Mark chapter 3, I want to ask you a question, is all sin forgivable?
! I'm not asking if people will forgive all sin because people won't.
! They hold against you.
There's a lot of lack of forgiveness among people, but I'm asking does the Lord forgive all?
Is there anything that you and I can do that the Lord will not forgive?
Murder. Does God forgive murder?
Lying in church.
Is it worse to lie in church than it is to lie in a parking lot?
Or how about at the house? I've always been curious about that.
Sleeping in church. Does God forgive that?
There is a sin that God will not forgive.
I want to talk about that this morning.
It's found in Mark chapter 3, beginning in verse 22.
And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem were saying, he is possessed by, speaking of Christ, he is possessed by Beelzebub.
And by the prince of demons, he cast out the demons.
And he called them to him.
And he said to them in parables, how can Satan cast out Satan?
If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.
And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand.
And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but is coming to an end.
But no one can enter a strong man's home and plunder his goods unless he first binds the strong man.
Then he indeed may plunder his house.
Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven, the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter.
But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.
For they were saying, and this is a key verse, for they were saying, he has an unclean spirit.
Now, Mark loves to tell stories in layers or give accounts or narratives in layers.
He used a technique in Mark chapter 3 that I referred to a couple weeks ago called a Markin,
theologians call it a Markin sandwich, in the sense that he gives one narrative
and then pauses to deal with another narrative and then goes back to the previous narrative.
And he does that intentionally, and he does it several times, at least five, possibly up to seven times in the Gospel of Mark.
It's a trait.
There's interconnected narratives.
And in this section, the passage I covered a couple of weeks ago was about his family,
that his family think he's out of his mind.
Then he deals with the passage we're dealing with today.
And then his family's waiting outside, wanting him to come out there so they can get rid of him and take him away.
And he talks about who, in fact, is a part of his true spiritual family.
That's the bread of the matter, I guess.
Today I want to deal with the passages in between, which is the meat of the matter.
And what's happened here is there's been several conflicts with these scribes.
Jesus has traveled throughout Galilee.
He's traveled through the surrounding areas.
He's gathered many people around him.
He's healed many.
He's taught.
He's gave powerful lessons.
He's cast out demons.
And local scribes have seen this, and they've reported back to Jerusalem.
And now from Jerusalem, an official delegation has traveled over 100 miles to see and hear Jesus for themselves,
to confront him, to shut him down.
And they're trying to pin him down with just about anything that they can.
They don't like him because he gets better crowds than they do.
They don't like him because he teaches better than they do.
They don't like him because he's casting demons out of folks.
They went after him about forgiving sins.
I mean, who can forgive sins except God himself?
Is he claiming to be God himself?
Scribes didn't like that.
They went after him for ministering to known sinners.
He led Matthew to himself and then went home and ate with him.
And Matthew brought all his pagan friends with him, and they met Jesus.
And the scribes didn't like that.
They got mad at him about not fasting on their schedule
because beyond what Scripture says about fasting,
the scribes came up with a different schedule that is beyond that,
and they expect everybody to follow it.
And when he didn't follow it, they didn't like that either.
He didn't follow Sabbath laws.
They didn't like that either.
He healed somebody on the Sabbath, and that's considered work in their opinion.
So they didn't like that part of it either.
They're looking for anything.
And so now they accuse him of being demon-possessed.
And they speak of him that he's possessed of Beelzebub.
And Beelzebub is a Philistine god.
Baal, the first part of that,
is a very generalized reference to God, period, a pagan god.
And then the last part of that, Zebul, means high place or exalted abode.
So in other words, the god of the high place.
But the Israelites twisted that name,
and instead of saying Beelzebub, they said Beelzebub,
which means the lord of the flies.
Now, what flies, what do flies gather to?
Trash, yeah, but they also gathered other stuff.
And so it's another way of saying your exalted lord is the lord of dung.
That's what they're basically saying, to put it nicely.
That's not too nice, but anyway, it's truth.
The word in the Greek, Beelzebub, the original word,
is similar to the first one,
but the meaning of it in translation means
the lord of the dwelling or the lord of the house.
And the thought is that Satan's influence is within our sphere.
Satan's influence is around us.
Ephesians chapter 2, verse 2 says,
he's the prince of the power of the air,
meaning that he's working in our midst.
John tells us he's the ruler of the world.
So this is his domain.
This is where he messes with people of sorts.
And so this term, Beelzebel, becomes synonymous with Satan.
And they accuse Jesus because they know that his power is real.
They can't deny that.
They've seen it or at least heard of his exorcisms.
