Mark chapter 3. In John's Gospel,
the Lord says, the light shines in the darkness and the darkness
did not comprehend it. The Lord Jesus came into a dark
world and was not comprehended. In Mark's Gospel, we have many
of these conflicts between the Pharisees and the Lord Jesus
and they are written for our instruction. They are words not
just for some time past, but they're actually words for today.
So Mark 3, verse 20, Then the multitudes came together again,
so much that they could not so much as eat bread. But when his
own people heard about this, they went out to lay hold of
him, for they said, he is out of his mind. And the scribes
who came down from Jerusalem said, he has Beelzebub. And by the ruler of demons, he
cast out demons. So, he called them to himself
and said to them in parables, how can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against
itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against
itself, that house cannot stand. And if Satan has risen up against
himself and is divided, he cannot stand but has an end. No one can enter a strong man's
house and plunder his goods unless he first binds the strong man
and then he will plunder his house. Assuredly I say to you,
All sins will be forgiven the sons of men, and whatever blasphemies
they may utter. But he who blasphemes against
the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is subject to eternal condemnation,
because they said he has an unclean spirit." And so here we have the light
shining in the darkness again and we have this conflict. But
in verse 20 we see the Lord Jesus returning from his time on the
mountain and other preaching ministries and the crowd gathered
to such an extent that they could not even eat a meal. And so one of the things that
we need to see immediately is that Jesus' ministry is a public
ministry. His witness is a public witness.
It's plain and open for all to see. So the words we have recorded
here in the Gospels are words that multitudes of people heard
and they were spread by multitudes to other multitudes. And so gathered
in that group were his disciples some who would become his disciples
even though for a time they doubted his sanity, and those who came
as his enemies and came only to disrupt, to dispute, to condemn,
and as we saw earlier in this chapter, to conspire his murder. But all of this is done publicly. Must keep bearing that in mind.
When his own people heard of this, they went out to take custody
of him for they were saying he has lost his senses. I think
his own people here is a reference to his family which we'll, Lord
willing, come to next week. but they went out to try and
take hold of him or lay hold of him with force because they
thought that he had gone mad. They thought that he'd lost his
mind. They thought that he was going to meet with the same fate
that John the Baptist had met with. And so there's a lesson
for us, isn't it? God's children will be misunderstood
by those close to them. They'll be misunderstood by those
who love them, such as family members. They will misunderstand
God's children. They'll misunderstand our motives.
They'll misunderstand our actions. They'll misunderstand what we
do and what we say in many ways. And the Lord Jesus says, you
know, as he has walked in this world, so his people will walk
in this world. and opposition will come to the
Lord's people from within their families. And it's sad, but it's
a reality of the Lord Jesus' life. But in verse 22, as well
as this family coming to save Jesus, in a sense, from himself,
the scribes came down from Jerusalem. and they were saying, he is possessed
by Beelzebub and he casts out demons by the ruler of demons. So, not only will God's children
be misunderstood by those close to them, God's children will
be condemned and persecuted by religious people. ever since
Cain murdered his brother Abel, that has been the history of
this world. As the Lord Jesus said to his
disciples in John 15, if the world hates you, you know that
it hated me before it hated you. And the promise is that God's
children will be persecuted. But also God's children will
face, as the Lord Jesus does in this story before us, will
face accusations which are wicked both in their conception and
in their exercise. So these men had such extraordinary
witness. Just remember again the crowds.
They had witness of the Lord Jesus and what he was doing.
They'd seen the Lord Jesus and heard of the Lord Jesus casting
out many demons and they could bear witness to the fact that
not only did the Lord Jesus cast out the demons, but the demons
testified to who he was. They proclaimed the Lord Jesus
as the Christ, the Holy One of God. They even proclaimed Jesus'
lordship over them, that he had the right to do with them as
he saw fit and they needed his permission for things that they
might want to do. So the great enemy of God's people,
the great enemy of God and his children, Satan, is relentless. He never rests. He's always seeking
an opportunity to harass those and to turn people away from
grace and from the wonders of what the Lord Jesus has done.
