Foundational to Christianity is belief that Jesus made an atoning sacrifice to pay for our sins and through personal acceptance of Jesus as savior, our sins will be forgiven. All but one sin, there is a sin that Jesus said could not be forgiven, and that “unforgivable sin” is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, for which the penalty is eternal damnation. (Matthew 12:31-33, Mark 3:29, Luke 12:10)
Considering Christ’s uncompromising warning, I think it is important to examine just what the unforgivable sin is and perhaps remind Christians of it. I single out offending Christians here because in Hebrews 6:4-6 the unforgivable sin is associated with "falling away”, it clearly states that only Christians can commit this sin, and it claims the offenders are crucifying Jesus again while putting Him to an open shame. When I see some Christians engaging in so much denominational strife and religious one-upmanship, which upon consideration of Scripture is in fact what Jesus referred to as “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit”, I can’t imagine Jesus being anything but openly shamed by such a divided house.
In Matthew 12 Jesus says a divided house cannot stand, in his definition of the unforgivable sin he makes a clear distinction between blasphemies against Him (forgivable), and the Holy Spirit (unforgivable), and then immediately reminds us that you should only judge a tree by its fruit.
Jesus said he came for ALL men, transcending the very notion of religious exclusion. In the context of the absolute laws of unity and compassion that He embodied and the utterly non-dual nature of his teachings, exemplified in the statement that “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28 , Colossians 3:11) there can be little question about what the unforgivable sin is.
When asked to, Jesus summarized all of his teaching into the maxim that you should love your neighbor as you love yourself (Matthew 22:36-39 and Mark 12:28-31, also see Leviticus 19:18, Galatians 5:14 ,Matthew 22:39, Luke 10:27, James 2:8, John 1:5, John 13:34), something impossible to do without recognizing that your neighbor’s faith is to him, what your faith is to you. Christ said that the true Kingdom of God was within, that his father’s house had many mansions and that a Kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation and a divided house cannot stand.
The unforgivable sin then, is to have been to the mountaintop of the transcendent and non-dual love of Christ’s understanding of God, and to again become dual minded and unstable (James 1:8), and to judge the Holy Spirit working in others by the external trappings of ritual and dogma rather than looking beyond those things to the Kingdom within (Luke 17:21), judging by something other than the fruit of the Holy Spirit, especially when the agenda of tribal denominationalism causes someone to totally deny His teachings and attribute the work of God’s Spirit in others to demonic forces.
Along with almost every other major religion, Christianity maintains that God is transcendent to human understanding (Isaiah 55:8-9, 1 Corinthians 13:12 , Romans 11:33, and scads more) and Scripture is filled with supporting statements, explicitly telling us that no man knows as he ought to know (1 Corinthians 8:1-2 ), every man has his proper gift of God after different manners (1 Corinthians 7:7), with explicit consequential statements that therefore, we should not judge others (out of hundreds of references, Matthew 7:1 and 1 Corinthians 4:5 stand out).
When I see Christians engaging in all this religious one-upmanship and self-righteous condemnation of other ways of understanding God it is hard not to see a direct parallel to the manner in which the Pharisees smugly proclaimed the fruits of Holy Spirit that dwelled in Jesus to be the works of Satan (Matthew 12).
When questioned about it, the Christians who engage in all this “puffing themselves up” (1 Corinthians 8:1-2) and “self-exaltation” (Luke 14:11), typically justify it by claiming that they are only trying to save your eternal soul. Perhaps those offending individuals should forego their own egos and instead defer to their Scripture and consider what Jesus had to say about it all and recognize that maybe it would be more appropriate to worry that it is your own soul that is facing eternal damnation.
Romans 2:1-2
Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself; for thou that judgest doest the same things. But we are sure that the judgment of God is according to truth against them which commit such things.
