“He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you.”
—John 16:14 ESV
You’ve likely heard the catchy commercial phrase Buy one, get one, also known by the acronym BOGO. Our local grocery store here in Florida regularly advertises BOGO specials, and this—along with their high-quality bakery—keeps me coming back.
However, I remember being puzzled when I first heard the phrase Buy one, get one. I thought, Of course, that makes sense. When you buy one, you actually get one.
My confusion was heightened even more one day when I was at a Toronto Blue Jays spring training baseball game. A vendor walking up and down the aisles, selling ice-cold refreshments, would call out, “Buy one, get . . . [with a long pause] . . . one.” People would laugh, and I couldn’t figure out why. They were waiting for another word, a word that never came.
It was then that my friend introduced me to the common understanding of the phrase: Buy one, get one free. Suddenly it all made sense. One little word gave me perspective on the entire phrase, and I realized the acronym BOGO was just a shortened way of communicating it.
As we have touched on throughout this book, certain phrases can seemingly have one meaning on the surface, but when you take a deeper look, you gain a fuller or very different understanding.
One such phrase is the biblical concept blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. The word blasphemy doesn’t come up much in conversation today, mostly because our culture does not fear God like it used to. The word itself means “to speak evil of” or “to curse the name of God.” The idea behind it is that it is a sin to slander God, attribute evil to him, or in a careless fashion, mock something that is sacred to him (sacrilege).
This is what the Pharisees accused Jesus of doing when he was forgiving sin, making claims to be equal to the Father, or acknowledging he was the Christ, the Son of God (Luke 5:21; John 10:30–31; Matthew 26:63–66).
Jesus was merely a man in their eyes, just another “sinner” who took liberties when it came to their sacred customs and man-made laws. For them, he could never be God because they could never conceive of the idea that God could or would ever lower himself, taking on human form, even though the Scriptures foretold this, especially the prophet Isaiah. So for them, Jesus was a blasphemer, and everything he did and claimed to do in the name of God was blasphemous.
But little did they realize that Jesus was not the one who was committing blasphemy, but the Pharisees. And not only were they blasphemous toward Jesus and the heavenly Father, Jesus also said they were blasphemous toward the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.
A story that is often misunderstood and misused is found in three of the gospel accounts: Matthew 12:22–32, Mark 3:22–27, and Luke 11:17–23, with only minor details added or omitted, depending on which gospel you are reading.1 For our purposes, we will look at the Matthew account, since it is one of the most detailed.
Jesus had just healed a demon-possessed man who was also blind and mute. As you can imagine, for the man, it was quite a deliverance from the realm of darkness, both spiritually and physically. The crowds were dumbfounded, or “astounded,” as Matthew put it, and wondered if Jesus was their long-awaited Messiah.
But the Pharisees were quick to try to stomp out that idea. They implicitly denied any heavenly miracle by rapidly attributing Jesus’ actions to the devil, saying, “The man drives out demons only by Beelzebul, the ruler of the demons” (Matthew 12:24). The title Beelzebul, or Beelzebub, was a name given to an ancient heathen deity who was said to be the prince or ruler of all evil spirits, mainly the devil or Satan himself.
In essence, the Pharisees accused Jesus of being possessed by Satan and attributed his powers over the spiritual realm, nature, sickness, or diseases as nothing less than satanic or demonic in nature. Logically this made little sense, and Jesus (who knew their thoughts) countered their accusation by asserting that any kingdom or house divided against itself would collapse. “If Satan casts out Satan” (12:26 ESV), then he is fighting against himself and his kingdom will not stand.
Of course, his point is that the only logical conclusion is that his power comes not from Satan but from God, namely the Holy Spirit, who has supernaturally empowered him to do these miracles as a testimony to who he is as the Messiah who has come.
Here then comes the idea of an unpardonable or unforgivable sin. Jesus said,
Because of this, I tell you, people will be forgiven every sin and blasphemy, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man, it will be forgiven him. But whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it will not be forgiven him, either in this age or in the one to come.
Matthew 12:31–32
The point Jesus is making is this: Any and all sins are forgivable, except one. Careless words that are spoken, acts of immorality, gossip, sinful anger (to name a few), or even words spoken against Christ himself are all forgivable, assuming that one later repents and receives Christ as Lord. Let us be clear: There is no sin too great that God’s grace cannot cover it and rescue someone from the grips of evil. Salvation and cleansing are available to all, even a thief on a cross.
But one sin will not be forgiven, and the Pharisees were committing that very sin: One cannot deliberately reject that which is obviously from God, concerning the person and work of Jesus Christ. The Pharisees had heard him speak, they watched him do miracles, and they could not catch him saying anything false or bringing harm to any person he laid hands on or healed by his spoken word.
