Unpardonable Sin & Inner Light

Don: Scripture contains a number of illustrations of the concept of there being some kind of inner light within every human being. For example:

1 John 3:24: …The one who keeps God’s commands lives in him, and he in them. And this is how we know that he lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us.

Ecclesiastes 3:11: He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also set eternity in their heart, yet so that man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end.

Ezekiel 36:26-7: Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will be careful to observe My ordinances.

Whatever it is called it seems to function as a transceiver set to the frequency of god, establishing a connection and enabling communication with him. Connectivity with god has two important functions: First, it is a convector of sin, giving Mankind a sense of his eternal need of grace; and second, it is is a guide to truth. In contrast, in his book People of the Lie, M. Scott Peck describes people who have severed this connection—who have cut themselves off from god.

So grace needs this inner light, this sensor, this director and guide, to fulfill our connection with god. But free will apparently gives us the ability to disconnect. It seems that the inner light is programmed into us:

Ezekiel 37:14: I will put My Spirit within you and you will come to life, and I will place you on your own land. Then you will know that I, the Lord, have spoken and done it,” declares the Lord.’”

However, free will enables us to deviate from the program and go our own way.

So our natural condition is to be connected to god, and choosing to disconnect from it is not simply a single act of evil but a sense of self-righteousness and independence, of not needing god or his grace, a belief that I know what is right, this leads one to the notion that one is without sin.

Luke 18:9-12: And He also told this parable to some people who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and viewed others with contempt: “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and was praying this to himself: ‘God, I thank You that I am not like other people: swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I pay tithes of all that I get.’”

This is the condition of the People of the Lie, of people who commit the Unpardonable Sin. In the parable, Jesus is talking about them.

1 John 1:8-10: If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar and His word is not in us.

Self-righteousness results in two things: First, it switches off our transceiver and masks our natural state of being a sinner in need of God’s grace. In short, it turns off the light.

Second, it denies grace to others:

1 Peter 4:10: As each one has received a special gift, employ it in serving one another as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.

The grace of god is effectively hoarded by the self-righteous individual, who confuses his supposed goodness for god’s grace and thereby prevents him from sharing grace with others, especially those he regards as sinners.

We not only need to receive God’s grace, we have to transmit it, too. Exodus 16 tells the story of manna, God’s daily gift to the Israelites. It is a metaphor for grace. You get as much as you need. God’s grace is sufficient for our needs but we have a responsibility to share it.

We saw the elder brother in the Prodigal Son trying to hoard his father’s grace and being jealous of having to share it with his younger brother. It seems that the hoarding of grace, self-righteousness, and independence conspire to switch off the god transceiver and snuff out (or at least dim) the inner light. They give us an inkling of the concept of the unpardonable sin.

But it is important to note that God’s grace continues to reach out to such people, to get them to re-kindle their inner light.

2 Peter 3:9: The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance.

God works with mankind to ensure that no-one is lost forever. Romans 2 also suggests that god works hard to overcome our resistance.

The Prodigal Son shows that there can be a re-kindling of the fire. The connection can be restored. Only our persistent disregard of God’s efforts, our claim of self-righteousness, stands in the way. Matthew 22 tells of the Wedding Feast, in which a guest declines to don the robe of righteousness offered to all the guests. He is then ejected from the party.

David: The guest at the wedding feast really cast himself out. He had free will. The danger is that self-righteous religionists read this and see it as their duty to throw out the unwelcome guest, but to me the message is that if you make yourself unwelcome, you cast yourself out.

Don: Scripture illustrates that point.

Romans 2:1-5: Therefore you have no excuse, everyone of you who passes judgment, for in that which you judge another, you condemn yourself; for you who judge practice the same things. And we know that the judgment of God rightly falls upon those who practice such things. But do you suppose this, O man, when you pass judgment on those who practice such things and do the same yourself, that you will escape the judgment of God? Or do you think lightly of the riches of His kindness and tolerance and patience, not knowing that the kindness of God leads you to repentance? But because of your stubbornness and unrepentant heart you are storing up wrath for yourself in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God,…

Robin: Scripture does not tell us why the originally invited guests to the wedding feast did not show up, but it seems that they had higher opinions of themselves than they had of the king. They purposefully rejected him.

Don: Both evil and good secondary guests were invited. They are only sorted out at the door, when they accept or not the robe.

Matthew 22:10: Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered together all they found, both evil and good; and the wedding hall was filled with dinner guests.

Robin: But why would people not take the robe, other than through a lack of humility?

