I've titled the message tonight, Jesus in the Dock. Slight twist on C.S. Lewis' book, God in the Dock. Anybody familiar with that book? In England, I guess, when somebody's on trial, the defendant sits in this little booth called the dock. So if you're the one being tried, you sit in the dock. Jesus was always being examined, critically examined, and not with friendly eyes. In fact, look back up to verse 2 in chapter 3. Remember that? Some of them were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, and so they watched Him closely to see if He would heal the man on the Sabbath. They're watching Him, they're examining Him, hoping that he'll fail. When you think about the Pharisees, what was in their hearts, this exposes their hearts. Why were they so upset about Jesus breaking the Sabbath? Was it because they wanted God to be honored and they wanted people to keep the Sabbath? No. They were actually hoping that Jesus would break the Sabbath so that they would have something against Him. They were rooting for him to break the Sabbath. Anytime you find yourself hoping that someone fails, you're the one failing. And that can be a temptation. You can do that. You can get to where somebody, maybe somebody's just been merciless to you because of something in your past. They're holding it against you. They're looking down on you. And it's easy to just start thinking, hope he falls off his high horse one of these days, you know, or something. You can find yourself rooting for them to fail. Anytime that ever happens, repent, because that is a heart that is very far from the heart of God. And that's the heart they have. If someone is like that towards you, they're critical towards you, they're looking, they're waiting for you to fail, they're watching for you to slip up. Jesus knows how that feels. He can sympathize. Jesus is always being critically examined. To this day, he still is. There hasn't been a generation from Jesus' time till now that hasn't thoroughly examined and re-examined Jesus, looking for a flaw. He's the most examined person that's ever lived. And yet, he remains the most admired man that ever lived. And also, the most rejected man that ever lived. And that's what we see here. We're going to see actually two different forms of rejection based on two different verdicts. So they're examining Him. They're going to render a verdict. He's in the dock. They're examining Him, and Jesus is going to respond to these two verdicts. One comes from His family, the other one from the scribes. So Jesus comes down the mountain. Remember last week, He's up on the mountain. He's selecting the 12. He comes back down the mountain, and He's right back in the chaos of the crowds, verse 20. Then Jesus entered a house, and again, a crowd gathered so that he and his disciples were not even able to eat. So the crowds at this point have become absolutely unmanageable. Remember, they just about crushed him before he went up on the mountain. Now he comes back down. He goes into a house. He wants to eat. The crowds follow him right into the house. So, you know, you've seen like celebrities of the paparazzi or somebody's in the news and the press is camped out on their front yard. They're not even in his front yard. They follow him inside the house. He's going in to eat dinner, and he can't even eat dinner because they're in there. The whole thing is absolutely out of control. Verse 21, When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, He is out of his mind. So they're going to take charge of him. That word take charge of means to seize or to arrest, take into custody. In fact, that's the word used twice already. That's the word used for John's arrest, John the Baptist, Jesus' arrest later on. They're going to take hold of Jesus, get Him in custody, bring Him home, whether He wants to come home or not, because this whole thing is just getting out of control. He's got the authorities so riled up, so upset, they're trying to kill Him already, and He keeps just throwing more kindling on the fire. He keeps making it worse and stirring up these frenzied crowds, and that has ramifications for Jesus' family and the people that are around Jesus. For one thing, honor was a big thing in that day. Still is in that part of the world. Family honor is a big deal. And if somebody's bringing dishonor on the family, that's a problem. Also, there's persecution. And we read in John's Gospel that not long after this, it starts getting really rough for anybody associated with Jesus. They're getting excommunicated from the synagogue, and so people don't even want to get near Jesus. And so you can imagine Jesus' family's concerns here. This whole escapade has just gone too far. It's too much. Something drastic needs to happen. And so they decide they are going to do an intervention. And their conclusion at this point is he's lost his mind. He's insane. So they set out now in verse 21 to go to where Jesus is and take hold of Him, get Him in custody. But they're walking slow. And I get that because it takes them 10 verses to get there. They leave in verse 21, they don't arrive until verse 31. So what's happening here is Mark is doing something that he does frequently in his book, and that is he starts a story, and then he interjects another story, and then he ends that first story. So the commentaries refer to this as Marken Sandwiches. That's what they call it. Because he sandwiches one story in between two parts of another story. Why does Mark do this? He does it because the two events, the two stories are related and each one sheds light on the other one. So we learn something by seeing one of the stories against the backdrop of the other story. So, I think it's really more of a Mark and salad than a sandwich because they're mixed together. That's the whole point. It's the mixture of the two gives us more insight into both stories. So, in this case, he's got something really important that he wants to tell us about how Jesus reacted to Jesus' family. But they haven't arrived yet, so he's going to wait. First he's going to take the assessment that his family made and put that right alongside the assessment that the scribes made and the Pharisees. So let's look at the assessment of the family. He's insane. They went out to take charge of him before they said he is out of his mind. That's just so sad, isn't it? I mean, can you imagine that? And surprising, and actually kind of embarrassing if you're a Christian, right? That the man that we believe is God in human flesh, the people who are closest to him decided he was a lunatic? People that grew