Trinity Series - Sermon #7: Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit and Baptism of the Holy Spirit

After a break, we return to the series about the doctrine of the Trinity in this spot. This particular study covers two very controversial topics - blashpemy against the Holy Spirit and the baptism of the Holy Spirit. If you have not been following this series, please go to the post for January 22 where an explanation of the format is given. Happy studying!

All of God: Exploring the Mystery of the Trinity
Questions about the Holy Spirit

Today we will resume our study that explores the mystery of the Trinity, or one God in three Persons – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Now, when I refer to this as the “mystery” of the Trinity, I do not mean that the Trinity is unknowable, that He is mysterious and beyond our capacity to comprehend. We would not even be talking about the Trinity if God had not revealed Himself to us as one God, three Persons. While there is much that we can and do know about our awesome God, there is much that we cannot understand or explain to full satisfaction. That is where faith finds its place in our hearts. It is not blind faith, though. God has revealed much about Himself in His Word, which the Holy Spirit makes plain to us. So, when we come to the place that is beyond our ability to comprehend – like, God is one, and He is three with no contradiction – we must simply believe.

Would a God that we could fully comprehend really be God? Most gods that are worshiped in our world are made in man’s image rather than the other way around. Even if those gods appear unpredictable, happy one day and angry the next, they still look very much like humans made large. Our triune God is nothing like any other god. We are a little over halfway in our examination and contemplation of this transcendent, yet imminent, God. He is both far beyond our comprehension, yet near – as near as Jesus and as near as the Holy Spirit.

Thus far we have spent several weeks studying about the doctrine of the Trinity, and then one week studying about God the Father, one week with God the Son, and one week considering the work of God, the Holy Spirit. There is order in the Trinity, thus we call the Father the first Person of the Godhead, Jesus the second Person of the Godhead, and the Spirit the third Person of the Trinity. All three have the same nature and are equally God, yet each has a distinct role. Since there is so much confusion about the role of the Holy Spirit we are going to spend more time thinking about His role in our lives. The goal is to look at several questions that Christ-followers have with regard to the Holy Spirit. While it would be beneficial to spend more time with each question, it is more profitable over-all, I think, to think briefly about as many topics as possible.

Our text today will address the first question, which is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. We will also look at what the baptism of the Spirit is, though we will spend more time thinking about that next week. Next, we will think about spiritual gifts, then we will examine what it means to quench the Spirit. Do you ever think about quenching the Spirit – or, about grieving the Spirit. We are going to talk about them both. Finally, we will spend time contemplating the fruit of the Spirit. We will cover all of that today. And then in three years I will run for the office of President of the United States. And, I will be elected. I am just kidding about that – it is going to take us three weeks to cover all of these topics about the Holy Spirit. That changes the over-all plan for this series, but I knew that would happen anyway. It is the leading, I believe, of the Holy Spirit.

Our text today, Matthew 12:22-32, covers the first topic, which is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. There is a great deal of confusion about the blasphemy of the Spirit, and more than a little fear about the difficult, harsh words of Jesus on the subject. Hopefully today will enlighten your mind and ease your heart a bit. Would you please stand as we read God’s Word together?

22 Then a demon-oppressed man who was blind and mute was
brought to Him (Jesus), and He healed him, so that the man
spoke and saw.
23 And all the people were amazed, and said, “Can this be the Son
of David?”
24 But when the Pharisees heard it, they said, “It is only by Beelzebul (Satan), the prince of demons, that this man casts out demons.”
25 Knowing their thoughts, He said to them, “Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand.
26 And if Satan casts out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then will his kingdom stand?
27 And if I cast out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your sons cast them out? Therefore they will be your judges.
28 But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.
29 Or how can someone enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man? Then indeed he may plunder his house.
30 Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.
31 Therefore I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven people, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven.
32 And whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.”

Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. I wonder how many of you have wondered if you have committed this unforgivable sin? What does it mean? It is interesting that Jesus said you could speak against Him – against the Son of Man – and still be forgiven. But, if you speak against the Holy Spirit, forget it. You are eternally cursed. Hmm. Let’s think about this for a minute.