And he just openly attacks the Lord Jesus. And to attack the
Lord Jesus in this world is to attack his people. In Luke 14,
13, after the Lord Jesus had defeated Satan in the temptations
in the desert, It then says, when the devil had ended all
the temptation, he departed from him for a season, or he departed
from him until an opportune time. And so the Lord Jesus' years
of public ministry were ones where he was harassed again and
again. But the Lord Jesus, when he's
attacked, as he does when his people are attacked, defends
himself. And he calls these men to himself
in verse 23. He's the one who takes the initiative
here and he calls these to himself. And he began speaking to them
in parables. So they were aware that he had
cast out demons and he says to them, can Satan cast out Satan? What on earth is going on? Just
look at the testimony, look at the witness before your eyes.
If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. If a house is divided against
itself, that house will not be able to stand. If Satan rises
up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but he's finished. So in these really clear, clear
statements, the Lord Jesus is showing that he has come to rescue
his people. He's come and he has defeated
Satan. In his baptism he prefigures
what's going to happen to him on the cross where Satan is defeated
and defeated principally and defeated finally. Even though
Satan still roars and rages in this world, the Lord Jesus has
won a great victory. And so these people who had come
from Jerusalem, now the leaders of the scribes and Pharisees
had come, these people who claimed to be the ones who had great
religious knowledge, they were the ones who claimed to see clearly
They're the ones who are coming with these accusations which
from the very evidence before them are crazy accusations. We know that true saving faith
and true understanding of who God is only ever comes by revelation,
by faith we understand. But the Lord Jesus shows as he
deals with these Pharisees that anything which opposes the gospel
of God's free grace will be logically inconsistent. It will be inconsistent
with the facts that are laid out before people and it will
be inconsistent with scripture. It will never hold up in either
of those courts. So that, as Romans 3.19 says,
that every mouth may be stopped and the whole world may become
guilty before God. In a sense the purpose of this
is to show the depths of the wickedness of the hearts of these
people. So the Lord Jesus shows publicly for all to see that
he's won this victory over Satan as he deals with these demons
and the demons confess who he is and he stops their mouths. he actually causes them to proclaim
him and then he stops them proclaiming him because the proclamation,
as we saw a couple of weeks ago, the proclamation of who the Lord
Jesus really is, is going to come from his chosen apostles. And the strongman's house is
going to be plundered. He binds the strongman and then
he plunders his house, he thoroughly ransacks his house and then carries
away all that belongs to him. And then it's extraordinary in
the midst of this opposition and in the midst of this darkness
as he did with the paralytic man, the Lord Jesus to the people
there who are his and as a witness to these evil men proclaims the
Gospel. Look at verse 28. Truly I say
to you, all sins shall be forgiven the sons of man, and whatever
blasphemies they utter. It's just extraordinary, isn't
it? Here we have great darkness and great, great light. We need
to stop here and rest and feed our souls in the midst of this
appalling event that we have laid out before us. He proclaims
the completeness of the Saviour's work, all sins. Mercifully we
have poor memories of our sins. But I know of no child of God
who isn't continually in some way or another assaulted by the
ongoing sense of sins committed in the past and the reality of
sins in the present and aware of their frailty and their weakness. In 1 John, God is honest with
us, isn't he? My little children, he says,
I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin.
Then the next word is wonderful, and if anyone sins, not that
you won't sin, and if anyone sins, we have an advocate with
the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. And he himself is
the propitiation for our sins and not only for ours but for
those of the whole world. So all sins shall be forgiven
the sons of man. Isaiah calls to God's people
to come and reason together with God. Let us reason together says
the Lord. Though your sins are as scarlet,
they will be as white as snow. Though they are red like crimson,
They will be like wool. As he goes on to say in chapter
44, I have wiped out your transgressions like a thick cloud, your sins
like a heavy mist. Return to me for I have redeemed
you. So the Lord Jesus takes the opportunity
of this intense opposition to comfort his people in the midst
of these wicked, wicked accusations. And then not only will all sins
be forgiven, the sons of men, but whatever blasphemies they
utter. It's extraordinary. For three
or four years now, 30-something years ago, I was a blasphemer. I went to university having been
to a sad church run by the Masons and then was taught by people
at university about how wonderful evolution was and how the Gospels
are all concocted and Christianity is a fraud. And sadly, I had
Christian so-called Christian witnesses in that place who caused
the Gospel to be despised amongst people. And I became a blasphemer
and it was not until my 23rd year that the Lord arrested me