up with him that knew him the best? That doesn't help our case, really, very much, does it? Why include that in the gospel account? If you're writing a book trying to persuade the world that this man, Jesus Christ, is the Son of God, why would you mention that his own family thought he was insane? I can tell you one thing. If the story of Jesus were a made-up legend, this verse would not exist. If the accounts of Jesus that we get from the apostles were just exaggerated, embellished, inflated religious stories trying to make Jesus look greater than He really was, this verse would not be in here. It would not exist. If the church were picking and choosing and taking out stuff that didn't really help our God, this verse wouldn't have made it. The only explanation for this verse existing in the Bible is that it happened. And the gospel writers were honest, truthful, reliable witnesses telling us what actually happened. And so they don't hide the truth about people's rejection of Jesus. In fact, they make it a major theme. It's actually a theme, especially in Mark, the rejection of Jesus. So the verdict of Jesus' family is he's delusional, and then he lays that right alongside another verdict. So let's look at the next verdict, verse 22. The scribes who came down from Jerusalem said... So these ones... Now, we've run into scribes already in Mark, but they're locals. These ones are from Jerusalem. So they're not the locals. These are the big dogs. These are from the Sanhedrin. This is like the official inquiry done by the big shots down in Jerusalem. They show up there with their clipboards. They're making their assessment, and they come up with their final conclusion. Jesus is in the dock. They've examined Him. Now here's their judgment. Verse 22, all right, conclusion, He has Beelzebub. By the prince of demons, He's driving out demons. They're saying Jesus is inhabited by not just a demon, but the king of demons, Satan himself. What an unbelievable conclusion to arrive about Jesus Christ. I mean, anybody else, if you watch my life, like if you saw me at my absolute worst, or you could see the sins in my mindset, you might conclude that I've got some kind of demon influence in me, but Jesus? What did Jesus do? He healed everyone He met. He gave people the words of eternal life. He forgave sins. He welcomed children. He loved outcasts. He performed miracles of compassion. He fulfilled Old Testament prophecy. He upheld the Scriptures. He honored God every time. He delivered people from demons. John the Baptist vouched for Him. God the Father vouched for Him. God the Holy Spirit came upon Him visibly. And they say, their conclusion is, he's so evil that it's not even enough to say that he has a demon. He's got to have the king of demons in him. You just feel the hatred when they crank it up to that level. And by the way, if you get your power from the devil, that's sorcery, which carries the death penalty in the law of God. So they can't just say he's crazy. They can't just agree with Jesus' family and say he's crazy, because they're trying to explain his ability to cast out demons, right? And his miraculous ability. Being crazy doesn't help you walk on water, right? It might help you try, but it won't help you succeed. They're trying to explain his power, and so their conclusion is the worst possible conclusion. He's as evil as he can possibly be. And they spread this conclusion around. This actually picked up some steam. If you read John, you find out the crowds were repeatedly saying that in the Gospel of John. He's got a demon, you've got a demon, you've got a demon. So it caught on. And as embarrassing as it might be, the Gospel writers go ahead and tell us these things, and they're not embarrassed to do it, because the question of who Jesus is is already settled in verse one of the book. He already told us, Son of God, that's settled. The issue now is just how is everybody going to respond to that information? How are they going to respond to Jesus? And the issue, and however you respond tells you, when various different people respond to Jesus in various ways, that tells us nothing about Jesus and everything about those people and their hearts. So each response reveals something about the person responding. It tells us nothing at all about Jesus. So those are the verdicts, those two verdicts. His family, he's insane. The scribes, he's satanic. Now, we're going to see how Jesus responds back to them. And He has a very strong response to both groups, family and scribes. Both responses are strong. But they're different responses because they're different conclusions. And we talked about this before. I won't make a point of it now for time, but the people back then, sometimes people think, oh, people back then were so simplistic. They just, every time they saw mental illness, they just assumed it was a demon. And that's where demonization came from. No, they were sophisticated. They would distinguish between mental illness, demon. If someone's crazy or they're demonized. Those are two different things. It's the people today that are so simplistic and unsophisticated that they lump everything into mental illness category, and they ignore the issue of evil, good and evil, because they don't want to talk about that. Anyway, that's another sermon. So Jesus is there in the dock, and there's these two different judgments rendered, insanity or collusion, and not collusion with Russia, even worse, collusion with the devil himself, How does Jesus respond? Well, He responds first to the scribes, because again, His family hasn't even arrived yet. They're still walking. So, He'll respond to them next time. It's almost like the show 24, where stuff happens in real time. So, He's waiting for them to walk, and instead of just having 10 empty verses, He tells us this other story. So, anyway, He responds to the scribes. Jesus' response to the scribes is absolutely devastating. He crushes their argument. First, he crushes their argument with logic, and then he issues this blistering warning against them. The logic part is in verses 23 to 26, and it comes at them just like a machine gun, one thing after another. Verse 23, Jesus called them and spoke to them in parables. we'll get the significance of when he starts speaking to someone in parables, that's not a good thing. We're gonna find out in chapter four what that means. But when it says he called them, so he called them, that's the same word we saw back in verse 13 when he summoned the 12. I told you it refers to like an official royal summons. It's like the feeling of, they're