Grace Party: Escape to Reality Greatest Hits, Volume 3 by Paul Ellis Read Free Book Online Page A

harboring unforgiveness in our hearts? Didn’t Jesus say forgiving others
was a precondition for receiving God’s forgiveness (Matthew 6:15)? If it is
then there’s no such thing as grace. Read your Bible through the lens of the
cross. Jesus preached conditional forgiveness to those who trusted in the law
to silence their self-righteousness and to reveal their need for a Savior. We
are not under law but grace. We forgive others because Christ first forgave us
(Colossians 3:13).
    What
about taking the Lord’s Name in vain? This is one of the 10 Commandments and
was a stoning offense under the old covenant:
     
    Anyone
who blasphemes the name of the Lord is to be put to death. The entire assembly
must stone them. Whether foreigner or native-born, when they blaspheme the Name
they are to be put to death. (Leviticus 24:16)
     
    If you have taken the Lord’s Name
in vain, then thank God that you live under a new and better covenant! Thank
God for Jesus who has set you free from the curse of the law and who said:
     
    Anyone
who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven… (Matthew 12:32a)
     
    You may have cursed God, but he
has blessed you! I wish I could go back to 19th century Copenhagen, find the
gloomy Dane and tell him the good news. “Søren, all your sins were forgiven!”
    But what
about the rest of that verse:
     
    …but
anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this
age or in the age to come. (Matthew 12:32b)
     
    Here Jesus identifies the one and
only sin that he says will never be forgiven, namely, the blasphemy of the Holy
Spirit.
     
    The unforgivable sin
     
    What does it mean to blaspheme?
You might have heard that it is taking the Lord’s Name in vain, but that
doesn’t properly capture the meaning of the word. To blaspheme is to slander or
to speak falsely of someone in a manner than injures their good name. When
people accused Paul of preaching grace as a license to sin, he said their
reports were blasphemous, or slanderous (Romans 3:8).
    To
blaspheme the Holy Spirit is to dismiss his testimony about Jesus. The Holy
Spirit seeks to convince the world that Jesus is who he says he is. The
blasphemer replies, “You’re lying, Holy Spirit. I don’t trust Jesus.”
    Who is a
blasphemer? Religion paints a picture of a blasphemer as someone who is belligerent
and foul-mouthed, but a blasphemer is anyone who refuses to receive the grace
of God. (Need a picture? Think of the Pharisees and law-teachers of Jesus’
day.) On the outside a blasphemer may appear to be a very moral person, but if
their good deeds flow from a hard, distrustful heart, their good works are
nothing but dead works.
    What is
the unforgivable sin? It is unbelief in Jesus and his finished work. It is
hardening your heart to his love and refusing the gift of his grace. This sin
cannot be forgiven because the one who commits it rejects the very thing that
would otherwise save him. This rejection may take the form of hard heartedness
(“I don’t need him”) or religious idolatry (“I can save myself”). In either
case the grace of God is ineffective because it is not received.
    If you
love Jesus, there is absolutely no need to get hung up over the unforgivable
sin. Hell may be full of murderers, thieves and adulterers, but people do not
go to hell for committing murder, stealing or adultery. As terrible as they
are, all these sins have been paid for by the precious blood of the Lamb (1
John 2:2). So have the sins listed at the top of this article.
    Your
choice is this: You can be sin-conscious and gloomy, or you can be
Christ-conscious and rejoice!
     
    Happy
are those whose wrongs are forgiven, whose sins are pardoned! Happy is the
person whose sins the Lord will not keep account of! (Romans 4:7–8, GNB)
     
    A word after
     
    Hardly a week goes by without
someone asking me about the unforgivable sin. It turns out there are many
people who, like Søren Kierkegaard, are worried that they have