And when the demons come out of the people,
they often reference Jesus like he's the holy one of God
or he's the son of God.
And the scribes have to admit that Jesus has power.
So how do you deal with that?
Well, they're saying, okay,
apparently the demons are saying that he's their God.
They're calling him his God.
So he must be of Satan.
And so we can twist that and say that he's demon-possessed.
And the scribes have to admit that he's got power,
but they said, I know what we can say.
They're calling him a demonic God.
They're aligning him with, aha, we got him.
Now let's nail him.
And as the great Lee Corso would say, not so fast, my friend.
Because Jesus uses a parable to tell them how that's nonsense.
Why would Satan want to defeat satanic power?
Why would he, that would just divide and weaken the satanic kingdom.
That's like a household being divided.
There's nothing advantageous about a household being divided.
Instead, you're trying to defeat or overpower an enemy.
College football's almost gone,
so let me use a couple more football illustrations before it's gone.
I mean, in football, if a team is a throwing team,
you better aim with the quarterback.
You've got to do something about the quarterback.
And if their defensive line is strong,
then you work with the offensive line to better man the defense.
The O-line has to be strong.
Well, listen, if you're invading an ancient city,
and there's a wall around it,
and they have watchtowers that alert not only the citizens,
but also the armies of when the enemy is coming,
then you better find the strong towers and take them out.
That's the strategy.
If you're invading a home,
you take the strong one in the home,
and you bind him and contain him,
and then you're at greater ease.
And that's the illustration that Jesus used.
And he mentions in verse 27,
he talks about the strong man.
He's talking about Satan.
He's talking about the house.
That's his domain.
That's the earth.
This is where he roams.
The plundering of the house speaks of the sway of the people
that have been under his influence.
The binding is the authority that Jesus has over Satan
that they've witnessed.
And so he explains that.
Then he explains what real blasphemy is.
Now, I want to be clear.
What they're doing was blasphemy.
They were speaking against God when they spoke against Christ.
Don't take such as that lightly, folks.
When you hook a four-letter word onto the name of God,
that's not harmless frustration.
That's defamation of God, and it's serious.
When someone makes God the butt of a joke
or makes his name a punchline,
that's not just being crude.
That reveals a heart that has no reverence for God.
It speaks of a lack of a real relationship with God.
When you use his name as an expression of disgust or slang,
that's blasphemy.
When you joke about his power or his presence,
that's blasphemy.
Are those sins, are those things forgiven?
Are they forgivable?
Yes, they're forgivable.
Is what the Jerusalem scribe said about Jesus forgivable?
Yes.
However, and this is the warning that he gives them,
that they're headed down a road that leads somewhere far more dangerous.
They're on a trajectory toward being guilty of an eternal sin,
an unpardonable sin,
and that is what Christ calls the sin of blaspheming the Holy Spirit.
Now, what is blaspheming the Holy Spirit?
Well, to understand it,
let's talk about what's not blaspheming the Holy Spirit first.
Let me tell you what it's not.
What it's not, it's not horrible profanity.
It's not using the Lord's name in vain.
That's blasphemy.
But it's not what God calls,
what Christ calls blasphemy of the Holy Spirit.
There is forgiveness for saying dumb things.
I'm not making light of it.
It's serious.
It's sinful.
It's irreverent.
It's foolish.
It's dishonoring.
Frankly, it gives evidence that you don't even know Christ.
However, God forgives us for dumb things that we say.
God gives grace for careless, flippant tongues
that repent of what they've done.
The second thing that blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is not.
It's not a foolish statement.
Okay?
It's not just saying something foolish or disrespectful about Jesus.
That's ignorant, but it's forgivable.
I made the mistake of reading a comment on Facebook the other day
from a lady whose personal description was,
I am stardust.
That spoke volumes to me.
She was responding to another uneducated comment,
and she said this, and I quote,
I'm not a follower of the Bible
except for the very beautiful teachings of Jesus Christ,
which Southern religions have rejected
as not fitting in with their ideologies.
End of quote.
I wanted to respond really bad.
I did.
I did really want to.
Now listen, I didn't respond.
Not on Facebook.
And you need to be proud of me.
Now some of you are smarter like I am,
and so you'll say you should have said something.
I'm just telling you I shouldn't have said anything.
And I didn't.
I withheld my keyboard for just a few moments, okay?
Let me encourage you to do the same, okay?
Take a pause, 30-second pause at least.
Some of you need 30 minutes.
Some of you need 30 days, you know.
I'll tell you what I should have said
or what I wanted to say.
I wanted to say I trust the whole Bible
just like Jesus did, and he quoted it.
Stardust.