Who is God, Jesus or the Holy Spirit? The answer is Yes. Who is more God? Neither, of course. Jesus was not making a statement about the divinity of either Person of the Trinity, but clearly if speaking against the Holy Spirit is an eternal sin, then the Holy Spirit has to be God. But, so is Jesus – the term He used for Himself, Son of Man, referred back to Daniel’s use of this title for a divine one in Daniel 7:13.

It is unlikely that Jesus was saying something akin to when we would say something like, “Mess with me, that’s OK, but you mess with my family, you are in trouble.” Well, maybe there is a correlation, because when I say that, I really don’t mean that it is OK to mess with me – it means don’t mess with me or mine. That’s kind of what Jesus was saying. A little context will help us understand.

If you were here way back on January 18, you may recall (though, probably not) that we were in the 8th chapter of John’s Gospel where we witnessed a debate between Jesus and the Pharisees. The debate was about who Jesus was. Jesus said very plainly that He was God. The Pharisees called Him an illegitimate blasphemer. If you really want to understand the unpardonable sin of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, it would be most helpful to go online and listen to that sermon again. The Pharisees experienced direct encounters with Jesus that are not possible for us today.

I don’t know if you have seen this to be true, but in my experience, almost every time I share the gospel with someone and they understand it, they put their belief and trust in Jesus. Now, there are a lot of times that they don’t understand the gospel when I share it, but when they understand that Jesus was God’s Son who came to die for their sins, they almost always believe. It is clear in those cases that the Holy Spirit is working in someone’s heart to bring them to Jesus.

The Pharisees understood who Jesus claimed to be and they had a lot of evidence at their disposal that would support Jesus’ claims. But, they rejected the truth. If they had acknowledged Jesus as God’s Son, they would have had to repent of their sins and give up their power among the people. They didn’t want to lose that power. So, they said – in the presence of all the people – that Jesus was getting His power from Satan. And, Jesus said, in essence, “You just crossed a line. You know full well that I fulfill all of the prophecies that point to Messiah, even if I don’t appear to be the kind of Messiah you expected. Do you attribute My works to the power of the devil in the hearing of all these people? Not only do you reject Me, but you seek to turn the very ones I came to save against Me. You have blasphemed the Holy Spirit of God, by whose power I heal the sicknesses of these people, and this sin will never be forgiven.”

Does this make sense to you? Here is the point I want to drive home today – it is highly unlikely that you are even able to commit the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. It is possible that when a person rejects opportunity after opportunity to believe truth that God says, “No more.” That may be a modern day version of blasphemy of the Spirit, but I doubt it, and it certainly was not what was occurring in our text. It was a willful rejection of truth that was literally in front of their faces. So, it is highly unlikely that you, or anyone you know, has ever been guilty of the sin Jesus was condemning on the day this debate took place. Once again, if this is not yet clear and you really want to know the truth here, then go back and listen to the second study in this series from January 18. Or, you can go to my blog for the written transcript. What you see in those transcripts is most often strikingly close to what is said here on Sunday morning. I have to stay fairly close to the transcript because I get in trouble when I travel far afield.

Well, that’s the first topic – blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. Now let’s take an easy one: the baptism of the Spirit! Have you ever had someone ask you, “Brother, sister, have you been baptized in the Spirit?” Or, they may ask if you have been baptized by the Spirit. But, saying “brother or sister” and “baptized by the Spirit” in the same sentence is redundant. If you are a Christ-follower, thus a brother or sister in Christ, you have been baptized by the Spirit! It happens at the point of salvation. As we go to 1 Corinthians 12, you may well recall us talking about this in the not too distant past. I bring this up fairly often because there is such confusion about the work of the Holy Spirit in a Christian’s life.

Let’s look at 1 Corinthians 12:13: “For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body – Jews or Gentiles, slaves or free – and all were made to drink of one Spirit.” Now, let’s take a few minutes to consider all the truth found in this one verse. These words are found toward the end of a letter that the Apostle Paul wrote to the church at Corinth. What kind of church was this church, a good church or a troubled church? Troubled! Big time! In 1 Corinthians 3:1-2, Paul lamented the fact that he could not address them as spiritual followers of Christ. Instead, he was forced to speak to them as self-absorbed, fleshly, baby Christians, even though that sounds like an oxymoron.

So, this was not a very spiritually minded crowd that Paul was addressing. Yet, he said in our text that all of them who were Christians had been baptized into one body. He was referring to the body of Christ. The specific point that Paul was making was that all Christians are equal in Jesus – Jews and Gentiles, leaders and followers, even to the extent of slaves and non-slaves alike. Slaves were very much a class of people in the first century, yet they were considered on the same spiritual level as their owners when they were believers in Jesus because they had been baptized by the Spirit into the body of Christ. If all of the Corinthian believers had been baptized by the Spirit, it could only have happened at the point of salvation.

But, what about subsequent times of Spirit baptism in the lives of believers? A lot of people think that there is at least a second moving of the Spirit in our lives that takes us to another spiritual plane where there is victory over sin and power to do great works for God. But, Ephesians 4:4-5 tells us, “There is one body and one Spirit – just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call – one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.”

It seems pretty clear to me that we are baptized by the Holy Spirit one time – and the meaning is that the Spirit fully immerses us into the body of Christ with all others who profess Jesus as their Lord and Savior. Do we always live as if Jesus is the Lord of our lives? I think the Corinthians answered that question – NO! But, we have been, nonetheless, baptized by the Spirit. So, if someone asks you if you have been baptized by the Spirit, you can say YES! If they ask when, tell them you were baptized by the Spirit into the body of Christ when you became a Christian – and point to these verses as the foundation for your belief.

You need to be aware, though, that they are going to have a few verses of their own. And almost certainly, they are going to go to the book of Acts, particularly chapter 8, to support the doctrine that salvation comes at one point and the baptism of the Spirit comes later. I want to address that partially now, but more fully next week.

It is extremely important to recognize the nature of the gospels and the book of Acts when forming doctrine and understanding how God works in our lives today. The gospels, of course, tell the story of Jesus’ redemptive work. Much of Jesus’ teaching was not understood, even by His disciples, until after Pentecost when the Holy Spirit came to indwell believers. The book of Acts tells the story of how the gospel of Jesus spread to the whole world. This entire period was a period of transition. Remember, it was a time when the Holy Spirit transitioned from coming alongside of people in order to enable them to do God’s work to now permanently indwelling believers once they believed the gospel of Jesus. We will talk next week about how the work of the Spirit was quite visible at every point of transition, with Jews, with Samaritans, and with Gentiles.

Much of the Spirit’s work that was done at these crucial points of redemptive history is misunderstood and misapplied by Christ-followers today, especially with regard to the doctrine of the baptism of the Spirit. That is why it is so important for us to make sure the epistles, or the letters written by apostles to first century churches, back up whatever doctrine we may derive from the gospels and Acts. If this does not seem clear to you today, hopefully it will make more sense next week.

In preparation for next week, I want to read one of the NT passages about spiritual gifts and offer the briefest of comments. I am going to look at a few verses in 1 Corinthians 12, verses 4-7. The first three verses set up this section, but we will stay here for now.

4 Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit;
5 and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord;
6 and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone.
7 To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.

Did you catch Paul’s Trinitarian theology? Remember, when Paul uses the term “Lord,” he is almost always referring to Jesus. So, the Holy Spirit is in verse 4, Jesus in verse 5, and God the Father in verse 6. Verse 7 sums up the purpose for spiritual gifts, and you see this same purpose articulated every single instance in the NT that you see a list of spiritual gifts – they are given to us for the purpose of building up one another. They are not given to build up ourselves or even to improve our relationship with God, but to build the faith of others! Next week we are going to look specifically at the gift of tongues. That particular gift, in my opinion, is often misunderstood and misused in our day. I do think it is a gift that God still gives and that the Holy Spirit uses, but perhaps we need a better biblical understanding of how God used tongues in the first century and what that means to us today.

Well, that is all the time we have today. Two and a half out of six from our list ain’t too bad. We will talk more about spiritual gifts in the Home Fellowships this week, more about the gift of tongues next week, and then we will complete the list on the first Sunday of April. Don’t forget that Mike Calhoun will be here on March 29 – you will not want to miss that Sunday. Let’s pray