s wicked, shortsighted, and a prevalent danger.
A Word of Encouragement
From that word of warning, Jesus then provides a word of encouragement in verses 4–7, urging His followers not to be bluffed into silence or insincerity when religious bullies threaten them. And, He assures them, they would be tempted in this way, eventually being dragged into Jewish courts on account of their association with and commitment to Him (v. 11).
His disciples, then and now, would need to learn the right kind of fear—the kind that makes them fearless in the face of intimidation. What was said at the graveside of the Scottish Reformer John Knox must be true of all who would profess allegiance to Christ: He was “a man who, in his life, never feared the face of man …. For he had God’s providence watching over him in a special maner, when his verie life was sought.”2
We often live as though life in its physical frame is the orb of our significance in existence, when in fact, as Jesus makes plain, our material lives are simply precursors to all that eternity will be to us. Rather than fearing physical threats, we ought really to fear God (vv. 4–5). The fear of the Lord combines awareness of God’s holiness with acknowledgment of our weakness. And it’s this fear that prevents us from presumptuous thoughts and foolish actions.
There’s tremendous encouragement in Jesus’ command to fear God, as counterintuitive as it may seem. Those who fear Him know Him, and God knows them (v. 6). Jesus reminds us of how the Father knows more about His children than they know of themselves. His care extends even to the tiniest details of life, to the very hairs on their heads (v. 7).
The Sin That Will Not Be Forgiven
Jesus then concludes His private teaching session with chilling words: “Everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but the one who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven” (v. 10).
This surely isn’t to say that sinning against one member of the Trinity is less grave than sinning against another. It can’t be that, for each member of the Trinity is equally God, and to sin against any of them is equally offensive. So what, then, does this blasphemy against the Spirit entail? It’s often said, quite helpfully, that if we’re anxious we’ve committed blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, then we don’t need to fear that we have—for the act of blasphemy is always accompanied by indifference to it.
To get to the heart of the matter, we need to recognize that this particular sin consists of a rejection of God and His lordship which is conscious, deliberate, and willful. To blaspheme is to recognize that God has revealed Himself in His Son by the Holy Spirit but respond in unyielding hostility and persistent unbelief. Rather than say, “Jesus is Lord,” the blasphemer lives as if Jesus is a demon, even the devil himself. For this reason, Matthew and Mark’s accounts frame this sin as ascribing to Satan that which is clearly from God.
This particular sin consists of a rejection of God and His lordship which is conscious, deliberate, and willful.
Herman Bavinck, a theologian in an earlier generation, understands the unforgivable sin as “a sin against the Gospel in its clearest revelation,” consisting
not in doubting or simply denying the truth, but in a denial which goes against the conviction of the intellect, against the enlightenment of conscience, against the dictates of the heart; in a conscious, wilful and intentional imputation to the influence and working of Satan of that which is clearly recognised as God’s work … in a wilful declaration that the Holy Ghost is the Spirit from the abyss, that truth is a lie, and that Christ is Satan himself. … For this reason the sin is unforgivable: although God’s grace is not too small and too powerless for it, yet in the kingdom of sin there are laws and ordinances placed there by God and maintained by Him.3
This particular sin, says Bavinck, is of such a nature that it excludes all pathways to repentance, cauterizes the conscience, and hardens the sinner once for all. In this sense, blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is unpardonable.
Words for All of Us
Although Jesus spoke these words originally to His disciples, they have enduring relevance for Christians today. As Jesus spoke, surely there was one disciple in particular staring straight ahead and wrestling with the lie in his soul—namely, Judas. He’s a reminder of how close we might be to Christ yet how far our hearts may be from Him. It’s virtually inconceivable that somebody hearing of the Father’s love, the dangers of hypocrisy, and the dread of blasphemy would for thirty pieces of silver hand Jesus over to be crucified. But that’s exactly what Judas did.
May God grant us hearts willing to heed Christ’s warnings, receive His encouragements, and remain in the fellowship of the Spirit.
This article was adapted from the sermon “Hypocrisy, Intimidation, and the Unforgivable Sin” by Alistair Begg.
-
Alfred Plummer, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to S. Luke, The International Critical Commentary (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1898), 317. ↩︎
-
Attributed to James Douglas in W. Stanford Reid, Trumpeter of God: A Biography of John Knox (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974), 290. ↩︎
-
Herman Bavinck, Gereformeerde Dogmatiek, 2nd ed., 157, quoted in Norval Geldenhuys, Commentary on the Gospel of Luke, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids; Eerdmans, 1951), 352. ↩︎
