The Unpardonable Sin

A thin, gray-haired lady smiled continually and stood at the back of a nursing home meeting area while I spoke.

Years ago, I monthly visited the nursing facility that housed this lady and many other elderly “guests.” I usually played my guitar, led hymns and gave a short sermon in a sitting area located between two hallways where guests gathered.

The thin lady, a newcomer to the group, kept a smile on her face during the meeting I now write about. After we sang a final hymn at that gathering, I shook a few hands and approached the woman with the mystic smile.

“You must be a Christian,” I said.

The lady, still smiling, said, “I’ve committed the unpardonable sin.”

I questioned her statement, but she repeated, “I’ve committed the unpardonable sin.”

I saw a young woman – maybe in her late twenties – approaching, and the smiling lady said, “Oh, here’s my daughter coming to visit.”

The older lady introduced me as the man who’d just held a religious service, and the daughter, showing little facial expression, offered me her hand. Her pale hand felt like a lifeless fish placed in my palm.

I wondered about the relationship between this mother and daughter. Had the mother sinned in some manner that drove away the daughter’s father? Was the daughter weary of her mother’s preoccupation with religious guilt?

“Good to meet you,” I said to the daughter.

I left them to their visit and don’t recall ever again seeing that mother and daughter. Perhaps the mother was transferred to another wing of the nursing home. I have thought many times about that mother and her offspring and about people who become obsessed with thinking they may have committed “the unpardonable sin.”

What is “the unpardonable sin”?

In Matthew 12:31, 32 Jesus declared that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is the sin for which there is neither forgiveness in this world or in the world to come.

James K. Bridges, former general treasurer of the Assemblies of God, says, “It is vital that we understand the role of the Holy Spirit in God’s plan of salvation in order to grasp the Savior’s meaning of how one sins against the Holy Spirit.”

Bridges says that one can know conviction of sin, a drawing to God and understanding of Christ’s saving work only through the ministry of the Holy Spirit.

If a person rejects the avenue by which grace comes, there can be no pardon. Blaspheming (profaning the work of) the Holy Spirit is described as “insulting the Spirit of grace” (Hebrews 10:29).

Bridges says, “When a person with full understanding of what he or she is doing ‘tramples the Son of God underfoot, and counts the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified a common thing,’ the Holy Spirit is denied the opportunity to administer the grace and pardon of Christ.”

J. Oswald Sanders wrote in his “Bible Studies in Matthew’s Gospel,” about the unpardonable sin: It is a calculated sin, not one of impulse. It is a sin of knowledge, not ignorance. It is not an isolated act but a habitual attitude. It is a sin of the heart, not merely of the intellect or tongue. It is a sin of finality – complete rejection of Christ.

Bridges says that the devil has led some people to believe they have committed the unpardonable sin and that people who are fearful they have committed such a sin would do well to heed the words of William Barclay, who said, “The person who cannot have committed the sin against the Holy Spirit is the person who fears he/she has, for the sin against the Holy Spirit can be truly described as the loss of all sense of sin.”

Had the smiling woman I met in a nursing home committed the unpardonable sin? I doubt it, but I don’t know. Could she have become obsessed with an unresolved real or imagined sin and her conflict become complicated by Alzheimer’s disease or senility?

Some people may have committed the unpardonable sin and no longer feel drawn to Christ. But sensitive, repentant believers in Christ can trust in this truth: “If we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:7).