getting called into the principal's office here, right? This is even more, it'd be bigger than that, the king. Jesus doesn't appear to be in the dock anymore. He's issuing a subpoena, and He's saying, okay, you, you, you, you, and you, here, right now, come here. And He's gonna talk to them. He's gonna cross-examine them. And His whole cross-examination only lasts for one question. And as usual, they can't answer it. Verse 23, how can Satan, cast out Satan, now that question, it's actually kind of funny if you think about it. Because try answering it. How would someone go about casting himself somewhere? You try it. Just try it. Try giving yourself a shove. Just a simple shove. You can't do it, right? You certainly can't pick yourself up and cast yourself anywhere. So that's his question. It's like, how could he do it? It's like, help me guys, I'm having a tough time picturing this. How does Satan cast out Satan? Well, they keep their streak going, losing streak. Their percentage of times that they can answer one of Jesus' questions is right there at an even zero still, zero percent. They've never been able to answer one once, and they're already silenced now. He's asked them one question, they're silenced. Jesus' point is proven. The argument is over, and Jesus has no more questions for these witnesses. Time for his closing arguments, and so here they come. Rapid fire, verse 24. There's three of them. If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. Second one, verse 25. If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand. So he goes from kingdom to house. Kingdom is the largest organization. Household is the smallest. Neither one can survive self-destruction, fighting itself. And the point always, when you see two extremes in scripture like this, is it includes everything in between. It's called a mirrorism. So the point is, no organization of any size or any kind can survive declaring war on itself. Now, when you read that argument, you might say, wait a minute, don't unbelievers sometimes cast out demons? I mean, what if some Which doctor was driving out a demon or something somewhere? Isn't it possible? I would say, yeah, Satan might occasionally allow that to happen in order to deceive some people or whatever here and there, but that's not what Jesus is talking about. He's not talking about casting out one or two demons here and there. Jesus was shattering Satan's kingdom. He was driving out thousands of demons. And we're talking scorched earth. in Satan's kingdom. The scale on which Jesus was demolishing and dismantling Satan's entire kingdom was something that had never happened before and I believe has never happened since. If you could see through some spiritual glasses back then at the landscape of Israel at the time of Jesus and you saw the demonic realm, it would look like a hurricane just blew through there. Devastation. Satan's kingdom was being obliterated, Jesus cast out thousands of demons, and they didn't come back either. He sent them to hell. Scripture hardly ever mentions demons inhabiting people prior to the time of Jesus, and it doesn't mention it much after. A little bit in Acts, but not much. Not in the epistles. But during the life of Jesus, they're constantly seen. And you almost wonder if when the Son of God arrived on the scene, if Satan just marshaled all of his forces and demons that everyone that he could muster for this all-out attack on God's chosen people, Israel at that time, and the Son of God, and Satan's finest were absolutely decimated by the Son of God. Just decimated. And to suggest that Satan would do that to himself is ludicrous. It's absolutely ridiculous. Because in a war, you know, it might be one thing to just like pretend that you're faltering and you're defeated in a certain area, or, you know, you give up certain things to a spy in order to keep his credibility, little things like that. But no nation would bomb its own capital into the Stone Age in a war. And that's what's happening here. So the first question points out the impossibility of what they're suggesting. Satan can't cast himself anywhere. No one can throw himself anywhere. And the next two statements describe what the outcome would be if he could, if he tried. It would just be self-destruction. The only possible outcome of fighting yourself is self-destruction. So a house divided can't stand. And that's just a proverb, that's a basic principle. You can apply it in a lot of ways. Abraham Lincoln applied that principle to the Civil War in his famous house divided speech. The Apostle Paul applied it to the church in Galatians 5.15. If you keep on biting and devouring each other, watch out or you'll be destroyed by each other. That's the same principle. Even little children, I think, intuitively know that. That's why they get so upset when mommy and daddy are fighting. They know it threatens this family, which is their entire world, right? It applies to families, it applies to countries, it applies to churches, and it applies to Satan's kingdom. And by the way, when Jesus talks about Satan's kingdom, He's affirming what they were assuming. When they talked about the king of the demons, that the demons have a king, Jesus is affirming that. Yes, Satan, there's a hierarchy of demons, and Satan is indeed the ruler of that whole realm. He's the ruler, and not just of demons, but of people. 1 John 5, 19, the whole world is under the control of the evil one. And so now Jesus, so Satan's running this kingdom in the world, and Jesus shows up, and what is he preaching? Mark 1 15, he's going around preaching what? The kingdom of God is near? This is the story, the gospel is the story of the collision of two massive kingdoms. And you can't have two kingdoms in the same place at the same time. This is gonna be war, and what this war is gonna look like, again, we're gonna see that in chapter four. He's gonna tell us the secrets of the kingdom in chapter four. Anyway, back to this. These are the first two statements. I told you that he makes three statements rapid fire. First, kingdom divided. Second, house divided. And then here's the clincher, verse 26. And if Satan opposes himself and is divided, he cannot stand. His end has come. He's done, right? Because if the devil fights himself and wins, He's done. If the devil fights himself and loses, he's done. Right? Either way, the devil's done. Either way, do you realize you just gave me credit for wiping out the devil? I mean, whether it's the ridiculous way that you guys described it, or it's the way that I said I did it by the finger of God, either way, you've