It was obvious. Jesus was exactly who he claimed to be, and he had the words and actions to prove it. Yet in spite of all this evidence, the Pharisees still willfully and purposefully rejected him and attributed his miracles not to the power of God but to the power of Satan.
This is tantamount to a wholesale rejection of the Holy Spirit’s testimony about who Jesus truly is as the Messiah, Son of God, and Savior of the world. All throughout his ministry, when Jesus preached with power, healed the sick, raised the dead, and so on, the Holy Spirit was testifying loud and clear through these things that Jesus was the Christ.
In fact, Jesus later said this is the Holy Spirit’s purpose: to bring glory to Christ (John 16:14). His job is to shine the light on Jesus. And this is what he was doing. These Pharisees saw this with their own eyes, yet they still rejected Christ and blasphemed the testimony of the Holy Spirit concerning Jesus.
But one may ask, How can this be an unforgivable sin today, when Jesus is not here on earth doing and saying these things now like he was then?
To be technical about it, this kind of blasphemy is not happening in the exact same way it was happening then, because Jesus is no longer on earth in the flesh doing miracles, but is now in heaven sitting at the right hand of the Father. Therefore, one cannot reject him from a firsthand eyewitness stance like the Pharisees did.
But it is still happening in one sense today, when a person rejects the Holy Spirit’s testimony about Jesus that comes through God’s people and the Word of God by means of the message of the gospel. Today the Holy Spirit still testifies to who Jesus is through the written Word of God (Scripture) and through the spoken message of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection that makes up the content of the gospel of God’s grace.2 Without this gospel, people will remain lost in their unbelief, which is ultimately a rejection of Christ.
And if a person dies in unbelief, there is no forgiveness for sin.
This is what it means to blaspheme the Holy Spirit. Unfortunately, this is not always the way blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is understood. Some erroneously think it is a rejection of the Holy Spirit’s existence altogether, which is indeed a form of blasphemy, but not the kind of blasphemy we are talking about in this context.
Still others may think that blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is a refusal to believe in miracles today, which is very problematic, but is still not the kind of unforgivable blasphemy that Jesus is talking about in our passage under consideration.
To be fair, there are some “counterfeit miracles” today that happen in many churches that we should have a right to be suspect of, especially if they are done by someone who is a known false teacher or are not in keeping with biblical precedent or a proper understanding of the signs and wonders that were unique to the ministry of the apostles (see 2 Corinthians 12:12).
Personally, I believe that every time someone repents of their sin and trusts in Christ alone for their salvation we see an incredible miracle of a spiritually dead heart being born again and made alive toward God. Not to mention the common grace that God gives through modern medicine to heal in ways never seen before in human history.
Getting things wrong about the Holy Spirit is forgivable, but rejecting his testimony about Jesus (which results in an ongoing rejection of Jesus himself) is not one of them. My prayer is that God’s people will be bold in these last days so that more unbelief is overcome and this sin will become less common.
If there is one thing all of this teaches us, it is that we need to go deeper in context in order to understand biblical words and phrases correctly so they can be applied appropriately. Not everything on the surface is what it seems. My big concern is that the church today suffers from a lot of surface-level teaching that is mostly thematic in nature. And when the theme becomes primary, then many Bible verses are picked from various places without much attention to their context.
This has the potential to be dangerous. Why? Because some speakers may pull select Scripture verses out of context to promote their own personal agenda, disregarding faithfulness to their context. This does not mean, however, that your pastor should never do a thematic study from the pulpit. Sometimes such a series is necessary to address specific issues that are relevant and to look at those issues from a whole-Bible perspective.
But one advantage of expository preaching in a verse-by-verse fashion is that a pastor over time models for his congregation how to interpret Scripture in context, so that popular themes, terms, and ideas that are commonplace in the church can be understood correctly and applied faithfully through the sound interpretive principles that are modeled.
No matter what approach your pastor takes in the pulpit, context matters. No matter what kind of Bible study you are a part of, context matters. When the book of the law was found after the exile of Israel, the people were starving for the Word of God to be preached again. And the Levites were tasked with explaining God’s commands from the time when they were given to Moses. “They read from the book, from the Law of God, clearly, and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading” (Nehemiah 8:8 ESV).
In other words, the Levites translated and taught the Word in context, giving background and meaning, so that the people could understand the words of God correctly. This should be the church’s task today so that we have a deeper and truer understanding of terms and phrases that often only get a surface interpretation.
Shallow teaching will breed shallow Christians, and what you win them with is what you win them to. Therefore, we have an obligation to go deeper so that we can foster a culture where Christians are discerning and trained in the ways and words of God.