367. The Unpardonable Sin

The Unpardonable Sin

Mat_12:31-32 : ’93All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.’94

Heb_12:17 : ’93He found no place of repentance though he sought it carefully with tears.’94

Let it be understood at the outset that the Protestant pulpit has not any revelation not made to the Protestant pew. Ministers of religion have no right to lord it over God’92s heritage. When we preach we do not utter edicts, but only offer opinions. In this day, when the Bible is in almost every house and in almost every hand, let every man understand that he has an equal right with others to interpret the Word of God, asking only divine illumination.

You see from the reading of the first passage that there is a sin against the Holy Ghost which never will be pardoned. A man having committed it is bound hand and foot for the dungeons of despair. Sermons may be preached to him, songs may be sung to him, prayers may be offered in his behalf, but all to no purpose. He is a captive for this life and a captive for the world to come. Has any one in this audience committed that sin? Mark you, all sins are against the Holy Ghost, but the one spoken of in the text is a very particular sin, and differs from all other sins that a man ever committed or ever can commit.

In my opinion, the sin against the Holy Ghost was ascribing the works of the Spirit to satanic agency. Indeed, the Bible distinctly so declares. Here is a man who is restored to sight after having been blind, and in Christ’92s time a man says to him, ’93That’92s the work of Beelzebub’94; or a man dead is brought to life by the Lord Jesus, and some one says, ’93That man was brought to life by satanic power, and not by Divine power.’94 As soon as a man thought that or said that he dropped under the curse of the text.

I do not believe it is possible to commit that sin in our time. I think it only could be committed in apostolic times. The day of miracles has ceased and Christ is not present in body, and I have the opinion that that sin cannot be committed in our own day. However, it is a very dangerous thing to say anything against the Holy Ghost, and the human race has been most mercifully kept from that. You have heard men swear by the name of Almighty God, and swear by the name of Jesus Christ; but you have never heard any one swear by the Holy Ghost; so that, looking over this audience this morning, I can feel there is salvation for all. It is not as when they put out in the life-boats from the Loch Earn to the Ville du Havre, and the sailors knew there was room for only a part of the passengers. How badly those sailors must have felt when they got some of the passengers into the life-boats and then pulled away, leaving others to perish! I am glad that the Gospel lifeboat is large enough to take in all the people, and I can confidently this morning invite you to come aboard this old Gospel craft.

But there are persons here who are afraid that they have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, and that they can never be pardoned. A sailing vessel is becalmed mid-Atlantic’97becalmed for one day, two days, three days, four days, five days, six days. The captain walks the deck and says, ’93It seems to me that the gales of heaven have forsaken this ship, and that we will never get into harbor.’94 But after a while the sails begin to flutter, and the water begins to ripple, and after a while the sails are full, and the ripple of the sea becomes a great billow. Is it very hard work to persuade that captain that the gales of heaven have not forsaken the ship? Now, you are here this morning, and you have an anxiety of soul lest you have committed the unpardonable sin. That very anxiety was produced by the Holy Ghost, and shows you are not forsaken. For this is a divine simile, the Holy Spirit compared to the winds of heaven. And this anxiety which you feel in regard to this subject, and this earnest question that you are asking, are proof positive that your soul is being moved upon by the Holy Ghost, and you are not becalmed forever. There is an opportunity of getting into the harbor.

But while it seems to me impossible that a man commit the sin spoken of in the first text, the second text that I read to you implies that a man may commit an irrevocable sin. That is, he may do a wrong that can never be corrected, he may do something for which afterward he shall seek a place of repentance and not find it, though he seek it with tears. Esau had a birthright. It meant temporal and spiritual blessing. In a fit of hunger one day he traded it off for something to eat. As though you should take bonds and mortgages and government securities, and in some fit of recklessness or hunger you should go into a restaurant and put down these valuables and legally transfer them in order that you might get some kind of food. Esau for a mess of pottage sold his birthright. He was very sorry about it afterward, but he could not get it back. He sought a place of repentance, and sought it carefully and with tears, but could not find it.