just acknowledged that I'm responsible for the demise of Satan. So, you're welcome. Now, I would say at this point Jesus has made His point, right? And then some. But He's not finished. In the past, He would let them off with like a one-liner and then send them off. He is pummeling them here now. He's not done. Verse 27, He gives an allegory now that actually answers His first question back in 23 that they couldn't answer. How can Satan cast himself out? Well, first of all, he can't. Secondly, if he could, he wouldn't because it would only destroy himself, which only leaves one possibility. If Satan's being cast out, What does that mean? It means it's got to be the work of somebody more powerful than Satan. Satan's not powerful enough to cast himself out. Nobody is. So whoever's doing it is more powerful, and that's the point of this allegory. Verse 27. In fact, no one can enter a strong man's house and carry off his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man, then he can rob his house. So if you wandered into the house of, say, like the current MMA champ, and you wanted to take all his stuff, you better be pretty tough. That's what Jesus is saying. You'd have to be pretty tough. If he's home, and you come and show up there and take his stuff, you can't just be a little bit tougher than him, like another MMA fighter wouldn't be able to do it, because you have to tie him up. Can you imagine tying up an adult that doesn't want to be tied up? Restraining a two-year-old that doesn't want to be restrained is not easy. But an adult, I mean, imagine trying to tie up a strong, like an MMA champ, pumped full of adrenaline because his house is being robbed. And you've got to not just pin him, but you have to pin him and then be able to hold him with one hand and then tie him up with the other hand. Point is, if you're going to rob someone's house, you have to be much, much, much stronger than him. The strong man in the allegory is Satan. The possessions in his house are these people that the demons have control over, who are demonized. And Jesus just wanders into Satan's house and takes whatever he pleases, whenever he pleases, whatever he wants at any time. Jesus can take a human soul right out of the clutches of the devil at will. And He's doing so on a massive, massive scale in Israel. And those demons, He wouldn't even let them speak. I mean, He had them tied up. He would tell them, shut up, don't even talk. And He would do it by a mere command. And they would freak, they would see Him coming and they would panic and beg for mercy. Jesus went right into Satan's domain, took on all of his hosts, all of Satan's finest, cast them out, bound and gagged them, the most powerful beings in existence, and did it without even breaking a sweat. He'd do it with just a word, just command it. And whenever the demons saw him coming, they would panic. Jesus was showing in a visible way His ability, now this is important, He was showing in a visible way His ability to defeat Satan, which He was going to do in a much greater way on the cross in an invisible way. The defeat on the cross is much bigger than just casting out demons, but casting out demons is something you can see. What He did on the cross to the devil, you can't see, and so He gives us things that we can see so that we can believe. He gives us evidence. And He's going to do it even in a greater way than He did on the cross, when He returns after the Second Coming on the last day, He'll really do Satan in. So now that Jesus has demolished their argument, He issues one of the most chilling, frightening warnings in the whole Bible. And here we really see Jesus is definitely not the one in the dock. He's not even the prosecutor. He is on the bench. The scribes are in the dock, and Jesus is the judge that gives them this bone-chilling warning in response to their assessment. Now that you've arrived at this conclusion with me, let me just tell you what the consequences are of arriving at that conclusion. Now that you've made it, listen to this, verse 29. But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven. He is guilty of an eternal sin. He said this because they were saying he has an evil spirit. Not many verses in the Bible scarier than that one, right? Such a hard statement because it's hard to interpret. I read one commentary, Alison Davies, this is one of the most respected commentaries on Matthew, and they said, after all our research, they get to the final end, they said, there is no obvious meaning. We remain stumped. I paid $60 for this commentary. So there's a lot of controversy, a lot of confusion. Very hard statement. It's hard because the rest of the Bible makes it sound like God will forgive anything, any sin. In fact, that's what He says in verse 28. Look at verse 28. Verse 28 should really be one of the most comforting verses in the whole Bible. He says, I tell you the truth, all the sins and blasphemies of men will be forgiven them. And in the Greek, he emphasizes the word blasphemy. All the blasphemies with which men blaspheme will be forgiven. Now don't just skip over verse 28. It's crucial to understand the vastness of God's promise of forgiveness in Scripture. The Bible presents forgiveness as something that's really close to the core of the nature of God, who He is. When Moses said, I want to see God, God said, OK, here I come. And Exodus 34, 6, and he passed in front of Moses proclaiming, the Lord, the Lord, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin. This is God's nature. When he passes in front of Moses and says, this is me, that's it. Of all the thousands of things that God could have said about himself. This is included. He boils it down to a few sentences, and forgiveness is in there. And this description of God is repeated more often in the Old Testament than any other description of God. He is the God of forgiveness. He forgives wickedness, rebellion, and sin. Now, of course, that's conditional. He doesn't automatically forgive. You have to come to Christ. You have to have faith so that Christ's righteousness is credited to your account. But where there is faith in Christ, there is always total forgiveness. Amen? So when people find out that there is a sin that is unforgivable, here's a big question. What is it? And typically, our natural thing is to think it must be whatever the worst sin is. I mean, it must be something just really despicable, really bad. You do something really, really, really bad, that's unforgivable, because that's the way human beings are. Is that what the unforgivable sin is? You just do