tonight was a normal night. almost.
my wife and i are doing the p90x program. it's legit. my body hurts all over. as tony horton says in the ab ripper x portion, "i hate it, but i love it." afterward, i usually head for the fridge and find the biggest piece of meat i can find. i hear protein is good for muscle building. but tonight, i just wasn't hungry.
i even went to a cook-out/dance-party that my church was having in the street downtown after the workout. there were all kinds of delicious foods, including the blackened hotdogs that i love so much. but i just wasn't hungry. it wasn't not feeling hungry that puzzled me. i felt full, like i had just eaten a great meal. as i sometimes do, i asked god, "why am i not hungry? i should be starving." no answer.
i came home and started talking with a housemate, and the conversation, somehow, veered toward the unforgivable sin. i told her about a conversation i had with a coworker who didn't believe that god moved in "signs and wonders" anymore. i told him just a few experiences that my dance-party church have had in the past few years. i told him about how our pastor had his hand on a man's baseball-sized stomach tumor, asked god to touch him, and the tumor disolved in his hand. i told him about a little boy in our church who was born deaf, about the baby hearing aids that were made for him because he would never hear anything, and about how when the church prayed for him, he could hear everything.
as i talked to the man, he got angry.
"that's not god," he said. "that's being done by the power of the devil."
at first i was shocked when he said that. then i remembered a passage of scripture i read about the pharisees saying the same thing about jesus. matthew 12:22-24.
22 Then a demon-oppressed man who was blind and mute was brought to him, 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, the prince of demons, that this man casts out demons.”
i wasn't familiar with what came after that in verses 30-32, but when i read it, i welled up with sadness.
Jesus says:
"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."
then the lights came on. that jolt of lightning--the one you feel when the teacher unexpectedly calls you up to the board in class--went through my body, and i actually got scared. for years i thought that blasphemy against the holy spirit was saying a certain combination of words against the holy spirit that made god so angry that he wouldn't forgive it. in context, though, that's not what jesus is saying. at all.
he's casting out demons and healing people by the power of the holy spirit (the same one that lives in us, by the way) and the pharisees genuinely think it's the devil. they think god is the devil. what? i had to read it again. (hint hint, you should, too.)
yes, they think god is the devil.
but why is that unforgivable?
well, ask yourself: why would any sane person want anything to do with the devil? why would you want to be healed by the power of the devil? why would you want the power of the devil in you at all? why would you approach the devil for forgiveness of sin? for everlasting life? a sane person wouldn't. a sane person would be opposed to the power of the devil, and the man who operates in it.
that's why jesus said it's unforgivable: not because he is fuming angry and refuses to forgive, but because the one who believes he is the devil will never ask for forgiveness from him. and these guys believed so fervently that jesus was operating in the power of the devil that they ended up killing him.
i wrestled with this for over a year. is this man (the one who told me that the miracles i had seen were by the power of the devil) unforgivable? there has to be hope for him. there has to be. i know that god prefers mercy over judgement. i know that he is love. he doesn't just have love, he is love. can love wake this man up? in the state he's in?
i would stay awake at night, staring at the ceiling, begging god to show up to him. but even if god did show up to this man, he would recognize god as the devil, and just think that satan visited him. right?
eventually, life happened, and i stopped thinking about it. fickle, i know. it just weighed on me so heavily that i couldn't think about it anymore. that a man is doomed. that with all my reasoning and pressing in, i couldn't work out how he could ever experience the holy spirit for who he really is. it's a man's soul we're talking about, not a $2 cheeseburger you accidentally dropped on the ground. you can't just go buy another one.
fast forward.
tonight, when i got home, he came to mind again. "i know there is always hope. i don't know how, but i know there is hope for him." then i realized.
paul was a pharisee.
paul wasn't just any pharisee. paul (saul at this point) was killing christians, and thought he was doing god a favor by doing so. just like the pharisees who killed jesus, saul was killing anyone saying they followed the man who claimed to be the son of god, but was actually sent from satan. like the other pharisees, saul thought jesus did what he did by the power of the devil. and he was carrying on what his brothers started: ridding the world of this satanic power by killing those who were possessed by it. he had set in his heart, and said with his mouth, and decreed with execution orders that jesus was from the devil: the same thing his brothers did in matthew 12.
saul had committed the unforgivable sin.
. . .
enter the risen lord, made of love and light!
. . .
jesus shows up to saul (on his way to kill more christians). but jesus does the impossible.
he forgives saul the unforgivable sin.
my mind exploded.
it gets even better.
saul gets a new name--paul--and is given the task of planting and teaching the bride of christ throughout the known world. saul becomes the apostle paul, the scripture writer, the teacher, the missionary.
so not only does jesus forgive what he says is unforgivable, he also gives love, power, and mission in place of hate and blindness to who god really is (knocking the scales off of paul's eyes wasn't just for show).
god is love. god's mercy always triumphs over his judgement. god forgives even what he decides is unforgivable. a love that trumps even it's own wrath. he's infinitely good. quite literally, impossibly good.
it's why the scripture never says "god is judgement."
it's why the scripture never says "god is anger."
it's why the scripture never says "god is hate."
"god is love."
we are never without hope.
