“The blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin” – 1 John 1:7
“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” – Romans 8:38-39
“And everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven.” – Luke 12:10
Luke 12:10 seems to spoil the radical, total and unconditional nature of God’s grace. How can it be read in a way that doesn’t contradict Romans 8:38-39 and 1 John 1:7? If nothing can separate us from God’s love, and we are cleansed from all sin, how can there still be sin that separates us, from which we cannot be cleansed? Also how can the persons of the Trinity be so distinguished that blasphemy against one is okay, but blasphemy against the other isn’t?
The golden rule of all Biblical interpretation is context. Although Luke doesn’t provide context for this verse and simply lists it among other sayings of Jesus, in Mark 3:23-30 and Matt 12:22-32 we are told what had happened to prompt Jesus to utter these words. Once again, it is a conflict with the Pharisees and/or scribes.
Jesus was healing the blind, the lame, the deaf, the demon possessed, setting people free from both physical and spiritual bondage. These were prophetic signs that the Kingdom of God had come, written about in Isaiah 61. The scribes would have known these scriptures better than anyone. But instead they claimed that Jesus was using demonic power to cast out demons. Their response to the obvious coming of the Kingdom of God was to call it the Kingdom of Satan.
The crucial point here is that nobody could deny or misunderstand the good things that were happening. Usually people have some excuse for failing to recognise the Kingdom of God: Christians do a bad job of presenting it, or it is weird and confusing, or it seems like just one good religion among others. When people reject Jesus for these reasons, then they are blaspheming against the Son of Man. But when the Holy Spirit has given inner illumination – has convicted someone of his truth in an undeniable way – to reject Jesus then is to blaspheme the Holy Spirit.
God offers unconditional forgiveness, but on one condition: we have to accept it. We cannot receive forgiveness if we don’t believe we need forgiving or if we don’t want to be forgiven. The sin of refusing to be forgiven is the only sin which cannot be forgiven. The only thing that can separate us from God’s love is wanting to be separated from it. God will never coerce us into his Kingdom: he always gives us the choice. If we refuse to enter it, then we are forgiven as long as our refusal comes from misunderstanding or confusion. But when it becomes absolutely clear by the witness of the Holy Spirit, then by refusing we cut ourselves off forever.
Although this verse can be sobering, we should remember that it is also very good news indeed. It informs us that the only people who will be in hell are those who have chosen it, conscious of what they were choosing. Nobody will accidentally find themselves in hell. We also learn from this that rejecting Jesus does not condemn someone to hell, provided Jesus is rejected because he has not yet been clearly understood. Nor can we possibly know whether someone has clearly understood Jesus or not, and therefore it is not for us to judge anyone’s eternal destiny. Our task is simply to bring the Kingdom of God into people’s lives, as described by Isaiah 61, as best we possibly can.
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Hi Barney, I really enjoyed reading the post – and I look forward to reading more. (I came across this blog after ready your helpful post on the refugee crisis shared by a couple of mutual friends on Facebook.)
Can I ask, however, whether you think therefore people would have better eternal prospects if the gospel was not presented to them. That way they would not have the chance of wilfully reject Christ under the conviction of the Holy Spirit?
I can’t imagine you would think that. In that case, please can you elaborate to square the circle on this – or just to help me if I seem to have misunderstood the implications of what you’ve written.
Thanks,
Paul
Hi Paul,
Thanks for engaging with this post! And thanks for your kind words about my other post on refugees.
You’re quite right that what I said here is open-ended, and also quite right that I don’t think we shouldn’t share the gospel with people on the basis that doing so would lessen their eternal prospects. So here is how I would draw out further implications of what I’m saying.
Jesus said “This is the verdict: the light has come, but people preferred darkness because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19 – right after the most famous bible verse). One significant way of understanding our goal is that we are here to bring light into the world. Light exposes the true nature of things and enables the possibility of a real choice. Bringing clarity is not the ONLY goal – the gospel also has a transformative effect. But it can only have this effect if people submit to being transformed by it, and they can only submit to it if they know about it.