on my road to hell and stopped me. But I look back on those
times now and I grieve and grieve and grieve over the fact that
I, like so many of the people in this land of ours, blaspheme
the Lord. And so these are words of comfort
as they were to Paul. who calls himself a blasphemer,
a persecutor, an injurist, but I obtained mercy because I did
it ignorantly in unbelief. Peter denied his Lord three times. There will times come upon the
Lord's people where they will fall and they will sin grievously
against their God. These are great words of comfort
in the midst of a dark, dark world. And so they accused the
Lord Jesus here of blaspheming. that the Lord Jesus in Mark 2
was accused of blaspheming and his miracle was done to prove,
in Mark chapter 2, it was done to prove his authority. that
you may know, you may know that the Son of Man has authority
on earth to forgive sins. So that which was at the heart
of the Lord Jesus' activities, the forgiveness of sins and the
restoration of his people is the very thing that these wicked
Pharisees and scribes come and accuse him of. And then we come
to that verse that has troubled so many people for so long in
3.29. So, all these sins will be forgiven
but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness
but is guilty of eternal sin. and the next verse highlights
and helps clarify this whole business of blasphemy against
the Holy Spirit because they were saying he has an unclean
spirit. So there are some things revealed
in the scriptures that help us to clarify what's going on here. I think one of the things that
we need to see at the outset is that there is an intense love
between the members of the Trinity. They forgive God's children shocking
sins but we'd be well advised to treat God who is a consuming
fire with reverence and awe. To offend one member of the Trinity
is to offend all of them and woe to those who do it and do
it habitually. Secondly, we live in a world
where there is just now open blasphemy of our Lord Jesus. It's just rampant. In fact, to
pay taxes in our land and in most Western countries is to
send some money to those who openly and unashamedly treat
the name of the Lord Jesus with contempt. Our governments openly
commit blasphemy. So we need to be warned. We live
in perilous times. God will not allow this to continue
indefinitely. And the most horrid judgements
and the most horrible things that come upon people have come
to nations who have had the light of the Gospel and have spurned
the light God has given them. we must remember that our God
is mightily provoked and his long suffering should cause us
to be mindful of the depth of the judgement to come because
judgement is now occurring. according to Romans 1. There
is a judgement in the future but judgement is now occurring
because the Lord God gives people over to their sins and blasphemies
and hardens their hearts. And so now we live in a land
where open sin is proudly boasted and people boast about their
freedom. But God says that they are slaves
and God says they are under judgement. And this unforgivable sin is
only committed by religious people. people who claimed to be the
ones that had an inside track with God, that they were the
ones who knew so much about God and so much about his word that
they could actually stand in judgement of God's dear Son. They are self-righteous, they
are proud and they openly oppose the light God has given them. They claim that they can see
clearly, so clearly that they can actually judge the Lord Jesus. They've come down from Jerusalem.
to expose the Lord Jesus as a fraud and a false teacher. This is
the unforgivable sin that these men had committed. So this sin
particularly relates to these scribes and Pharisees. In verse
30, it was because they were saying, he has an unclean spirit. And the other thing about this
sin is it's a sin of words, isn't it? And the Lord Jesus warns
us again and again to measure our words and to be careful about
our words. So the greatest enemies of God
and his people come from within the religious world and the religious
world that claims most passionately that they are the true worshippers
of God and all others are wrong. So, there's a great warning here,
isn't it? As God left testimony in the Old Testament of Lot's
wife and said, remember Lot's wife, he left testimony of Pharaoh
and his army buried in the Red Sea. God has sent these men to
hell as a testimony to people not to play games with God. And so the sin of blasphemy against
the Holy Spirit is a sin that doesn't involve ignorance. Timothy
acted in ignorance. Peter acted in ignorance. I acted
in ignorance. It's a sin that's committed by
men and women who willfully persist in unbelief, in obstinate unrepentance,
deliberately rejecting the counsel of God against themselves and
are therefore given up by God to a reprobate mind. J.C. Ryle describes it as the union
of the clearest head knowledge of the gospel with the deliberate
rejection of it and the deliberate choice of sin and the world. The Pharisees claimed to be the
ones who could make spiritual judgements, eternal judgements. So this willful, this unpardonable
sin is a willful, deliberate rejection of Christ by one who
is fully convinced and knows that he claims to be the Son
of God and the only Saviour of sinners. It's a deliberate refusal
to bow to him as Lord. It is choosing your life, choosing
to save your life rather than lose it to the dominion of the
Son of God. It is nothing less than running
over the top of the Son of God to get to hell. Now I know so often when you
speak to people they are fearful that this is a sin that they