Now, while I do not think it is possible for you to commit the unpardonable sin spoken of in the text, it is possible for you and for me to make irrevocable mistakes, and in this class of irrevocable mistakes, in the first place, I put the follies of a misspent youth. At forty, or fifty, or sixty years of age we may wake up and say, ’93Oh, the neglects of my early studies when I was at school or college; how I neglected geology and mathematics and chemistry; I wish I had not neglected them; how very helpful they would have been to me in the duties of life; I am sorry.’94 Are you sorry? You will never get back those advantages, it does not make any difference how sorry you are. God will forgive you, but you will never forgive yourself. You may say, ’93Oh, if I had only disciplined my mind when I had the opportunity!’94 I do not wonder at your regret. You can seek a place of repentance; you will seek it in vain, you cannot find it. A man at fifty years of age says, ’93Oh, I wish I had not on me these habits of indolence! When will I ever get rid of them?’94 Never. Every stroke of work you do will be against the protest of your entire physical nature. You get that habit on you when you are twenty or twenty-five years of age, and you never will get over it.

Where is the man who has not an idea in his mind that somewhere in the future there will be a time when he can correct his mistakes. If we only repent in time God will forgive us, and then it will be just as though we had never sinned. My subject runs in collision with that theory. There are those who go in the days of their youth and commit transgressions. They call it ’93sowing wild oats.’94 They say, ’93Oh, we’92ll get over these things after a while, and then we’92ll devote ourselves to high and noble enterprises.’94 ’93They that sow the wind will reap the whirlwind.’94 A man at forty or fifty years of age says, ’93Oh, if it wasn’92t for the sins of my youth what a strong constitution I would have had, and how useful I might have been to the world and the Church.’94 You are sorry. Are you? Yes, but that does not bring back the energy that you lost.

At the foot of this pulpit I met a clergyman at the close of the service. I said, ’93Where are you preaching now?’94 ’93Oh,’94 he replied, ’93I haven’92t preached any for years; I am suffering now for the sins of my youth; I shall never preach again.’94 I knew that man to be a consecrated man, honored in the highest degree in the neighborhood where he had preached the Gospel, wholly consecrated to the Lord; but he had on him the effects of the sins of his youth. Oh, there is a wonderful pathos in that passage of the Psalmist where he says, ’93Remember not the sins of my youth.’94 God forgave him, but the laws of nature never forgive, never forgive. They pursue a man for the sins of his youth; they pursue him to the gate of the grave, and they shake their fist at him after he has gone in, crying, ’93Pay me what thou owest!’94

God forgives, but the laws of nature never forgive. Why do I say this? To give annoyance to those who have only baleful retrospection? No, for the benefit of those young people. I want them to understand that people never get over the sins of their youth, though God may forgive those sins. I want them to understand that eternity is wrapped up in this hour. I want them to understand that a minute is not made up of sixty seconds, but of everlasting ages. Oh, what a dignity this gives to the lives of these young people! In the light of this subject, life is not something to be smirked about, not something to be danced at, but something to be weighed in everlasting balances, the balances of eternity. Young man, the sin you committed yesterday, the sin you commit today, the sin you shall commit to-morrow, will be an everlasting sin in some respects. God may forgive you, the laws of nature never will. The scars of that sin will be everlasting.

A father was trying to illustrate to his son his evil habits, and every time the son committed a sin the father drove a nail into a post until there were many nails in the post. The young man after a while began to repent of his sins and give up his evil habits, and every time he repented the father took a nail out of the post until after a while the nails were all gone out of the post. ’93But,’94 said the son, ’93father, the scars are all there yet.’94 God forgives, but the scars stay. Do not be under the infatuation, young men, that because God forgives you and because society after a while may forgive you, the laws of nature are ever going to forgive you. The follies of youth are irrevocable mistakes. There are a thousand men in this house who with hand uplifted to heaven would attest it.

In Belgium, sixty years ago, some miners got into a quarrel, and one set of miners, in order to get revenge on another set of miners, set fire to the mine where they were working. That fire has burned on for half a century; it is blazing today. They cannot put it out. It never will be put out until it is wrapped in the greater conflagration of the last day. It is easy to start a fire that never will be quenched. O young men, be not under the infatuation that the sins of your youth can ever be eradicated. God will forgive you, and you may enter heaven, but the scars will endure.

I will put amid these irrevocable mistakes parental neglect. We start our children. When they are ten years of age we wake up and try to correct this or that habit. It is too late. I believe that if parents do not make an impression upon a child for Christ and for heaven before ten years are past, they never will make any impression. Talk about people beginning life at twenty-one; life is decided between ten and twenty in nine cases out of ten. The following fifty years of not so much importance in the formation of character as the first twenty. A man wakes up at fifty years of age. He says, ’93I must become a Christian; here and now I yield my heart to God.’94 He goes home a Christian. He has spent all his life in worldliness and sin. He says, ’93Now let us call the family together and have prayers.’94 He opens his Bible. He says, ’93Call the family together.’94 Where are the family? One in New Orleans, one in Cincinnati, one in Boston, two in eternity. Ah, he cannot call his family together! I say it for the benefit of young parents, parents of twenty-five or thirty or thirty-five, now is the time for family prayers, now is the time to call your family together.