When the illumination of the Holy Spirit touches someone’s heart, it exposes what was already there anyway.* Bringing the gospel doesn’t endanger anyone’s eternal salvation but rather makes obvious what may not have been obvious before. This helps others to grasp the real implications of the gospel who might not otherwise have done, bringing healing, hope and liberation to many.
*In a manner of speaking – although eternal choices are not fixed in time. Perhaps a better way of saying it is that the eternal choice is presented to everyone eventually. One day people will be faced with the truth and will have a choice whether to submit to it or not. When people share the gospel, they are bringing that eternal choice forwards and thus participating in the restoration of all things.
The gospel both (a) makes it clearer what the real choices are, (b) makes it easier to choose rightly. But those with hard hearts will not repent even if someone rises from the dead.
Hi Barney,
Thanks for your reply and for taking the time to tune into and address my query. I really appreciate you doing that.
It’s interesting to read the way you write about every person having a time or opportunity to make a clear cut decision to accept or reject Christ and God’s grace. I hadn’t seen it that way (depending on what you mean by that) – but am open to the idea.
Please can you unpack what you mean by that, and when that would be (e.g. In each person’s lifetime, at the end of the age, etc?) and how that would (as far as you have understood it) – and particularly how you have arrived at that view Scripturally.
Thanks,
Paul
Hi Paul,
Thanks for your shared interest in what I believe to be an important topic!
I should specify that I don’t think there is a specific time at which everyone has an opportunity to accept or reject Christ. The thing is hard to talk about because of the eternal nature of the choice, but I have been much influenced by C.S. Lewis’ book “The Great Divorce” in pondering the issue. The book has scriptural quotations peppered throughout but without references – he simply assumes you will know the Bible well enough to recognise it when it is being quoted.
As for my own thoguhts on the Scriptural view of eternal salvation, they are many and probably deserving of another blog post! But in brief, as follows:
1) The word-group “salvation/saviour/to save” in the Old Testament never refers to one’s eternal destiny. It describes the character of God in relation to his people in a number of ways: deliverance from enemies, from slavery, healing of sickness, of poverty, of affliction. When the New Testament takes up the term it *sometimes* but not *always* adds an eschatological dimension to it. There are still many verses about the rescue of God’s people from concrete historical circumstances (i.e. Roman rule, persecution, social ostracism) which are often misapplied as being about an individual’s eternal destiny.
2) The verses which do still talk about an individual’s eternal destiny turn out to be less related, on the whole, to the preaching of the gospel than one might suppose. Paul never talks about hell and rarely about heaven (1 Cor 3 is a continuation of a building analogy, not an allusion to the fires of hell, which becomes clear when the multiple nuances of the word “salvation” in the Greek are brought into play). Paul does, however, say that people will be judged by their motivations for their actions (Rom 2:6-8). Jesus talks a lot about hell, but rarely about sharing the gospel. What he says about hell seems to have less to do with whether people consider themselves his followers or not (see Matt 7:21-23 & 25:45 for two chilling examples) and more to do with the orientation of people’s hearts and actions towards goodness, beauty and truth.
3) In Johannine literature there is more material. 1 John 4 says “whoever loves knows God” (observe the logical order – not what we might expect!). This is consonant with John 10:26 where Jesus says “you do not believe because you do not belong to my sheep” – again in the opposite logical order than we might expect. It implies that many are his sheep, but have not yet heard him, so it is not clear who they are.
The overall picture the Bible gives us is of a God who is just and fair to the very core of his being, who treats people equally regardless of where or in what circumstances they were born. God enjoins us to behave likewise, because God never separates his character and how he desires our character to become. Hell is a function of God’s love, a sign that he will not force people to love him even if that would save them from eternal torment. But the Bible does not give us clear, simple, surface-level indicators of who will end up in hell (if anyone) or of how his grace comes to people. We are left (a) without any reason to believe that non-Christians automatically go to hell (for reasons given above), (b) with the clear indication that God response positively to any movement towards him even by people who do not yet know his name, and (c) with ample reason to believe that God gives everyone a fair chance. I think from there we must simply join the dots.