something especially evil? People think that and they're haunted by something, because most people have something in their past that they're like, man, that might have come up to the line. What do you suppose the worst sin could be that you could commit? I don't know what the worst one could be, but I'm thinking murdering the Son of God's got to be up there. What could you do worse than that? Murder the Son of God on a cross. That seems to me like really bad. Is that unforgivable? What did Jesus say on the cross? Father, forgive them. Luke 23, 34. No sin is so evil that it can't be forgiven. No sin is so evil that it's unforgivable. No sin. Other people say, well, it must be the numerousness of the sin. How many? I've just sinned so much. I've failed so many times. I've gone back to that sin so often. But that can't be it either because remember in Luke 7 when the sinful woman came and anointed Jesus and he says her many sins have been forgiven. And then what does he say? He says the result, the fact that she had so many sins means she loves much. Because he who has been forgiven much loves much. So the volume of her sins didn't make her unforgivable at all. It just helped her love him more when she was forgiven. So it can't be sin that's just bad enough. It can't be sin that's numerous enough. Jesus said, whoever comes to me, I will never drive away. John 6.37. And in 1 John 1.7, it says, the blood of Jesus, his son, purifies us from all sin. All sin. Verse nine, he is faithful and just to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. The Bible is a record of God-forgiving incestuous drunks like Noah, pagans and adulterers like Abraham, prostitutes like Rahab, murderers and liars like David, Christ-deniers like Peter, moral wretches like Matthew, and violent blasphemers like Paul. All forgiven. All forgiven. My sin, O the bliss of this glorious thought, my sin, not in part, but the whole, is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more. Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord, O my soul." God is so incredibly forgiving that that's actually one of the offenses of the gospel. The fact that God forgives that much For a lot of folks, that's too much. God is too forgiving. There are some people who reject Christianity because they say, I cannot believe in a religion where Hitler could have repented on his deathbed and gone to heaven. Which he could have. If Hitler would have repented of his sin and turned to Christ the moment before he died, he would not have been punished for one single one of his sins. Every last one would have been canceled, put on Christ. He would have enjoyed eternal blessedness in heaven forever. Hitler. That's too much forgiveness for a lot of people to even swallow. God's forgiveness is vast beyond our ability to even comprehend. If you think you're beyond God's forgiveness, that's not humility. All that is is minimizing the cross. Right? What He did on the cross. What you're saying is, Jesus, you didn't suffer enough. That was a nice effort that you made on the cross, but it falls short in my case. What kind of blasphemy would that be? No matter what you've done, I assure you, your sins are no match for the cross. However, there is one sin that is unforgivable. And if that frightens you, Good, because that's exactly what Jesus intended to do with this verse. There's no question in my mind, He intended this to be frightening. And I say that because I was so disappointed this week when I listened to a lot of sermons. I listened to sermon after sermon after sermon on this passage, and almost every one of them downplayed this warning. Don't worry. Don't worry. If you're worried about the sin, don't worry. You're fine. You haven't committed the unpardonable sin. You couldn't commit it if you wanted to." And they go on to define it in ways that just make it basically innocuous. A lot of preachers say that all the unforgivable sin is is rejecting Christ. That's all it is. That can't be. Every Christian has been forgiven of that sin, right? All of us were Christ rejecters before we accepted Him. Right? That's not unforgivable. All you have to do is repent and you're forgiven. And so they say, no, no, no, it's not, it's if you die rejecting Christ, well then the unforgivable sin is dying. but that doesn't work either. All sin is unforgivable if you die without Christ. Others will say unbelief is the unforgivable sin, but it's only unforgivable while it persists. Well, if that's the case, then Jesus' words here are meaningless. The unforgivable sin is a sin that's unforgivable, but only while it remains unforgiven, but then after it's forgiven, then it's not unforgivable anymore. That's the exact same thing as saying nothing. except it's way more syllables. Others say that this is a sin that could only be committed when Jesus was walking on the earth. Now that He's gone, you can't even commit this sin anymore. But I think they forget, this is not the blasphemy. Jesus says, He'll forgive blasphemy against the Son, not against the Holy Spirit. Is the Spirit still around in our day? Spirit's still alive and well, and He's active even in this age. And I could go on and on with this, I think it's enough to say this, if the Lord Jesus Christ issues a strong warning, if He's sitting there saying, watch out, be on your guard, watch it, beware of this, this is a real danger, be alert, don't fall into this, if you do, there's this huge consequence, and He's saying that, and some preacher comes along and says, ah, don't sweat it, doesn't apply to you, don't worry about it, don't worry about it, you don't have to take that warning to heart. Beware of that preacher. There's a reason why the warnings in the Bible are in the Bible, and it's not so that we can ignore them, or disregard them, or downplay them. Beware of any preacher that tells you that you don't have to beware. Jesus prefaced this warning by saying, I tell you the truth, literally, amen. That's the first thing in this sentence, amen. Did you know that Jesus is the only person in the Bible who ever says amen to his own words? No one else does that. It's always a response to someone else's words. Why does he say that? Everything Jesus said is important, but when he starts out with amen, then it's supremely important, and you'd better take it to heart. This is serious. All right, so what is the unforgivable sin? Turn to Numbers 15. I think the reason why so many people have struggled with the concept of the unforgivable sin is because they don't understand that there's several other passages of Scripture that talk about it. They think that this is the only verse. And if we look at these other passages, it becomes more and more clear. The unforgivable sin is spoken of numerous places in the Bible, and it starts in Numbers 15, verse 30. This is the first one. Numbers 15, 30. The previous verse talks about forgivable sin. If you sin, the NIV says, unintentionally, if you sin that way, then there's a sacrifice for that, you can be forgiven. But verse 30, but anyone who sins defiantly, literally that's with an upraised fist, blasphemes Yahweh, and that person must be cut off from his people. So, sin with an upraised fist, that's our first clue of what the unforgivable sin is. In the modern vernacular, you might use the phrase, in your face sinning, just in God's face. All right, now flip over to Deuteronomy 29, 18. Deuteronomy 29, verse 18. Make sure there's no man or woman whose heart turns away from the Lord our God. I'm going to skip a few of the phrases here just to get to the core of this. Make sure there's no man or woman whose heart turns away from Yahweh our God. Verse 19, when such a person thinks, I will be safe even though I persist in going my own way, this will bring disaster. Verse 20 is the key. Yahweh will never be willing to forgive him. That's the unforgivable sin, right? He'll never be forgiving. He'll never be willing to forgive. If he just persists in going his own way, say, oh, I'll be fine. I can keep going my own way and I'll be fine. So all that to say the unforgivable sin is nothing new. God warned his people about it from the very beginning. So let me ask you this, has anyone ever committed this sin? Well, yes, Eli's sons did. In their defiant desecration of the temple, God said in 1 Samuel 3.14 that their sin could never be atoned for by any sacrifice. So they did it. No sacrifice could cover their sin. So Jesus isn't coming up with this concept out of the blue. This is a biblical, it's right out of the Old Testament Scriptures. But Jesus does reveal something new about it here. What he reveals that's new is this. He reveals that the reason the unforgivable sin is unforgivable is because of the fact that it's committed against the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the one that enables the human heart to understand truth and accept it. That's 1 Corinthians 2, verse 14. Spirit enables you to receive it and accept it. When the Spirit does that, and He enables you to absorb it, and you still resist, if that continues long enough, what'll happen is the Holy Spirit will finally withdraw from you, and there will be no more possibility of repenting for you, because the human heart cannot repent without enablement by the Spirit. You can't just do it yourself. Without the Spirit helping you, you'll never repent. So as soon as the Spirit withdraws, you're done. And that's why Jesus calls it an eternal sin. If you go back to Mark 3 now, a lot of people miss this when they're studying about the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit and they're saying, what is it? He calls it an eternal sin, that's a key. Verse 29, whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven, he's guilty of an eternal sin. The reason, that's why it can't be forgiven, because it's the sin that never ends. It's the sin that never ends. It never ends because you cut yourself off from the only thing that can bring a sin to an end, namely repentance. See, when you commit any sin, doesn't matter what it is, when you commit a sin, even if it's just something, you do it and it's over, like you steal something and then you're done, you're still committing that sin all the way until you finally repent, right? So if you steal something at three o'clock on a Wednesday and you don't repent until three o'clock the next day, you've been sinning for 24, you've been in that state of sin for 24 hours. But when you cut yourself off from the Holy Spirit altogether so that you can't repent, then you never will repent, which means that your sin is eternal. It never ends. Now we're warned about this sin repeatedly in the book of Hebrews. There was a group of people in Hebrews 6 who committed this sin. They had been enlightened by the Holy Spirit, so the Holy Spirit had come inside them, shined His light, And then they still, even after that, they turned away. And the text says, it is impossible for that group to ever be brought back to repentance. They can't repent. So Hebrews 6 gives us insight into why the unforgivable sin is unforgivable. It's because of rejection of the Holy Spirit means they can't repent. I'll read it to you. Hebrews 6, 4, it is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, there's the enlightenment, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, and who have tasted the goodness of the Word of God and the miracles of the coming age, and have fallen away to be brought back to repentance." Now, some people try to make that hypothetical, and they say, if they fall away, because that's what the NIV says, if. There's no if in the Greek. It's just another item in the list. And they have fallen away. They fell away. This happened. And they can never be brought back to repentance. Turn over to Hebrews 10, and that's another one. This is the climactic one in Hebrews. There's a whole series of them, and this is a big one. Hebrews 10 warns about the same thing, and it uses language. We know this is talking about the unforgivable sin. It uses language right out of Numbers 15, that Numbers 15 passage where it all started. So look at verse 26, Hebrews 10, 26. If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sin is left. Just like with Eli's household, no sacrifice for sin can cover it. It's unforgivable. But only fearful expectation of judgment and raging fire that will consume the enemies of God. See where he says deliberately in verse 26? If we go on sinning deliberately, Very interesting words. Opposite of the word in Hebrews, I mean, Numbers 15, 29, where it talked about the sin that can be forgiven. Remember that was translated in the English unintentional. Sins that are non, I would call it non-defiant. Non-defiant sins against the Holy Spirit can be forgiven, but once you lift your hand and your fist and harden your heart to the enlightening work of the Holy Spirit in your heart, and that continues long enough, you get to the point where no sacrifice remains for your sin, and it can never be forgiven because you'll never repent. Now you're the permanent, enemy of God, Hebrews 10 says, and you'll receive nothing but judgment and raging fire. The word used, that word deliberately in verse 26 