I do not think I was ever so much impressed by a picture as I was by one, although it was only a rough wood-cut that I saw in a window in Chamouni, Switzerland, a representation of a group of people that had been trying a few months before to climb the Alps. You know that people who climb the Alps have a rope put around the waist, and guides go ahead and guides come after. The rope connects them all together, so that if one slips the others may save him from fatality. Well, this group of eight or ten people were on the side of the mountains, all tied together, passing along on a very slippery place, and one slipped and dropped, and the others slipped and were going down this precipice, when one man, with more muscular power than the others, halted on the ice, struck his feet into the iceberg, and halted; but the rope broke! Fifty years from now, at the foot of that glacier, the rest will be found. Here is a whole family bound together by a cord of affection wandering on the slippery places of worldliness and sin. All given up to the world. No Christ in that family. All bound together and on the slippery places. Passing on down, the father at fifty years of age strikes his foot on the ’93Rock of Ages,’94 and halts. But the rope broke! the rope broke!

A ship carpenter in New York wakes up and says, ’93That vessel has been gone three days at sea. Why, there is a timber in that ship that ought not to have been there. It was worm-eaten.’94 Or, ’93I had a timber put in that ship that was the wrong kind of wood. Oh, I am so sorry about it! I am very sorry. I will correct it. I have another piece of timber to put in the place of it.’94 Correct it! That ship went down last night in a cyclone. Oh, the time to train our children for God and for heaven is at the start; it is at the start. When a man comes to fifty years of age and chooses God, I congratulate him, but oh, I think what a pity you did not come twenty-five years ago.

Among the irrevocable mistakes also I place unkindness to the departed. When I was a boy and a little reckless, my mother used to say to me, ’93De Witt, you will be sorry for this when I am gone.’94 I remember just how she looked, with her cap and spectacles. I remember just how she sat with the Bible on her lap. I laughed the admonition off, but she never said a truer thing in all her life. I have been sorry for it ever since. And yet we do unkindness to people. ’93Oh,’94 we say, ’93it don’92t make much difference; we’92ll apologize after a while, and if we don’92t apologize it don’92t make any difference.’94 Just wait until they are gone, and see how you will feel about it. A parent, without asking the circumstances of the provocation, boxes a child’92s ears. A little child falling in the street comes in all covered with the dust, and the parent, as though one disaster was not enough, whips it. After a while there will be a little slab on a grave in Greenwood, and on it, ’93Our Willie’94 or ’93Our Charlie.’94 The moral of which is: be kind to your friends while you have them. Be economical of your satire. Spare your scolding. Shut up in a dark cave from which they can never swarm forth all the words that have a sting in them. You will be sorry for them after a while’97very soon you will be sorry’97perhaps to-morrow.

David Hume had a most excellent Christian mother, and he set himself to work to overthrow her religion. David Hume was applauded in the courts of Europe, and his mother was fascinated with his popularity. David Hume came home, and this old Christian woman said, ’93Well now, here is my son; he is a great man, and he says religion is a sham, and it must be.’94 So she gave up her religion. David Hume one day riding from Edinburgh to London was met on the way by the postman, who handed him a letter. He opened the letter. It was from his mother, saying, ’93I am dying, and my philosophy gives me no comfort. I am in great sorrow. Come to me and comfort me, my son David.’94 Do you suppose that David Hume could ever undo the wrong he did that mother, either in this world or the world to come? He robbed her of her holy religion, and gave her a hollow philosophy that afforded her no peace when she died. Oh, these wrongs to the departed, they are irrevocable mistakes.

In this list I also put all lost opportunities of getting good. I never come to a Saturday night but I can see that during the week there were opportunities where I might have bettered my spiritual condition. I never come to a birthday but I think there were times during the past year that might have been made better, and I neglected the opportunity. I never leave this pulpit and go home, morn or night, but I regret that I did not better present the great truths of the Gospel. How is it with you? Have you lost any opportunities? If a farmer take a certain number of bushels of wheat, and he throw this wheat on a certain number of acres of ground properly prepared, he expects a proportionate number of sheaves. Have the sheaves of your moral and spiritual harvest corresponded with the truth and the advantages planted? I cannot tell you, my brother, my sister. You know. You know. What does that mean? Why, it means, if we are going to get any good out of this Sabbath we are going to get it before the hand of the clock turns around to twelve to-night. It means that opportunities gone are gone forever. It means while at our feasts the chalice may be passed to me and I may decline it, yet that very chalice may come back to me after a while; in this matter of the Gospel feast a chalice comes and I reject it’97it never comes back’97never. That one opportunity gone forever.