David: I think the man does not want to join. He wants to be separate. He wants to be cut off. [Postscript: Perhaps he values his independence, or perhaps his individuality, more than he values community and conformity.]

Don: This is the sort of thing that leads me to think of the bible as a book of questions, rather than a book of answers. It forces us to think about the issues.

Robin: Matthew 22:14 says that “many are called, but few are chosen.” It seems that the king did the choosing, not the guests. I am confused.

David: If the bible’s purpose is to provoke us into asking questions, it certainly succeeds! Could this be just a case of bad or misleading writing by the chronicler or a subsequent interpreter?

Robin: It would make sense if it said “but few will choose.” The church traditionally interprets it to mean that god personally chooses to elevate people. But that no longer makes sense to me.

Don: The person singled out or “chosen” is the one who rejects the coat, so maybe it means that few are chosen to be cast out!

David: I suggested last week that the unpardonable sin was to disconnect by having no faith, by disbelieving. But it’s kind of the obverse—it’s more a matter of having faith in oneself, or rather, in one’s own righteousness. Examples abound of secular humanists who declare their lack of faith in God and yet quietly go about being good people who would be model Christians if they called themselves Christian! I have to believe that the inner light exists in such people whether they recognize it or acknowledge it or not. Disconnection from grace can’t be achieved just by denial of god. [Postscript: Rather, it is achieved by denial of god’s supremacy in righteousness.].

Don: In Fowler’s “stages of faith” there is a fairly immature stage that involves the concept of a contract with god that spells out what is right and wrong, and the questions that people at this stage have in mind are precisely the questions that are answered in church. But as time goes by and one’s relationship with god deepens in some way, those answers and some aspects of religion don’t seem to resonate as they once did.

This is a skeptical stage and yet the inner light seems still to glow in people who go through it, even if they don’t recognize it as such. They are good parents, they take care of the environment, they are good neighbors, they are receptive to the needs of the less fortunate, they care for God’s other creatures in the animal kingdom. The goodness that abounds in them and with them has to be an evidence that something is still resonating inside them.

If they emerge from this stage, according to the stages of faith theory, they reach a more mystical, or transcendent, sense of god, which they never had in church but which often draws them back to church to re-establish the connection with god, but on a higher level. Even at the stage of skepticism, they are probably more in tune with god than they were in the earlier church-going stage.

Robin: This theme continues in the parables in the next chapters of Matthew.

Don: It sounds self-righteous to declare oneself a sinner! But it appears that the hard words of Jesus concerning the law, and the notion of the unpardonable sin, have to do with the notion of not ending God’s grace. It’s not that people declare this, but the way they perceive themselves before god makes them what John called people who are not telling the truth and M. Scott Peck calls “people of the lie.” These must be few and far between, but there is something in that standing that puts themselves at serious risk of cutting themselves off from god.

David: The phrase “unpardonable sin” suggests a one-time act or event of utmost evil, but what we are discussing is a continuum, and more a matter of degree of self-righteousness—some of us have more of it, others less, and the amount may vary over time. We all must be guilty of it to some extent. We were, in a way, born with it, if the knowledge we acquired at the Fall of Man was the source of self-righteousness. We already had free will (e.g., to eat or not eat of the apple) so all we had to do was apply our now informed free will to our relationship with god—to choose whether to sever it or keep it—on the not unreasonable basis that once we knew what god knew, we didn’t need him any more to tell us what was right and what was good. Then again, if we are all guilty all the time, to some greater of lesser extent, of the unpardonable sin, where does this leave an opening for grace? I am confused (again) 🙂

Robin: The parable of the wedding feast perhaps answers the question. All you have to do, when you are invited to the wedding, is to put on the garment. When you get to the head of the line at the door, if you refuse to don the robe, then you simply don’t get in. There was only one rule.

David: And there was only one rule in the Garden: Don’t eat the apple! But once it was broken, the sin stayed with us. We are born with it. The bible, or at any rate its preachers, keeps telling us that. We are also told it is pardonable. I guess what we have to do, and what we accomplish by donning the robe, is to give up all the knowledge acquired at the Fall and acknowledge that we know nothing, and we must restore our faith that only god can be trusted with the knowledge.

Robin: We must acknowledge God’s superiority.

Don: The immediate effect of knowledge was to reveal to Adam and Eve their nakedness. The clothing provided by god is not only sufficient, it is better than the clothing, the covering, we provide for ourselves. It adds a new twist to the old phrase: “Clothes maketh the man.”

We’ll talk more about this next week