is the opposite of the word in numbers of sin that can be forgiven. This is what can't be forgiven. I heard one preacher say after after his sermon that this sin is exceedingly rare. In fact, a lot of them said this is exceedingly rare. It almost never happens. I don't know if it's ever happened. The Bible doesn't say The Bible doesn't say it's rare. I don't know of any place in Scripture that would suggest that. In fact, I think that there are signs that this sin has been committed in numerous places in the Bible. For one thing, we know what happened to Eli's household. It sure seems to me like Judas committed this sin. Years with Jesus and still it won't penetrate? What's going to penetrate Judas' heart if years with Jesus won't do it? Pharaoh hardened his heart so many times, so hard to the point where God started to harden it, remember? And if God is hardening your heart, how is it ever going to be softened? We're going to see later in the book of Mark that Herod's heart, I think, was impenetrable. It says he liked to listen to the preaching of John the Baptist, but he wouldn't accept the message. He never accepted it. He never repented. He just liked to listen to it. And so when Jesus finally appears before Herod, Jesus has nothing to say to him. Seems to me like Herod missed his opportunity. And when Jesus finally, oh the next one, in Acts 7 where Stephen preaches this whole long sermon to the Sanhedrin, the people that had just killed Jesus. He preaches this big long sermon and then you wait for some conclusion. Therefore repent, therefore do... He doesn't ever call them to repentance. He doesn't tell them therefore anything. He just says, he gets to the end of his sermon, he says, you stiff-necked people with uncircumcised hearts and ears, you are just like your fathers, you always resist the Holy Spirit. Let's pray. I mean, that's the end of the sermon. And so they stoned him to death. They had gotten so hard they were to the point of always resisting the Spirit. It seems to me like this unforgivable sin is actually fairly common. In fact, and I'll just close with this, I'd go so far to say that this sin exists in embryonic form in all of us. It really does. We all resist the Holy Spirit to some degree, don't we? You're reading your Bible, you're listening to a sermon or whatever, praying, and God's light begins to shine in your mind, and the Spirit touches your heart with that tug of conviction. Holy Spirit is testifying to your heart, saying, yeah, this is true. This is for you. I want you to get this. You need to respond to that. The Holy Spirit's doing that. But if it's truth I don't want to accept, It's a response that I don't want to make. I don't want to make this change in my life. I don't want to face it. What do I do? I start to resist. The Holy Spirit's tug. Usually just by ignoring it, right? Spirit's tugging at my heart with conviction. I'm like, I'm going to turn on the TV. You know, just like whatever. Yeah, whatever. And I'm going to go check Facebook, you know. That is, I believe, the embryonic form. It's not the unforgivable sin in the full-blown form, but it's the beginning of it, it's the seed of it. It's where it starts. And when we do that, the Holy Spirit, in His mercy, will keep pressing and keep giving you more chances, keep tugging, tugging harder, shaking you, giving you more and more chances to repent. But if I keep resisting, keep resisting, keep resisting, then each time I do that, the resisting will get easier and easier. And finally, in order to get rid of that nagging conviction altogether, I'll cross the line and start calling it evil. I'll call that tugging evil. He'll shine light into my heart, and I'll call it darkness. I'll say, that's darkness. and I'll become hostile against it, like the people in Isaiah 5 who called evil good and good evil. I'll come to the point where I can explain everything away, and no amount of evidence will ever be able to convince me I've got an answer for everything. My heart becomes impenetrable. It exists in all of us, and we all have to be alert to it. That's why we're given the warning. Now, if you're worried that you might have committed the unforgivable sin, I'm not going to sit here and assure you that you haven't, because I don't know that, but I will say this. If you want to know for sure, if you just want to be safe and you want to know for sure that you haven't, just repent. Just repent. Then as soon as you repent, then I can assure you with 100% confidence, you are 100% forgiven. If you repent, all your sins are forgiven, you're cleansed from all unrighteousness. We saw that. And if you're cleansed from all unrighteousness, that means nothing you have done in the past is unforgivable. So just repent, and you're safe. Once you've repented, the past is no longer an issue. The issue is the present and the future. Satan always wants you to think the past is the issue. It's not. It's the present and the future, and that's the concern of the book of Hebrews. Three different times in the book of Hebrews, he says, in two chapters, he says, today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts. Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your heart. When you hear it, don't resist the Spirit. That's the whole purpose of the book of Hebrews, is to get that message across. The unforgivable sin doesn't start with calling Jesus satanic. It starts with little moments of resisting the Spirit. No. I don't want to do that. I don't want to do that. I don't want to accept that. And Hebrews has these warnings. If you've ever studied the book of Hebrews, you know it has these warnings sprinkled all through the book, right? They climax in chapter 10. But as they go through, they get more and more extreme. They start small, and then they build and build and build. And I read you the big one in chapter 10 about the impossibility of forgiveness and judgment and raging fire and all that. That's the last one. But listen to the first one. Listen to the first warning, verse 1 of chapter 2. Hebrews 2.1. We must pay more careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not Drift. That's where it starts. Not hard-hearted, stiff-necked, rebellion, upraised fist. It doesn't start there. It starts with just drifting. Nothing is easier than drifting. Nothing. The picture there is Christ is like an island in a river. And we're like fish that have to swim upstream in order to stay by Christ. And you have to keep swimming. You have to keep going against the current that we're in as this world is just a current pulling us away from Jesus. And all