In this class I put all lost opportunities of usefulness. There is a chance of benefiting that man once’97never again. You have a business partner who is a proud, arrogant man. If ordinarily you should say to him, ’93Attend to the things of the soul, become a Christian,’94 he would say to you, ’93Mind your own business, and I’92ll mind mine.’94 But there has been an affliction in his household, and his heart is tender. He is looking for sympathy and solace. Now is your time, O man! Speak, or forever hold your peace. You are in a religious meeting. A great impression is being produced. Something says to you, ’93Now is the time for you to speak a word for God.’94 Your cheek flushes, you half arise from your seat, you sink back cowering before men whose breath is in their nostrils. Your neglect will tell on eternal ages. A lost opportunity of getting good or of doing good never comes back. You may fish for it; it will never take the hook. You may dig for it; it will never be found.

There are people in this house I have never met before, and I will never meet them again until the Judgment. If I miss this opportunity I miss my only opportunity. I want them to understand that every minute has two wings, and that it does not fly in a circle, like a hawk, but in a straight line from eternity to eternity, and that if a minute, if an opportunity, if a privilege get an inch against us, a hundredth part of an inch a-past us, a thousandth part of an inch a-past us, a millionth part of an inch a-past us, no man can ever come up with it. So I stand before men who have this day a glorious birthright. What was Esau’92s birthright compared with this? Birthright of a Christian ancestry. Birthright of Gospel privileges. Birthright of glorious Sabbaths. Birthright of national liberty. Birthright glorious beyond all description. Are you going to sell it? Satan wants to buy it. The world wants to buy it. Will you sell it? God forbid that you should make such a bargain as they offer for your soul! And so this morning I stand here and offer you all the pardon and peace of the Gospel ’93without money and without price.’94

I could play a sweeter harp, I could tell of gates of pearl and crowns of light, but of what advantage would that be to a man who has no preparation for that land, who is on the wrong road? And so I stand here inviting you to come; and while there are sins which we have committed which are irrevocable’97I confess it for myself, and you must confess it for yourselves’97there are sins which we have committed which are irrevocable, still, come now, let all come to the foot of God’92s throne of mercy and have our sins pardoned. Let us all be made right with God. Come, let us enter into the wide door of his mercy, that door so wide that you may all enter. I stand here, though a stranger to many of you, as it is every Sabbath morning and every Sabbath night, with just as much confidence as though I knew all your history, and I offer you pardon and peace and life and heaven, now and without one single exception.

Stuart Holland, the lad, stood on the Arctic. You know the Arctic was run down in a fog. Stuart Holland stood at the signal-gun. He was a mere lad, but he felt the responsibility. He thought if he could sound that gun so ships passing by could hear, perhaps all the passengers might be rescued. So Stuart Holland, the lad, stood at the signal-gun and fired it. It went over the sea, boom! boom! boom! The engineer left his place. The helmsman left his place. Some of the passengers fainted, some prayed, some blasphemed, some got off in the life-boats, some went off on rafts, but three hundred were drowned. But Stuart Holland stood at the gun, and kept sounding it and sounding it until after a while the powder was gone. Then he took an ax and went down to the magazine, and brought out more powder, and stood at the signal-gun, and it sounded over the sea, boom! boom! boom! When the ship sank, he sank. Oh, there are some of you in peril, immortal peril. Sickness will come on you. Death will come on you. Judgment will come on you. Eternity will come on you. In the most un-expected moment it will crash into you. Some get off in the life-boats. All is well. You are just as safe for heaven as if you were there. You may have your struggles and trials, but you are going into glory that is provided for you. You get into the lifeboat. Others are making no attempt to escape. So I stand here and I sound this signal-gun of the Gospel. ’93Now is the accepted time. Now is the day of salvation.’94 ’93Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thought, and let him return unto the Lord who will have mercy and unto our God who will abundantly pardon.’94 Now! Now! ’93Whosoever will, let him come.’94 Now! Now!

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage