“Facing Our Bully”
Matthew 12:22-37
The prelude
The 1st 12 chapters of Matthew
The attempt to publicly shame and the try at keeping the status quo
THEN Vs 22-23
The pharisees cross the line
BUT WHEN Vs 24
Jesus responds
The Left
Vs 25-26 il________________________________________________
The right
Vs 27 in________________________________________________
The knockout
Vs 28 in________________________________________________
Denying. BUT IF vs 28
Failing to recognize who is staring you in the face. OR AGAIN vs 29
The line in the sand. WHOEVER vs 30
Dare them to stand up and finish it - AND SO I TELL YOU vs 31-32
The Unforgivable Sin !
Matthew 12:18, 21
Romans 8 : 38 - 39 Paul
Acts 7 :51 Stephen
Who is speaking in Matthew 12: 32 ?
Romans 8 : 12 -17 Paul
It is by the Holy Spirit that we are Led to the saving grace of Jesus christ. Yes to the cross where God the father grants us his forgiveness, through the intercession of the Holy Spirit.
William Barklays commentary on Mathew 12:31-32
“The Lost Awareness”
Examples of the pharisees hardened hearts vs 33-35
1.
2.
3.
Application Matthew 12:36-37
The question here though is why were their hearts so hard ? Why are our hearts so hard ?
John 11:45-53
Luke 9:57-62
These men hardened their hearts because they had something to lose.
Are we fully willing to face our Bully , the tormentor of our souls ,and to fully trust and accept the forgiveness and love of christ.
Because In Him and only in Him can we put our hope of redemption.
This from William Barclay's commentary
a Scottish author,
radio and television presenter, Church of Scotland
minister, and Professor of Divinity and Biblical
Criticism at the University of Glasgow
The Lost Awareness ( Matthew 12:31-33 Continued)
Let us then try to understand what Jesus meant by the sin against the Holy Spirit. One thing is necessary. We must grasp the fact that Jesus was not speaking about the Holy Spirit in the full Christian sense of the term. He could not have been, for Pentecost had to come before the Holy Spirit came upon men in all his power and light and fullness. This must be interpreted in light of the Jewish conception of the Holy Spirit. According to Jewish teaching the Holy Spirit had two supreme functions. First, the Holy Spirit brought God's truth to men; second, the Holy Spirit enabled men to recognize and to understand that truth when they saw it. So then a man, as the Jews saw it, needed the Holy Spirit, both to receive and to recognize God's truth. We may express this in another way. There is in man a Spirit-given faculty which enables him to recognize goodness and truth when he sees them.
Now we must take the next step in our attempt to understand what Jesus meant. A man can lose any faculty if he refuses to use it. This is true in any sphere of life. It is true physically; if a man ceases to use certain muscles, they will atrophy. It is true mentally; many a man at school or in his youth has acquired some slight knowledge of, for example, French or Latin or music; but that knowledge is long since gone because he did not exercise it. It is true of all kinds of perception. A man may lose all appreciation of good music, if he listens to nothing but cheap music; he may lose the ability to read a great book, if he reads nothing but ephemeral productions; he may lose the faculty of enjoying clean and healthy pleasure, if he for long enough finds his pleasure in things which are degraded and soiled.
Therefore a man can lose the ability to recognize goodness and truth when he sees them. If he for long enough shuts his eyes and ears to God's way, if he for long enough turns his back upon the messages which God is sending him, if he for long enough prefers his own ideas to the ideas which God is seeking to put into his mind, in the end he comes to a stage when he cannot recognize God's truth and God's beauty and God's goodness when he sees them. He comes to a stage when his own evil seems to him good, and when God's good seems to him evil. That is the stage to which these Scribes and Pharisees had come. They had so long been blind and deaf to the guidance of God's hand and the promptings of God's Spirit, they had insisted on their own way so long, that they had come to a stage when they could not recognize God's truth and goodness when they saw them. They were able to look on incarnate goodness and call it incarnate evil; they were able to look on the Son of God and call him the ally of the devil. The sin against the Holy Spirit is the sin of so often and so consistently refusing God's will that in the end it cannot be recognized when it comes even fully-displayed.
Why should that sin be unforgivable? What differentiates it so terribly from all other sins? The answer is simple. When a man reaches that stage, repentance is impossible. If a man cannot recognize the good when he sees it, he cannot desire it. If a man does not recognize evil as evil, he cannot be sorry for it, and wish to depart from it. And if he cannot, in spite of failures, love the good and hate the evil, then he cannot repent; and if he cannot repent, he cannot be forgiven, for repentance is the only condition of forgiveness. It would save much heartbreak if people would realize that the one man who cannot have committed the sin against the Holy Spirit is the man who fears he has, for the sin against the Holy Spirit can be truly described as the loss of all sense of sin. *****
It was to that stage the Scribes and Pharisees had come. They had so long been deliberately blind and deliberately deaf to God that they had lost the faculty of recognizing him when they were confronted with him. It was not God who had banished them beyond the pale of forgiveness; they had shut themselves out. Years of resistance to God had made them what they were.
There is a dreadful warning here. We must heed God all our days that our sensitivity is never blunted, our awareness is never dimmed, our spiritual hearing never becomes spiritual deafness. It is a law of life that we will hear only what we are listening for and only what we have fitted ourselves to hear.
***There is a story of a country man who was in the office of a city friend, with the roar of the traffic coming through the windows. Suddenly he said, "Listen!" "What is it?" asked the city man. "A grasshopper," said the country man. Years of listening to the country sounds had attuned his ears to the country sounds, sounds that a city man's ear could not hear at all. On the other hand, let a silver coin drop, and the chink of the silver would have immediately reached the ears of the money-maker, while the country man might never have heard it at all. Only the expert, the man who has made himself able to hear it, will pick out the note of each individual bird in the chorus of the birds. Only the expert, the man who has made himself able to hear it, will distinguish the different instruments in the orchestra and catch a lonely wrong note from the second violins.
It is the law of life that we hear what we have trained ourselves to hear; day by day we must listen to God, so that day by day God's voice may become, not fainter and fainter until we cannot hear it at all, but clearer and clearer until it becomes the one sound to which above an our ears are attuned.
So Jesus finishes with the challenge: "If I have done a good deed, you must admit that I am a good man; if I have done a bad deed, then you may think me a bad man. You can only tell a tree's quality by its fruits, and a man's character by his deeds." But what if a man has become so blind to God that he cannot recognize goodness when he sees it.
