Day 197: Blasphemy 2

July 16
Today's Connected Passages: 

• 1 Samuel 3:11-14 
• Psalm 139:19-24 
• Isaiah 32:1-8; 52:1-6  
• Matthew 12:31-32 
• Mark 3:28-29 
• Luke 12:8-12 
• 1 John 5:16-17; 
• James 3:1-17; 
• Revelation 2:8-11, 13:1-10

Transcript

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Welcome to the Canon Connected, where we read the connections, see the connections, and study the connections of the Bible. Thank you for joining us on day number 197 of the Canon Connected, and today is the second day of two days we're doing of connected readings on the biblical subject of blasphemy, which has a lot of different possibilities about what that could mean, at least as far as you know, potential synonyms we could use for it. Cursing God is one of those that I think about, but it definitely, I think at its heart, just means speaking wrong things, or even we could say lies about God. How we speak about God is of utmost importance, and we should speak about God with reverence and with awe, and absolutely with truth, with biblical truth. It's why we need the Bible, so that we can understand God, so that we can worship Him and follow Him, but also speak correctly about Him. And sometimes we just say things that aren't necessarily blasphemy, they're just wrong because we may not know better, but blasphemy, definitely, in my opinion, studying it, is the willful acknowledgement of saying wrong things about God, believing wrong things, and so you express them, and typically with defiance and with with at worst or at best carelessness in the sense of I don't care, so I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna say whatever I want. And so we saw some examples yesterday, you know, and uh of of this um throughout the Old Testament. We have a few more from the Old Testament today. Um we definitely can see about, you know, when you know the Lord told Samuel um to carry out he was gonna carry out the threats against Eli and his family. I have warned them the judgment is coming upon his family forever because his sons are blaspheming God. And he hasn't disciplined them. The lesson there about, you know, about disciplining children, which we talked about months ago now, at least weeks ago. But they were blaspheming God, saying wrong things about God. They should have been the people to do the exact opposite of that based on their positions, and yet this is why they were judged for saying wrong things about God, for speaking wrongly, for blaspheming him. Um, Psalm 139 definitely talks about this. Um, the wicked, they blaspheme you. It's not just that they're murderers, they blaspheme God. Your enemies misuse your name, the NLT says in verse 20. Um, and uh this is one of an example of how we talked about confrontation, you know. Um, David writing this at the end, he says, Search me, O God, know my heart, test me, and know my anxious thoughts, like I want you to examine me too. But that doesn't stop him again from having the boldness to call out his enemies for blasphemy God. And again, how seriously he took it. And they were not just murderers, again, they this is on the same, you know, level as God, to God, I think, as blaspheming God is just as evil as murder, I would say, you know. Then a couple of different examples of this, you know, God speaking through Isaiah to call people out for this very sin. And then the parallel passages, uh, three of them, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, about this sin of blaspheming the Holy Spirit and how it's unforgivable. So there's a lot that could be said here, and I'm not super heavy on a lot of commentary on these things, but it's also would be, I think, unfair for me to give this to you as a reading and just you know leave it at that because there's so much to this. And whatever this is, it is definitely an unforgivable sin. I think that's pretty clear from the text. So, what could it mean, you know? I'll say this up front. I remember years ago seeing this uh this trend from young people on YouTube who had read this verse, and again, they were being very defiant and being very, you know, godless, and how they would video themselves and put it out there for the world to see, and they would say, I blaspheme the Holy Spirit, you know, because they wanted to try to test this to see, you know, if God was serious about this. And again, showing, you know, again, utter carelessness in the sense they don't care about God and just a complete sense of apathy about his word. And so I don't know if in that case, if that's what this is talking to, probably not. But I do think there is a sense against when you read about 1 John about a sin that cannot be forgiven, and when you read about apostasy in Hebrews, the idea that a a genuine follower of Jesus Christ can forfeit or abandon their faith, make shipwreck of their faith, and become lost again, those ideas do seem to all be connected because in Hebrews 6 it makes the point to say they cannot be renewed again to repentance. So they're outside of relationship to God with no hope. And so I think all those things definitely tie together. But I think in these passages, I definitely think there's a sense in which the reason why Jesus said it's not blasphemy against the Son, but the Holy Spirit, is because we do live in the age of the Spirit now, and the Spirit's what brings conviction truly. Okay, even though Jesus and the Holy Spirit have a lot of overlap, I think it's clear that as one of his roles now is the Spirit brings conviction. We live in the age of the Spirit, the Spirit indwells us now, and that when a person renounces that with their words and with their beliefs, because they cannot be, you know, separated out, that when a person gets to that point where they renounce the Holy Spirit, it is a final sort of thing. And I think even outside of apostasy, as in Hebrews teaches, this possibly could even happen with unbelievers, because there's other things that don't speak quite, you know, like this, but that allude to this sort of thing, like for example, in Romans, you know, one, it says that God gave, you know, some of these uh sexual perverts over to their own, you know, lust, and he gave them over to that, like he almost, like, in a sense, let them go and let them and let them do what