you have to do to get far from Jesus Christ is stop swimming, just drift. The current will take you from there. The sin in our own hearts, the world we live in, the devil will take you from there. And so he just starts out Hebrews by saying, just don't drift. So today and tomorrow, if you hear his voice, do not resist it. Welcome it, submit to it, obey it, and where needed, repent. And if you do that, you will never fall into the sin of the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for the Holy Spirit Thank You for sending Him. Thank You for sanctifying us through Him. Thank You for indwelling us through Him and enabling us and strengthening us and convicting us of sin and tugging on our hearts towards You. Lord, all of us are here tonight because Your Spirit has tugged us in the direction of Your Word. Lord, keep us soft and responsive to that and alert us to where there's little pockets of rebellion in our hearts that wants to resist the Spirit. Don't let us sear our conscience so that resisting your Spirit becomes easier. We plead for this in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, amen. Right, okay, so Catholics have mortal sins and menial sins. And the difference has to do with how easily one can be forgiven. I think Catholicism has come up with that because any legalistic system that tends to be focused on rituals, externals and not the heart, It has to come up with some kind of a system like that. Because you can't have, if you're a legalist, you can't have murder and grumbling be on the same plate. It just doesn't work. So when they look only at the external, they have to come up with some kind of a pecking order that's based on the external. And I can't answer the question historically where that developed. Probably it's just some from church tradition somewhere. That's what happens when you elevate church tradition to the level of the Bible. You come up with stuff like that. It's just not biblical. Right. Yeah. Yeah, I think, I mean it's true that it was on the occasion of these people assigning what Jesus did to the devil and it was from the Holy Spirit and they assigned it to the devil and then he warns them about the unforgivable sin. But I wouldn't limit the definition of the unforgivable sin to just that because you could I mean, I don't want to come up with a system where you say, if somebody isn't very educated, knowledgeable, and they say, oh, I was going to have a picnic and the devil made it rain. And it turns out the Holy Spirit made it rain. Now they're doomed for eternal hell forever because they just goofed up. They didn't understand that. I don't, I mean, I don't think that, I think there's more to it. The rest of the passages about the unforgivable sin fill in the gaps of our knowledge to where we see it's not any kind of mistakenly attributing the works of the Spirit to the devil. It's when you do that as a result of having resisted the Spirit and sinned with an upraised fist. So even if John MacArthur is wrong in all the people he points to as being satanic, and some of them are actually manifesting the Holy Spirit's work, I wouldn't say that he would be committing the unforgivable sin just because of that, because the other pieces aren't there. Okay, so the question is, Judas seemed like he repented. I mean, he seemed way more broken over his sin than I am half the time over my sin. And so, is it possible that what he did was repentance? And I would, in 2 Corinthians, Paul talks about When he's talking about repentance, he talks about different kinds of sorrow, and he says there's sorrow unto death, and there's sorrow unto repentance. And there are two different kinds of sorrow. So the sorrow over sin in and of itself isn't repentance. There's a sorrow that leads to death, and there's a sorrow that leads to repentance. So if there's a sorrow that leads to repentance, then that godly sorrow isn't even repentance. It leads to repentance. Repentance is turning from the sin back to God. And that's where I think you see the contrast between Judas and Peter. Both of them go out and wept bitterly, right? They both betrayed Christ and they both wept bitterly. But Judas, he turned from his sin to another sin. He just committed suicide. He didn't turn back to Christ. Peter turned back to Christ. And so I would say, I wouldn't call what Judas did repentance. I would say it's a classic example of the sorrow that leads to death. worldly sorrow that leads to death. It just destroys itself. It becomes so upset with itself, it destroys itself, but it won't turn back to God. I'm trying to remember, where is that? Isn't it in 2 Corinthians 2? Oh, 7. Oh, yeah, okay, 2 Corinthians 7. Well, that looks like a 2, kind of. Oh, yeah, there it is, verse 10. Godly sorrow, brings repentance, it leads to salvation and leads to no regret. Worldly sorrow brings death. No. No, yeah, that's something that I was going to mention, I forgot. I don't believe suicide is a forgivable sin. unless someone commits suicide with this kind of hardness against the Spirit, which is probably pretty common with people who commit suicide. If you know that God doesn't want you to kill yourself and you go ahead and kill yourself anyway, it's a pretty blatant act of disobedience. So it's not unforgivable. If you're born again and you have faith in Christ and you get so overwhelmed with something and you commit suicide, you'll go straight to heaven. because all your sin is forgiven, even the sins that you don't have a chance to repent of. So you'll still go straight to heaven. But if I'm talking to somebody who's contemplating suicide, and they say, well, I'm going to commit suicide and go straight to heaven, and I'll warn them, I say, well, the evidence that you're truly saved is that you're willing to obey Christ. If right now you are willing to disobey, you're not willing to obey Christ, then there's not evidence that you're saved. Now maybe you are, but I wouldn't want to be handcuffed to your soul right after you die because it's not a sure thing. There's a question mark there and you don't want to be dying when there's a question mark about your eternal destiny. Right? So does that make sense? Kind of shaking your fist at God then. Yeah, it is. It's like a little bit of this. And I don't want to have, I want to be like this when I die. So it's a scary thing. But I think it's possible a person could commit suicide and go to heaven. OK. Anything else? Got anything online? No, internet crashed and then the car got corrupted and then the audio of that might have died. Wow. Great. Well, the unrecordable message.