Dr. Sam Storms has written a new book called “Kept for Jesus: What the New Testament Really Teaches about Assurance of Salvation and Eternal Security” (Crossway, 2015), where he looks at every passage in the New Testament that addresses assurance, security, and perseverance. I highly recommend it. He has also written a bonus chapter, available as a pdf here, where he answers a number of questions including these two:
1) “My son just turned thirty and told us today that he no longer believes in Jesus. He says he’s an atheist. What happened to him? Has he lost his salvation?”
We’ll call this young man Charley. Perhaps Charlene would be a more suitable name in your case. In any case, his (her?) life presents us with a painful and difficult dilemma.
Charley was born into a Christian family. His parents were devout followers of Jesus, and both of his siblings, an older brother and a younger sister, came to faith in Christ and have remained vibrant and deeply committed to him.
Charley was raised in the church and was usually present whenever the doors were open, whether at a Sunday service, a youth meeting, special events throughout the week, or a summer retreat. When he turned twelve, he professed faith in Jesus, largely through the influence of his parents and older brother. He was baptized soon thereafter and was discipled by his youth pastor over the course of the next few years. Charley’s faith appeared to be quite vibrant and joyful. He endured the same trials and temptations as do virtually all teenaged boys, but he never wandered far or failed to repent when he sinned. He prayed every day and read his Bible and was growing in his understanding of God.
Following graduation from high school, he went to college and fell in with a different group of friends. They challenged his faith and insisted that he was being naïve to believe in Jesus. It wasn’t long before Charley stopped attending church and eventually declared himself to be an atheist. He grew increasingly angry at the institutional church and nurtured a deep resentment toward those who had influenced him while he was growing up, having become convinced that they had hidden the truth from him and only wanted to control his life.
Charley is now thirty, twice divorced, an alcoholic, and painfully bitter and unpleasant to be around. He wants nothing ever again to do with Christianity.
So what’s up with Charley? What happened?
Some believe Charley was truly saved as a young boy but subsequently apostatized and in doing so lost or forfeited his salvation. Others also believe Charley was genuinely saved and always will be, but they believe that his reckless and unrepentant lifestyle will result in the loss of rewards in the age to come.
In ‘Kept for Jesus’ I argue for what is known as the Reformed or Calvinistic view. Those who embrace this perspective interpret Charley’s experience in one of two ways.
Some Reformed believers would argue that if Charley was truly saved at the age of twelve, he is still saved at the age of thirty and will, by God’s grace and the convicting work of the Holy Spirit, eventually come to his spiritual senses and return to the Lord. This may happen only after Charley endures severe discipline from his heavenly Father, but eventually God will bring him back. In some cases, people like Charley are disciplined straightway into heaven; that is to say, the discipline of the Lord results in their physical death. They die prematurely, under the discipline of God, but they are saved eternally.
Others who hold the Reformed view contend that the likely explanation for Charley’s departure from his professed faith in Christ is that he was never genuinely born again in the first place. His so-called faith was spurious. His life of apparent obedience was prompted by factors other than a genuine love for Jesus. He was self-deluded and deceived everyone who knew him. If he had been truly born again, he would have persevered in his faith.
2) “Is it possible that Charley was really born again and that he has blasphemed the Holy Spirit? Can a Christian commit blasphemy of the Spirit?”
This question is provoked by a well-known passage in Matthew’s Gospel in which Jesus responds to the religious leaders who had accused him of drawing on the power of Satan to heal a young boy. Jesus says:
Therefore I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven people, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. 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. (Matt. 12:31–32)
For Jesus to declare that whoever blasphemes the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven, neither now nor in the age to come, comes as a jolt. This ominous declaration doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Something happened to provoke it. So let’s look at the context.
The religious leaders had just witnessed Jesus cast out a demon from a blind and mute man and then heal the man, and they concluded from it that Jesus was himself possessed by Beelzebul or Satan and that it was, in fact, Satan himself who enabled Jesus to do it. The miracle was beyond dispute. No one doubted that the man had been truly blind and mute.
This wasn’t a case of some slick magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat or doing amazing things with a deck of cards. Thus, either his healing was the work of God or of the Devil. Since the religious leaders refused to acknowledge that God was behind the miracle, they had no other choice but to conclude that Jesus had done it by the power of Satan.
This provokes our Lord to declare that whereas all sins can be forgiven, even blasphemy against himself (vv. 21–32a), the one who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven (v. 32).
The leaders’ sin was against the Holy Spirit because it was by the power of the Spirit that Jesus performed his healings and miracles. Jesus had just said that it was by the Spirit of God that he cast out demons (v. 28). Here we see that the life Jesus lived, he lived in the power of the Spirit. The miracles he performed, he performed in the power of the Spirit. What the religious leaders were saying is: “Jesus, we don’t deny that a great healing miracle has occurred. We don’t deny that you cast out a demon from that man. But the power by which you did it was the power of Satan.”
Thus, in a remarkable display of hard-heartedness and spiritual blindness, they sinned by attributing to Satan what the Spirit had done. But we still don’t know why this was regarded by Jesus as so heinous a sin that it was beyond forgiveness. Why was this blasphemy of the Spirit and his work so utterly outrageous that forgiveness became impossible?