Listen, that lady's ignorant, and she's foolish,
and she's disrespectful, and I don't know her,
and I believe she's probably lost.
But all of that's forgivable.
All of it.
Third thing that's not blasphemy of the Holy Spirit,
and that's a weak moment.
It's not a moment of anger.
It's not a moment of fear.
It's not a moment of doubt.
It's not a moment of frustration.
When pressure is put on us and things come out,
that reveals our character.
It does.
It shows cracks in our spiritual armor.
It exposes more than we want other people to be able to see.
However, an outburst,
a moment of panic,
a wave of fear,
a sense of discouragement,
a doubt about what we've always believed,
these are not sins that God refuses to forgive.
They're not.
They're moments of weakness.
They're not permanent rejection.
They're human struggles.
They're not eternal condemnation.
They're not.
Tell you what else blasphemy of the Holy Spirit's not.
It's not inappropriate humor.
There are things that are said sometimes in an effort to be funny that go way too far.
A line gets crossed.
The joke falls like a lead balloon.
And instead of people laughing at everything,
everybody grows silent and just kind of looks at you like.
It leaves an impression on people that they'll remember you by.
Even though you wish they don't remember it,
you wish you hadn't said it,
but it's already been said,
it's shameful,
never should have been said,
and it marks you,
and it leaves a scar.
It does.
It may scar a relationship,
but it's forgivable.
Let me tell you,
and some of you need to hear this.
I'm not going to tell you who.
Dumb statements and inappropriate puns are forgivable.
Thank God.
They're forgivable.
They are.
I'll tell you what else blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is not.
It's not deliberate sin.
Sin is often described as a mess up,
or as a slip up,
or as an accident.
That's not sin.
We don't slip into sin.
That's an inappropriate way to address sin.
We don't slip into sin.
We walk into sin.
Now,
we may be enticed into sin.
We may be encouraged into sin.
We may be accompanied into sin,
but sin is still a choice for us,
and the fault lies,
hear me,
the fault lies with the sinner.
Sometimes,
even a Christian will deliberately sin,
and sometimes they'll deliberately sin big.
Now,
let me explain,
because we like to categorize sins in certain ways.
We like to categorize sins as little sins.
Little sins is the stuff that you think
that you don't need to be thinking about.
Little sins are the things you listen to
you don't need to be listening to.
Little sins are the things you glance at
that you don't need to be glancing at.
Little things are the things you say,
sometimes even under your breath.
That needs to stay under your breath.
That's because it needs to stay out of your mouth.
You know,
it's those little sins,
you know.
Then there's medium sins,
okay?
And that's the stuff that
that you glare at.
That's the stuff that you say
and somebody else hears you,
and they go,
hmm.
That's the stuff that you're with
other people and you listen
to stuff you don't need to be listening to.
That's the more exposed stuff.
Not huge.
Not life-defining,
but stuff you need to stop doing.
Then there's the big sins.
Big sins are the ones that light up the prayer list,
you know.
The prayer chain gets going with the big sins,
you know.
They never say what it is,
it's unspoken.
You can't mention it.
But it's those type sins.
It's the big ones.
Now,
I want to be clear about something.
Big sins are the ones that blow up your life.
Changes things.
Be clear, though.
These are our categories.
They're not God's categories.
If you've got a sin in your life
that you think is a little sin,
that you, you know,
you just got to nurture that thing
and bring it along
and it's just your little buddy.
Christ went to the cross
and died for that sin.
It's serious.
So this judging of little,
big, medium,
that's our doings, okay.
We do that
because the ramifications are different
with different sins.
But the reality is,
the little sins just snowball
into medium sins
and the medium sins
just grow into big sins.
Then all of a sudden,
we really messed up
and there's a paper trail there
in our lives
that we never acknowledged
along the way.
But even if it don't do that,
the little sins are still big sins
because Christ went to the cross
for that.
So what happens to somebody
who commits a scandalous sin
and they do it deliberately?
Well, let me tell you what it does.
It'll strain relationships
with other people.
It may ruin relationships
with other people.
It breaks trust with other people.
It breaks consequences
that may have,
it brings consequences
that may last a lifetime.
It may be prison.
I mean,
it may be being ostracized.
It may,
it could be being alienated.
The fallout,
and hear me,
the fallout is almost always worse
than you think it's going to be
because the devil loves to tell us
our sin's not that big a deal.
But I want you to listen to me.
All of that,
it is not unforgivable to God.
It might be to everybody else,
but not to God.
The consequences are deliberate.
Scandalous sin are huge.
But that's not blasphemy
of the Holy Spirit.
Not the way Christ speaks of it.
