Two things here about Jesus show that he never confounded recklessness with courage. (5) That the Holy Spirit in one's heart can be "quenched" is evident from the admonition, "Quench not the Spirit" (1Thessalonians 5:19). W. C. Allen writes: "In this war against Satan's strongholds there are only two sides, for Christ or against him, gathering with him or scattering with Satan." It was a rule in our old law, No sanctuary for sacrilege. Those who are themselves evil, have neither skill nor will to speak good things, as they should be spoken. And he answered and said unto them, An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign; but there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonah: For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale's belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. There is no halfway house. To my mind, the depth of such grace only enhances the beauty of Jesus, and is the very last possible ground that justifies man in thinking lightly of the Saviour. "So I said, 'Just clean round the bath will you while it's wet?' Why is this, but because those only are blasphemers against the Spirit, who slander his gifts and power, contrary to the conviction of their own mind? In ancient warfare it was the custom for the attacker to erect a huge mound which overlooked the battlements of the besieged city and from the height of the mound to bombard the defences. (2.) What concord or communion can there be between light and darkness, Christ and Belial, Christ and Beelzebub? And when he had agreed with the labourers for a penny a day, he sent them into his vineyard . Among the worst forms of blasphemy are those which twist sacred truths about God into lies. It will always remain true that "Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do." But you've come into a new family, of which ties are deeper and greater, and the bond is tighter. "The Lord of hosts has revealed himself in my ears. Such words were dreadful words indeed. It was going on, then, to the bitter end, and surely not without such suffering and sorrow as holy, unselfish, obedient love alone can know. Jesus reply in view of the response 12:25-37. We shall find something of these mysteries later on in this gospel; but here it is simply a Jewish testimony of Jehovah-Messiah in His unwearied love, through His twelve heralds, and in spite of rising unbelief, maintaining to the end what His grace had in view for Israel. In casting out demons Jesus showed that he was stronger than Satan. The Greeks defined justice as giving to God and to men that which is their due. He did not unpack." and who are my brothers? (4) And regarding certain violations of the Lord's table, Paul declared, "For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and some sleep" (1Corinthians 11:30). He didn't say, whatever you ask Mary, I'll give special consideration to, because every son gives special consideration to his mother. The people looked upon the Pharisees as a generation of saints, but Christ calls them a generation of vipers, the seed of the serpent, that had an enmity to Christ and his gospel. But Jesus said, no, really if you have hatred in your heart for your brother, you're guilty. What is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit? This done, with a word for the conscience appended, He takes up and pleads the cause of John. Of course, the facts of the cross were necessary to give it an evident and literal fulfilment; but we have it first apparent in His life, and it is blessed to see it thus accomplished, as it were, in what passed with Himself; fully realized in His own spirit, and the results exposed before the external facts gave the fullest expression to Jewish unbelief. How otherwise do your children cast them out? True Christianity may be hated, but it can never be disregarded. 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. One can reject Jesus Christ, but one cannot blaspheme the Spirit in the same sense in which Jesus contemporaries could. Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, in view of the context (Matthew 12:24-28), involved attributing Jesus works to Satan rather than to the Spirit. First of these comes the treasure hidden in the field, for which the man sells all he had, securing the field for the sake of the treasure. Thus it is shown that, though we have rich grace to the Gentile, there is the remembrance of natural relationship still. The two blind men called upon Him as the Son of David; a sample this of what will be in the end, when the heart of Israel turns to the Lord, and the veil is done away. There is an unpardonable transgression, and here is an example of it, "blasphemy against the Spirit." In other words, if a person wants to be technical on those things, the priests worked on the Sabbath days, but yet they were blameless. ." (1.) Finally, we have all wound up, after the going forth of a testimony which was truly universal in its scope, by the judicial severance at the close, when it is not only the good put into vessels, but the bad dealt with by the due instruments of the power of God. As we told you a couple of weeks ago, there are only two burdens that men have, and one is to do the will of God, and the other is to do the will of himself. But you could take preventive measures to keep him from dying, but that's all, nothing towards healing. Nor is this all. One of the modern saints of God is Father George Potter who, out of the derelict Church of St. Chrysostom's in Peckham, made a shining light of Christian worship and Christian service. Christ speaks here concerning idle words, and shows what evil there is in them (Matthew 12:36; Matthew 12:37); much more is there in such wicked words as the Pharisees spoke. And what makes this still more striking, is the certainty that the kingdom, bright as it is, is by no means the thing nearest to Jesus. But, as his biographer says, "His father was adamant, and much as the boy loved his home and its familiar surroundings, he was to know it no more.". The gospel is an act of indemnity; none are excepted by name, nor any by description, but those only that blaspheme the Holy Ghost; which therefore must be construed in the narrowest sense: all presuming sinners are effectually cut off by the conditions of the indemnity, faith and repentance; and therefore the other exceptions must not be stretched far: and this blasphemy is excepted, not for any defect of mercy in God or merit in Christ, but because it inevitably leaves the sinner