Hi Barney,
Thanks again for taking the time to reply to my question. I’m really interested in what you’ve written. And I’m pretty impressed that you managed at what you’ve managed to articulate so concisely on a topic that could merit volumes.
No doubt your reply might provoke a multitude more questions – but what you’ve written gives me pointers for further study further down the line.
So I’ll try not to ask you an endless stream of questions. But, in light of what you’ve written, let me ask these five interrelated questions that I’m sure you must have asked yourself.
a) Why did God send Jesus to be born as a man, to live, to die and to rise from the dead? Where does that fit in?
b) What did Jesus accomplish in his death and resurrection?
c) What is the gospel message?
d) What is the purpose of proclaiming the gospel?
e) What is the right response to the gospel?
Sorry – hope you’ve still got time to reply.
All the best.
Paul
Hi Paul,
Well, your questions would properly warrant an entire book, or at least another few blog posts! I shall consider writing such blog posts, but I shall also sketh some preliminary answers here. Hopefully they can serve as a draft for you to give critical feedback on 🙂
I think I’m going to simply tell the broad gospel story as I understand it and then hope that by the end I’ve answered each of your questions. The gospel story, as I understand it, goes something like this:
1. God created everything good, for the purpose of being in loving relationship to him for eternity. He created angels and humans as the most powerful agents in his universe, to govern and order it.
2. First angels, then humans messed things up. Their mistake set the whole of creation on a downward slide, and humans by themselves didn’t have what it takes to fix it, becuase they’d become trapped in their own disordered state of mind.
3. God stepped in to fix things. He was the only one who could. His goal was not just to rescue human beings as if from a sinking ship, but instead to fix the ship so it didn’t sink. He wanted to restore the whole creation back to its original intention.
4. First, he called a people to represent him and how he wanted everyone to live, a “kingdom of priests.”
5. Then he took human nature up into himself, becoming a human being. He was killed and rose again, becoming the substitutionary atoning sacrifice for humanity – i.e. taking the hit on what was necessary to restore creation. His resurrection inaugurated the “new creation” – i.e. he kind of dragged everything up with himself into its renewed state. That is what is still going on today.
6. Then he re-oriented his community around this incarnation-crucifixion-resurrection event-and-person. It was the pivotal point in history, so understandably the people of God should look radically different from then on. Suddenly the people of God was no longer limited to one ethnic group, but could include all nations.
7. Those who join this community are both restored themselves, and also participate in the project to restore everything else.
8. Nobody is forced to become part of the restoration of all things. Some angels and some humans may refuse to join in, and will end up on the rubbish dump, swept away at the end of all things (NB// this is not a comment on whether annihiliationism is true, just an image).
I THINK that captures, or at least gives implications for, all your questions. Please let me know if it doesn’t!
Hi Barney,
Sorry to break the thread. I’ve got difficulty replying to your last post within the thread from my phone.
Sorry also for my delayed and brief reply after your thoughtful and comprehensive reply to my questions. It’s been busy at work and home with two young kids and now away on hols – which is busy in a different way.
I love what you have written – and agree on all points. It’s great to see how you have clearly thought things out – and been able to articulate it.
I guess I or you might want to take what you’ve written (and our shared conviction) here – as well as what you’ve discussed earlier (where I’ve been less clear and done less study on) – and then lay that along side gospel announcements in the gospels and Acts, and aspects of the gospel in the epistles and see how that fits. You’ve probably done that already (- I haven’t had a chance yet) – and I’m guessing, from your understanding, it hangs together well.
It’s been great chatting with you on this. Thanks for sharing so freely – and putting up with my questions. I hope it was somehow and in some ways helpful for you also.
All the best. I hope we get a chance to chat more.
Best wishes,
Paul
P.S. I think we have at least one common friend, Paul Carrielies.