What exactly is blasphemy?

MARK 4.28-30. "The Unforgivable sin". Because the Spirit shows us truth, I took this to mean "denying" the holy Spirit, or denying what the Spirit shows us is true, whatever it is that comes through Him.

blasphemy

In the sense of speaking evil of God this word is found in Ps. 74:18; Isa. 52:5;
Rom. 2:24; Rev. 13:1, 6; 16:9, 11, 21. It denotes also any kind of calumny, or
evil-speaking, or abuse (1 Kings 21:10; Acts 13:45; 18:6, etc.). Our Lord was
accused of blasphemy when he claimed to be the Son of God (Matt. 26:65; comp.
Matt. 9:3; Mark 2:7). They who deny his Messiahship blaspheme Jesus (Luke
22:65; John 10:36). Blasphemy against the Holy Ghost (Matt. 12:31, 32; Mark
3:28, 29; Luke 12:10) is regarded by some as a continued and obstinate
rejection of the gospel, and hence is an unpardonable sin, simply because as
long as a sinner remains in unbelief he voluntarily excludes himself from
pardon. Others regard the expression as designating the sin of attributing to
the power of Satan those miracles which Christ performed, or generally those
works which are the result of the Spirit's agency.

sethsmommy said:

what did I just do

Click to expand...

MAde a quote to what I was referring.
Sorry, that wasn't very clear on my end.

Well, I think the unforgiveable sin is basically sawing off the tree branch that you are sitting on so to speak. We must remember that when Jesus spoke of this, he did so in the context of saying, "All sin will be forgiven men... except...".

Granted that except is a big except, without it, Jesus has totally made a universalist statement. But why isn't universalism true?

Start with what salvation and damnation mean... Salvation is basically one-ness with God and damnation is basically separation from God. If God doesn't want any to perish, and Jesus almost says that all will be saved, then why isn't universalism the outcome? Well, how do we gain one-ness with God? Jesus, of course. So, Jesus is the door to God and that is why Jesus gave himself for others--to unify us to God. And we certainly would want to say that his atonement was unlimited. So now we have all sinners being redeemed by Jesus, re-connected to God...

But how do we get to Jesus? Understood more broadly, if the Cross is the door over all time, how does anybody really get there? How do we realise we are sinners and that we need salvation? Who shows us what salvation really is? The Holy Spirit, of course.

We can sin against God, but Jesus still provides atonement. We can sin against Jesus, but the Spirit can still lead us back to him. The Spirit knocks on our hearts, wants to lead us, wants to show us the truth. Anyone, anywhere says yes or no to this leading. The yes brings one, eventually, to Jesus and God. The repeated no blocks forgiveness off, simply because one won't accept it and/or admit they need it. Of course there is always hope for the hard heart to break and to let the Spirit minister... but while a person resists the leadings of the Spirit, how can salvation apply?

So what happened with the religious leaders and Jesus to make him say such a thing to them?

A proposed reconstruction:

Jesus, as God, was filled with the Spirit. The Spirit led him and worked through him. All of these people around him, in this wonderful witness of the Spirit's activity, had their hearts opened to the Spirit in a new way. Even though the crowds did not know Jesus was God, or that he was the messiah, they were following the Spirit's lead to salvation. From their own hardness and selfishness, the religious leaders not only felt the Spirit leading them in truth, but then they were resisting the Spirit and refusing to be led (sheep, even lost sheep, can be led; goats are stubborn). Not only this, but worse. They had the darkened spirits of the satan because they were resisting the Holy Spirit and then they knowingly, and continously, went around accusing Jesus of being the satanic one. They espoused a complete inversion of truth: Jesus was fully linked to the Holy Spirit, they had fully cut the link to the Holy Spirit off (and they claimed the opposite to ignore the truth and further resist the Spirit).

Jesus' poignant warning, about never being able to be forgiven, came not as a scare tactic, it did not come to give future theologians a puzzle to work with; it came as a last, final, desperate plea for their sake. If Jesus, as God, in full communion with the Holy Spirit, made such a warning while the Spirit was already tugging at their hearts, then there really was nothing else that could be done for them... and, of course, they kept on doing what they were doing, to their own destruction.

But what does it mean for us today? Simple. To continuously convict us of ways in which we may be blocking out the Holy Spirit. The very feeling of uneasiness, of "what if I commited the unforgiveable sin?", that very conviction, is our hearts being thinned and softened by the Holy Spirit once again, in love, to continue to lead us towards salvation.