in infidelity and impenitency. Many sincere people have been grievously troubled with apprehensions that they had committed the unpardonable sin; but let it be observed that no man who believes the Divine mission of Jesus Christ, ever can commit this sin: therefore let no man's heart fail because of it, from henceforth and for ever, Amen. In Matthew 14:1-36 facts are narrated which manifest the great change of dispensation that the Lord, in setting forth the parables we have just noticed, had been preparing them for. "Can a woman forget her sucking child? Most clearly it is not so much a question of sin in the aspect of uncleanness (typifying deeper things, but still connected with the ceremonial requirements of Israel, as we find from what our Lord said in the chapter to the cleansed leper). That which is in the heart can come to the surface only through the lips; a man can produce through his lips only what he has in his heart. Thus, whatever the peculiarity of the new blessings, the old thing could be taken up, though upon new grounds, and, of course, on the confession that Jesus is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. He's already pointed out in the Sermon on the Mount, that through their interpretation of the law, they have thoroughly disallowed the law, for the purposes that God intended it. It is enough to meet a difficulty which many feel by the simple plea that the reason assigned is in my judgment a valid explanation, and in itself a sufficient solution of the apparent discrepancy. But it was made for man, because man needs rest.So here in chapter twelve, the beginning, we find Jesus in one of His controversies with the religious rulers, once again the issues over the Sabbath day. 2. Or how they would create men, how they would deal with free moral agency, how they would deal with choice. Here are three arguments by which he demonstrates the unreasonableness of this suggestion. This, of course, is not the moment to unfold it. The word describes something worse than physical adultery; it describes that infidelity to God from which all sin, physical and spiritual, springs. IfPsalms 8:1-9; Psalms 8:1-9 goes farther, surely that was for the Son of man, who for the suffering of death was exalted. And when a person comes to that place in his rejection of Jesus Christ, where he begins to deny this obvious evidence that God puts in his path, and begins to try to explain away the evidence that God is placing before him, that person is coming close to that place testified in John 12:38 ,where the Pharisees finally came; therefore, they could not believe. Doubtless, it was contingent upon the utter ruin of Israel through their unbelief; but the fall of the lesser thing opened the way for the gift of a better glory in answer to Peter's faith in the glory of His person. The hatred of theologians, the odium theoligicum is one of the tragedies of the Christian Church. A great tempest. Most people would rather have security than adventure, and the older they grow the more that is so. Basically, it is the refusal to harken to the work of the Spirit within your life. God came to the place were He was sick of their sacrifices, because they had began to really do their evil with sort of the concept, well, we can always go offer a sacrifice and be forgiven. Matthew gives no such details, but call and mission are together here. We have already seen (compare notes on Matthew 12:1-8) that the Hebrew phrase a son of man means simply a man, and that the Jews used this phrase when they desired to speak of any man. Because you've got eyes. God finally said, look I am sick of your sacrifices; I don't want to smell them anymore. They measured Jesus by their own impotence. Here again is found a fresh case of the same remarkable principle of selection of events to form a complete picture, which I have maintained to be the true key of all. Now of this general condition, variously described as death while one lives, a sin unto death, the quenching of the Spirit, worse than being an alien sinner, and impossible to renew, and for which there is no need to pray - all such sins qualify for Mark's description, "an eternal sin.". But the mission is given here in strict accordance with what the gospel demands. We have already said that this incident was crisis. To him who compares this with Luke 6:1-49, there need not remain a question as to the identity of the scene. "What man will there be of you," he said, "who will have a sheep, and, if the sheep falls into a pit on the Sabbath day, will not take a grip of it, and lift it out? . In face of all this the answer of Jesus is clearly delineated. Work had to be defined. Behind it there is a favourite Old Testament prophetic picture. "He that is not with me is against me," is a test that we ought to apply to ourselves. God said, "I would rather that you would have mercy then offer sacrifices." Israel must give full testimony in the bright day of His coming. If a man shall simply blaspheme against God, he is not declared to be beyond the hope of pardon; but of those who have offered outrage to the Spirit, it is said that God will never forgive them. This finds its fitting place, not in Luke, but in Matthew, particularly as the details here (not in Mark, who only gives the general fact) cast great light upon God's dispensational ways. for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. 2. This, then, I apprehend to be the reason why we End two demoniacs mentioned; whereas, in Mark or Luke for other purposes, the Spirit of God only draws attention to one of the two. In other words, the leper is here introduced after the sermon on the mount, though, in fact, the circumstance took place long before it. Nothing but the salt of grace, cast into the spring, will heal the waters, season the speech, and purify the corrupt communications. So they rose up against them in battle on the Sabbath, and they slew them with their wives and children and cattle, to the number of a thousand people" ( 1Ma_2:31-38 ). See Proverbs 10:11; Proverbs 10:13; Proverbs 10:14; Proverbs 10:20; Proverbs 10:21; Proverbs 10:31; Proverbs 10:32. Then follows the rise of what was great in its littleness till it became little in its greatness in the earth; and the development and spread of doctrine, till the measured space assigned to it is brought under its assimilating influence. "Now Jesus, as we get to the end of chapter thirteen, we discover had earthly brothers and sisters inasmuch as they were sons of Mary and Joseph.