It's not.
Let me tell you what else.
It's not.
I want you to hear me today.
It's not a fatal failure.
Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit,
the unpardonable sin,
is not a fatal failure.
And what I mean by that
is sadly the biggest mistake
that a person makes
in his or her life
sometimes ends their life.
It could be a single collapse.
It could be a confused moment.
It could be a dark hour of weakness.
It could leave all the living mystified
and shattered.
I want those who've walked through tragic loss
to hear me clearly.
Your eternity and your loved one's eternity
is not determined by the final moment
of their lives.
It's not.
A believer may be discouraged.
They may be confused.
They may be held in the grip of a stronghold.
And all of that is horrible
and it's heartbreaking
and it's selfish
and it's of the devil
because Jesus said in John 10, 10,
the thief comes but to steal,
to kill, and to destroy.
However, that final moment
does not determine your salvation.
Your salvation's based on the finished work of Christ.
That's what determines your salvation.
And God's grace is sufficient to cover
and remove all the sins of a confessing believer
including the last one that took their life.
Years ago, a young Christian
who was not walking with the Lord at the time
died in a horrible accident.
It's tragic.
It was horrible.
It sticks out in ministry.
There's like two handfuls of times in ministry
where something happens
and you walk through that with a family
and you walk away with a limp
and you never get over it.
You never forget it.
And it was one of those type deals.
It's tough.
And around the time of the funeral,
a relative of the young one that died,
a relative that believes a Christian
can lose their salvation,
came to that grieving mother and said,
I'm sorry that your boy's in hell today.
What a statement.
How dumb.
If I was God
and I heard somebody saying something that dumb,
it would be unpardonable.
I'd just zap and they'd be gone.
But thank God I'm not God.
And his grace is greater than even such a stupid statement.
But for one, based on his testimony,
it's not true
because he was a professed believer.
He was a struggling believer.
He was not where he needed to be.
But even if what she said was true,
even if he wasn't a believer,
why do you say that?
Why do you say that?
Cruel.
It's idiotic.
Don't do it.
I'm just telling you don't do it.
Our final moment,
our final hour,
our final week,
our final year
does not determine our salvation.
I want you to hear me.
A personal decision to trust Christ
determines our salvation.
And once we are in Christ,
he never lets go.
His blood covers all of our sins.
A fatal failure.
Don't take that away.
Lastly,
what's not blasphemy of the Holy Spirit
is a lifetime,
lifelong struggle.
A lifelong struggle.
There are particular besetting sins
that are lifelong battles.
And it shouldn't be.
As believers,
we have the power of the Holy Spirit
to overcome any sin in our lives.
Thank God the old is gone.
The new has come.
Oh,
if it was always that simple.
But sometimes there's a stronghold
that will resurface in your life.
Sometimes there's a weakness
that just keeps nagging.
A temptation that will continue to show up.
And it's not that the Christian
isn't fighting it.
On the contrary,
if you're not fighting against it,
that speaks of not having salvation.
Does that make sense?
However,
repentance sometimes
don't always stick.
Maybe I'm not supposed to say that,
but it's just the truth.
Sometimes repentance don't stick.
And some sins
don't ever seem to be conquered.
And lifelong battles
sometimes take a lifetime.
And that don't have to be
because there's hope in the Lord
and he gives you the strength
to rise above it.
And your sin is not justified
and it's not excused
and it's not minimalized.
But if you die in that struggle,
yet you die in Christ,
that besetting sin
is not an unforgivable sin.
It's not.
If we hate our sin
and we grieve over our sin
and we battle with our sin
and we fight to overcome our sin,
we're not rejecting the Holy Spirit.
We're responding to the Holy Spirit.
We're doing it imperfectly.
We're not doing it the way we need to.
But we're responding
to the conviction of the Holy Spirit.
And the struggle itself
is evidence of our desire
to please the Lord.
So I want you to hear me again.
Your salvation is secured
by Christ's righteousness,
not your perfection.
Because you're not going to get it right.
Of a believer,
may fall often,
but never out of God's hand.
Never will
fall out of God's hand.
So that's what eternal sin is not.
That's what is not the unpardonable sin.
That's what is not blasphemy of the Holy Spirit.
So what is the unpardonable sin?
What is blasphemy of the Holy Spirit?
I'll put it simply.
It's the rejection of Christ.
That's what it is.
The blasphemy of the Holy Spirit
is to ignore the eye-opening,
Christ-exalting conviction
and calling
of the Holy Spirit of God
upon your life for salvation.