they wanted, you know, like uh the the conviction wasn't there anymore. And it's not that God can, it's just I think it's sometimes people get so hard-hearted, like Pharaoh and in Exodus, that people just let them go and he gives them exactly what they want, a relationship completely free from him, and they will eventually be judged for it. Or even how, you know, uh God told Jeremiah several times in the book of Jeremiah, don't pray for these people in their idolatry. You know, it's like, as far as you're concerned, don't even try because it's not that there's no hope for them because God can't give them hope, but again, sometimes God just lets people go. And I truly think there is a line that people can cross, and I would say saved or unsaved, where a person can, you know, get to a point where they renounce the Holy Spirit, they blaspheme the Holy Spirit in such a way where they make a willful decision that they want out, they want nothing to do with God, and God gives it to them. Again, based on what 1 John 5 says about, you know, a sin that can't be forgiven, and and Hebrews teaches about apostasy, that's what I've come to the conclusion about. So not a whole lot of, you know, not paragraphs and paragraphs of interpretation there, and I'm definitely willing to listen to alternative takes on this, but I do think there is, again, uh from you know, Jesus, author of Hebrews, John and 1 John, that there is something that can happen to a person where they are they are they're no they know they do not want to repent, and so God, you know, says they can't repent. That even echoes a lot of what uh you know Isaiah 6 said about the Jews. Um they they couldn't, you know, they wouldn't listen to God, so they couldn't listen to God. Their their hearts were closed, their ears were closed. And it's possible there's a point of no return for people. I would think it's even likely from these passages. So these people, you know, blaspheme the Holy Spirit, they renounce the Holy Spirit, you know, want nothing to do with God, and they get to a point where they can't repent, so they can't be forgiven. And that may be wrong, but again, that's a very, you know, that's a very heavy subject. But I felt like it would be a miss. It would not be irresponsible, you know, of me as trying to do these podcasts if I didn't leave at least give some commentary on that. I included James because you can see, first of all, again, we can bless and curse with your mouth, and even if cursing isn't not always blasphemy, it can be that, okay? And he speaks to that. You know, we we bless and we curse not just people but God. Um, and so uh and people who are made in the image of God, again, just as with God's people in Numbers 22 through 24, a lot of times those things can't be separated out. They're they're intricately tied together. But also because you can see that the way a person speaks dominates how they live. So again, we can't just discard the idea that talk is cheap all the time. This is why blasphemy is considered, you know, the Holy Spirit to be that sin, because it really does come down to how a person speaks, because it reflects who they are. The tongue controls everything. The tongue is like the rudder of the ship, okay? How a person speaks is what they're going to do. Um it's there's power in words, both good and bad. And so I think this does tie into blasphemy because it is a spoken form of disobedience and rebellion against God. And so I think this is absolutely appropriate to tie into this teaching from James. Um blasphemy of the Holy Spirit uh means that the entirety of a person is against God, not just what the words they say. Because the words we say are again will lead us wherever we're going. Um And then Revelation has a couple of different places, you know, the the church in Smyrna in chapter two, and then you know, the the beast in chapter 13, where again the big sin that they're dealing with, at least one of them, is blasphemy against God, and uh the beast is even going to have opportunity to do this for a time. And it's if it's the kind of thing that does happen around us now, there's obviously different interpretations of Revelation 13, but it'd be kind of thing that'll be hard for Christians to deal with if we are exposed to it, if this is something we have to deal with. Um, because this is uh absolutely a uh uh uh a harsh reality about the unbelieving world. They will blaspheme God's name, they will blaspheme him. And in some manner of speaking, this is the kind of thing that has to happen to um two people, um, or whatever your view of the end times is, because it says, and the beast was allowed to wage war against God's holy people and conquer them and give them the authority to rule over every tribe and people and language and nation. And so this is obviously temporary, but it is true. We live in a time where a lot of the the the sins and the chaos and the injustice is temporary, but it's still reality. And so the blasphemy of God's name along with all these other things that are listed in Revelation 13 are things that again likely we're going to have to experience. And it's hard because I, you know, I I hate hearing people say wrong things about God, about, you know, misusing his name, um, and even, you know, joking and jesting about God in a way that, you know, is I mean, I've seen because of reels on on Facebook. I don't even have TikTok, but I still see every now and then, you know, comedians especially, they will say the w the worst things about God and make light of his justice and his judgment because they don't believe in him. And those kind of things are hard, but it is a reality, again, of of the world we live in. It always has been. So tomorrow we're gonna do a one-off, just one day, on what is right in their own eyes in quotation marks, because it's a quotation from judges, but it's not just a teaching we get from judges, it's all over the the old testament, and so we're gonna study that just for one day, and then we'll have a catch-up day, and we'll have a special guest to talk to us about witnessing the way that Paul did in in the the 20s chapters of the book of Acts. So come back and be with us again tomorrow as we continue to read the connections, see the connections, study the connections, stay.