The answer is found in the relationship between Jesus and the religious leaders and how they responded to him. Their repudiation of Jesus was not the result of ignorance or lack of evidence or because they believed the negative report of someone else who didn’t like Jesus. Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is willful, wide-eyed, persistent, unrepentant slandering of the work of the Spirit, attributing to the Devil what is undeniably divine. Those people had seen as clearly as anyone could see and understood as lucidly as anyone could understand that Jesus performed his miracles by the power of the Spirit. Yet they defiantly insisted, contrary to what they knew to be true, that it was Satan who had empowered him.
The miracles Jesus performed were credentials of heaven. The religious leaders declared them to be credentials of hell. They didn’t merely deny Jesus’s deity. They, in effect, declared him to be a demon! Jesus’s family may have thought he was mentally deranged, but the Pharisees declared him to be morally demonic.
Theirs was not a one-time, momentary slip or an inadvertent mistake in judgment. This was a persistent rebellion in the face of undeniable truth. Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is not a careless act committed only once in a moment of rage or rebellion but a calloused attitude over time, a persistent defiance that calcifies the heart.
The Pharisees had been present when Jesus healed the sick and raised the dead. They saw him perform miracles up close and personal. They watched with their very eyes as skin infected with leprosy suddenly and decisively became clean and smooth and whole. They heard him teach with power and authority. They watched as demons fled his presence as he set free those in bondage. They watched with their own eyes as he gave sight to the blind. Notwithstanding all this, they openly and persistently and angrily and arrogantly declared that he had done it all by the power of the Devil.
Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, therefore, is not just unbelief, the sort of unbelief or rejection or doubt that is so typical in our world. It is defiance of what one knows beyond any shadow of doubt to be true. It is not mere denial but determined denial; not mere rejection but wanton, willful, wicked, wide-eyed rejection.
This sin, therefore, is unforgiveable not because there is a defect in the atoning death of Jesus or because there is a limit to God’s grace and mercy or some defect in his character. It is unforgiveable because it is a sin that by its very nature makes it impossible for one any longer to repent. If a sin makes repentance impossible, then it is unforgivable sin. Forgiveness is promised only for those sins of which we genuinely repent.
Since a sin from which one may repent is not unpardonable, those who are most worried that they may have committed the unpardonable sin have not committed it. An unforgiveable sin is one for which the sinner has no concern, no conviction, and no anxiety and thus no repentance. The sinning one is so hard-hearted and willful and persistent and defiant that he couldn’t care less that he is committing it.
Remember that Jesus was addressing unbelievers. He was describing first-century religious leaders whose hard-hearted hatred of him was so deep that they attributed the Spirit’s work through him to Satan. So, yes, it is possible for a person to put himself beyond the possibility of forgiveness. But that is not God’s fault. It is not for lack of mercy, compassion, or grace in God. It is because someone who has seen, heard, and even tasted the truth has chosen to harden his heart to the point that he has rendered himself impervious to repentance and conviction.
Some of you are convinced you have committed the unforgiveable sin, or at least are fearful that you may have. A particular sin in your life may have caused you massive internal anguish, indescribable emotional pain. The guilt is piercing and relentless. The shame is so heavy and paralyzing that you feel as if every breath of spiritual life is being squeezed out of you.
I can’t begin to count the number of broken people who shake and weep endlessly and lose sleep, and when they do sleep, they experience horrid nightmares because they are convinced they have committed a sin that God cannot or will not forgive.
If I’ve just described you, I tell you on the authority of the Word of God and thus with absolute confidence and joy, that you have not committed the unforgiveable sin.
•? People who are ashamed of their sin have not committed the unforgiveable sin. The unforgiveable sin is committed shamelessly over time.
•? People who feel the conviction of the Holy Spirit in their hearts, who sense the piercing presence of guilt for having violated God’s Word, have not committed the unforgiveable sin. People who commit this sin feel no guilt. If anything, they are proud of what they’ve done.
•? People who fear they have committed the unforgiveable sin have not. The heart given to this depth of depravity has no fear of God or fear of judgment.
•? People who are broken and grieved by their sin have not committed the unforgiveable sin.
We can know with a high degree of confidence when people have not committed the unforgiveable sin, but we don’t know when people have committed a sin that puts them beyond the forgiveness of God.
The unpardonable sin, therefore, or blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, is not a single sin committed by a Christian that results in the loss of salvation. It is an entrenched, lifelong disdain for Jesus that unbelievers, like the Pharisees of the first century, commit. People guilty of this sin remain unrepentant and defiant. Because this hard-hearted repudiation of Jesus is lifelong and puts one beyond the power of repentance, it is beyond the possibility of forgiveness.
Some of you struggle with an overly sensitive, hyperactive conscience. You feel suffocated by shame and are burdened by guilt and wallow in self-contempt. You live in constant fear that you’ve committed the unforgiveable sin, perhaps multiple times. Far from walking in confidence and the assurance of salvation, you live in dread, anxiety, and hopelessness and in the paralyzing fear that God has forever forsaken you. I assure you, he has not.