God loved you enough
to send his son
to live as an example,
to die in your place,
to rise again,
proclaiming eternal life,
and to ascend into heaven
to pray for you
and make a home for you,
and then sent the Holy Spirit
to open your eyes,
to convict your heart,
to draw you to Christ,
to show you the opportunity of salvation.
And if you ignore that,
even though he speaks again
and again to your heart,
and you push him aside
and delay him
and die without him,
you will never be forgiven.
There is no forgiveness
after death.
There's none.
You have committed a sin
in rejecting Christ
that will last for eternity.
You spent your whole life
refusing the greatest offer,
an eternal offer,
by the Lord that loves you so.
You blasphemed, ignored,
made light of the very Holy Spirit
that came to bring you to Christ.
And you'll have hell to pay
for all of eternity for it.
And by the way,
about those red words of Jesus,
you don't want to know
who talks about hell
more than anybody else in Scripture?
Jesus.
And the pictures that we paint
of heaven that are scripturally based,
of hell that are scripturally based,
because a lot of people
come up with other stuff,
but the things that we paint
that are scripturally based
come from the words of Christ.
if I come to your house,
take you to a banquet
in the honor of the one
who loves you
more than anyone else
and you refuse to come,
and I ask you again,
and it don't matter how many times
I ask,
eventually I'm going to stop asking
because it's going to come.
The banquet's going to come,
and if you don't make it
to the banquet,
you didn't make it,
and you get left behind.
You miss your opportunity,
and once that opportunity is gone,
it's gone.
You missed out.
I don't mean this as a threat.
It's just the truth.
We're one rogue cell away
from our life changing drastically,
possibly very quickly.
One distracted driver away
from going into eternity immediately.
immediately.
And that's exactly why
the Holy Spirit speaks
to your heart today.
If you ignore him in this life,
you'll regret it for all eternity.
I'm not trying to threaten you,
and I'll be honest with you,
I'm not trying to scare you
because when somebody
makes decisions out of fear,
they really don't mean them
a lot of times, you know?
You can promise the world to God
if he'll get you out of this situation,
and you don't mean a lick of it.
But I want to be honest with you.
The reality is,
if there's any inkling within you at all
that you need the Lord Jesus in your life,
and there's any pulling at all
in your life to pull you towards the Lord,
I'm going to tell you,
you didn't come up with that on your own.
Scripture says that you're dead
in your transgressions and sins.
That means you cannot respond
unless the Holy Spirit awakens you
and gives you that opportunity.
But I'll be just as clear to say
you must respond to that awakening.
You have responsibility in that.
And if you ignore that
and the opportunities are up,
it is a sin
that will not be forgiven.
That's what he was saying to the scribes.
He's saying,
you're not taking me seriously.
And what you're leading to
is blaspheming,
denying the Holy Spirit.
So wait no longer,
is what I'm saying.
Come to Jesus.
He's the one that's calling you to himself.
He's the one that initiates that.
He's the one that receives you,
and he knows all the stuff
to go along with it.
He does.
I don't and don't need to know it,
but he knows it all.
And yet loves you enough to come to you
and give you the opportunity to be pardoned,
and you can be pardoned.
But the offer is only good for a time.
And so I encourage you to respond.
If you've never given your heart and life
to the Lord Jesus Christ,
today's the day of salvation for you.
If you'll respond to him in obedience,
he'll change your life forever.
He'll nail it down
and rest in it.
If you've done that privately
but never acknowledged it publicly,
part of the evidence
of it being real
is that you make it,
you make it
public.
Jesus said,
if you're ashamed of me before others,
I'll be ashamed of you before my Father.
In other words,
it never really took.
Or maybe God's leading you
to First Baptist Church.
Maybe it's that you've been around
these folks enough to know
and God's worked in your life
enough to know
that this is the place
where he'd have you to serve.
Or maybe it's something else
in your life.
Maybe there's a besetting sin
that when I talked about that,
it just came up
and you've just been labored by it.
Give that to God today.
You can repent of that
where you stand in just a moment.
You can repent of it at this altar.
I will pray with you.
Let's take the warning of the Lord
seriously
and respond to it
in obedience,
whatever that means
to us as individuals.
Let's honor God
by just simply being obedient.
With every head bowed,
every eye closed.
Lord Jesus,
I ask today
that you'll move
and work in lives.
Help us to not be so arrogant
as to think it's not important enough
for us to respond to.
Help us not be so ignorant
as to ignore your warning
and your invitation.
Help us not be so stubborn
as to continue
in a pattern of disobedience.
Help us, God,
be wise enough,
loving enough,
faithful enough
to follow your direction
as you speak to us right now.
In Jesus' precious name,
amen.
Stand where you are.