Hi everyone,
Today I’d like to ask a question regarding the unpardonable sin.
Now as a few may know these past days I’ve been in immense anxiety and worried about apostasy,but I’ve come to realize I most likely haven’t committed it.
Moving on to the question,I’ve heard is 3 perspectives about the unpardonable sin.
1.)The unpardonable sin is lifelong refusal to believe and being hateful and rejective of Jesus.
2.)The unpardonable sin is saying that Jesus did all his miracles from the power of a demon or Satan
3.)-The one that scares me,is apostasy and not being able to repent
Now I’ve heard that God forgives all sins except the unpardonable one.I’m not ever contemplating apostasy or backsliding or falling away,I always tell Jesus “I’ll NEVER renounce faith in you OR abandon you Father”,but if apostasy is committed by one,can they be repent and be forgiven?.
Historically, the position which the majority of Christians have held onto, since the earliest days of Christianity, is that the unpardonable sin most closely aligns with the 1st perspective.
The second perspective stems from a reading of the text which sees Jesus' words as meaning the Pharisees had already committed the unpardonable sin, because they attributed the works of Jesus to the devil. I think this is in error.
I think this is in error because when we look at the passage, Jesus' initial response is that the one who blasphemes the Son of Man will be forgiven; in other words their mocking Jesus is not the unpardonable sin. Jesus is warning them of the possibility, but not that they had already committed, the unpardonable sin--the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.
That is, they mock Jesus, this is not unpardonable. After all, there wasn't a more hostile Pharisee than Saul of Tarsus, and God personally chose him to be an apostle "born out of due time".
This again brings us back to the first perspective: That blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is a lifelong rejection of the work of the Holy Spirit. The one who denies and rejects the work and power of God's grace--which the Holy Spirit appropriates to and works in us through faith, including faith itself--is actively resisting forgiveness, pardon, grace, life, freedom, etc.
In other words, the unpardonable sin isn't unpardonable because God can't or won't forgive it; it is unpardonable because it remains unpardoned.
Because there is no sin that we can commit that Christ's atoning work, which His precious blood, does not cover. All sin is forgiven. This is objectively true. Christ died for all, for the whole world.
But it is through the power and work of the Spirit--through Word and Sacrament--that God works faith into us, and appropriates and imparts that forgiveness; as we are imputed with the righteousness of Jesus Christ by God's grace, through faith. Thus the one who intentionally and actively resisting the love and forgiveness of God--choosing to live outside of forgiveness, like a starving man insisting on starving while sitting outside a free-for-all banquet, means to insist on not being forgiven.
And, since we know that apostasy is forgiveable, as the Parable of the Prodigal Son and of the Good Shepherd clearly tells us--then we should not imagine that even the apostate is lost to God's love and goodness. The Gospel is for all sinners, both the unbelieving, the believing, and also those who have walked away and thrown away the faith through apostasy.
St. Augustine of Hippo, one of the most important and beloved theologians of the Western Church, both Catholic and Protestant, while having been raised by a Christian mother nevertheless abandoned his mother's religion and fell down a path first of womanizing and doing lots of things that rebellious teenagers do, then converted to the Manichean religion.
By the time Augustine reached his thirties, he began to feel the emptiness of Manichaeansim, and two things happened:
1) He heard St. Ambrose, the bishop of Milan preach, and Augustine was absolutely stunned by the beauty of Ambrose's words; even though Ambrose had not been trained in formal rhetoric (as Augustine had).
2) While contemplating this existential crisis he was in a garden when he says he heard the voice of a small child say, "Take and read". When he followed to where the voice originated, he found a copy of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans. And reading it changed his life. Literally.
Augustine renounced his Manichaeanism, received Christian baptism (from Ambrose himself), and would become, arguably, the most beloved theologian that Western Christianity has ever had.
The lives of God's saints are a treasure-trove of stories of God's grace and power in taking the most irredeemable of sinners and making them saints.
St. Paul says, "Where sin abounds, grace super-abounds." There is no darkness that the light of Christ cannot illuminate, there is no sin that the blood of Christ does not cover, there is no person that is outside of the everlasting arms of God's grace and salvation.
-CryptoLutheran