have committed, that this is an eternal sin and God will never
forgive it. But the one thing that characterises
these men, and Mark's Gospel makes it really clear, is the
callousness and hardness of their heart. They continue to do it. Over and over again they have
the light of evidence before their eyes. They hear of the
demons proclaiming this man to be the son of God. They see him
performing miracles that only Messiah will perform. They hear his words and then
he proves his words by his miracles. And so it's a deliberate, ongoing,
callous rejection of who the Lord Jesus really is. It's a willful, persistent rejection
of the Gospel and a willful, persistent hardening of the heart
against the claims of the Lord Jesus in the Gospel. And so this
sin is an eternal sin. They are guilty of an eternal
sin. It's become acceptable, it's become common in some religious
circles for us to diminish the extent of what God says about
the punishments in hell. He says they are infinite, they
go on forever and ever. And for those who want to try
and push the Word of God to make it say that hell does not last
forever and that God loves people all the way up to hell and maybe
even loves people in hell or that God loves people to the
gates of hell and then turns around and hates them and then
there's some punishment that lasts for a little while and
then these people cease to exist, they're all saying that God is
not telling the truth. These Pharisees have spent the
last 2,000 years in hell. They are raised up for us like
Lot's wife. that we might remember. We mustn't
fail to declare the evilness of sin. Sin is an infinitely
evil thing. The only possible solution to
sin, any sin, is that the Lord Jesus must bear it as his own,
must suffer infinitely the punishment of God for it until justice cries
out, it's finished, enough. But for those who reject the
Lord Jesus and continue in willful rejection, there is nothing,
there is no hope and their eternity is a real eternity. I don't know
how that functions. We don't need to know the physics
of it. We just need to know that it's true. Hebrews 6 and Hebrews
10 and 1 John are reminders of how grievous it is for people
to hear the Word of God and to see the Gospel in its clarity,
to be challenged about it and then to reject God. Hebrews 6
says, For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened
have tasted the heavenly gift, who were made partakers of the
Holy Spirit, and have tasted the good word of God, and the
powers of the world to come, if they shall fall away, to renew
them again unto repentance, seeing they crucify them to themselves,
the Son of God afresh, and put him to open shame. Hebrews 10
If we sin willfully after that we have received the knowledge
of the truth, There remains no more sacrifice for sin. It's so easy, isn't it, in this
world for us to hear the Gospel, hear the Good News over and over
again and to be calloused by it, that it no longer impacts
us. God is saying, by the lives of
these Pharisees, please take God seriously. Please take the
evidence of the Gospel seriously. And so for those who ask have
I committed this eternal sin, the mere fact that you are troubled
in your heart about it is a sign that you haven't because the
Pharisees were not troubled in their hearts. They continued
down this road all the way to the cross and there they were
at the cross mocking the Lord Jesus as he hung there, hung
bleeding and dying and all they could do was mock him. When he
rose from the dead they continued their willful opposition to God
and his people. So God sent these Pharisees,
and he sent them to hell, that they stand as a memorial to all
who pass by. But there is great hope, isn't
there, that all sins will be forgiven men. all sins in the
Lord Jesus. So there is forgiveness with
God for all sins through the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. But the warning of these Pharisees
is that God will not always be gracious. And one of the other
lessons that I think I'd like us to take away from here is
that when God comes to us and speaks, and we hear him speak, we need
to take careful, careful notice. And particularly those of us
involved in religious things, if ever a warning comes into
our lives from anyone, we need to take it very, very seriously
indeed. We need to go back to the scriptures.
We need to go back to God. We need to go back to the Gospel. And we need to say to God, please
give me a heart of flesh. don't let me be like the Pharisees
and reject the counsel because as we saw last week, God is working
all things for the good of those who love him and are called according
to his purpose. And so everything that comes
into our lives comes from God. The Pharisees stand as a warning. The Lord Jesus uses their wickedness
as a means of proclaiming his faithfulness to his people, his
love for his people, his protection of them. He exposes the Pharisees
and at the same time comforts and cares for his people. And
that's the wonder of the Gospel, isn't it? The wonder of the Gospel
is that to those who are God's children, according to 2 Corinthians
2, it is a saver of life unto life. But for those who are perishing, It's an aroma of death unto death. And may God the Holy Spirit grant
us hearts of flesh lives of faith that trust our Saviour in all
things. And may we take His warnings
seriously as we live in this world where opposition is going
to come to the Gospel we proclaim from religious people always. May we plead with them as the
Prophet did that please Lord in your wrath remember mercy.