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Hey, you're listening to Cut for Time, a podcast from Faith Church, located on the north side of Indianapolis. My name is Claire Kingsley. I'm Anna Mitchell.

And I'm Dan Breitwieser. Each week, one of us will sit down with the person who gave Sunday's sermon to discuss their message. Cut for Time is a look behind the scenes of sermon preparation, and they'll share with us a few things that we didn't hear from the sermon on Sunday.

Thanks for listening. All right. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Excited to have you. Thank you, Anna. I'm looking forward to chatting a bit.

So you talked about Matthew 12, 31 through 32 specifically. What makes this a hard saying or a hard passage? Yeah, when I thought about that for our Sunday time together, I mentioned that there's a couple of ways I find it hard. One just being it's kind of hard to understand exactly what Jesus means by this, and this distinction between speaking against the Son of Man and the Holy Spirit, why one would be forgivable and the other not.

And the other is I just think it's a disturbing, in the emotional sense, to think that we could do or say something that would forever cut us off from God's love and forgiveness. Yeah, that is scary. How did you approach this topic? How did you prepare? Yeah, you know, I don't know how much I've seen people enjoy, but it might be, I guess, help us appreciate our pastors and speakers a little more.

I had several weeks to work on this passage, which I'm thankful for because I had a busy week last week. So the way I approached it is for several days, I just read through Matthew chapters 11 and 12, and I also worked through some of the central passages we were discussing in the great text, which is how I ran into or had impressed upon me the future sense of the verbs in those warnings. And then I had a lot of commentaries.

I was a little rusty or a little behind on my Matthew commentaries, so purchased a couple more of those, and I use Logos Bible software. So I've run out of room on my bookshelf, so I have a lot of my books now in that library. So I have over 25, 30 commentaries and helps that are on Matthew, but there were five or six that were particularly helpful.

I don't know that you need to, we need to go through all those, but each has their own strength. They were very helpful to me because I'm not that bright, so it's good to have some smart folks helping us. Yeah, I get that.

I feel like maybe build some more bookshelves, then you can fit some more books on it, you know? Yeah, yeah. Still fitting on my hard drive at this point. Is there anything in particular you would recommend to people looking to dive a little deeper? Yeah, there's kind of the classic go-to commentary for Matthew currently is in the New International Commentaries for the New Testament that Erdman's produced, and a New Testament scholar named has created or written that classic commentary, and it's pretty readable.

It's not real technical, so if you're looking for a good commentary on Matthew, probably the one I'd suggest if you're going to have one. Thanks. I'll look it up, maybe.

Yeah. So anyway, after all that kind of study, I take notes as I'm thinking through things for several days, and then when I'm actually ready to start preparing a sermon, the first thing I do, and this is what I was taught in my homiletics class in school, was I tried to develop a one-sentence summary of the main point that I hope to communicate. So for this sermon, that was persisting in the blasphemy of the Spirit will not be forgiven because it rejects the work of God that brings forgiveness.

So once I have that pinned down, what it is I want to communicate, then I'll start developing an outline, and once I get the structure of an outline in place, then I start looking for applications and illustrations to try to communicate effectively and give some people some hooks to remember on. Yeah. More than you're wanting to know.

Well, thanks so much for sharing the process. I think I want to move on to what you prepared for, the meat of the sermon. What does blaspheming the Spirit entail? One of the concerns is that it seems like you could maybe fall into this by accident or reach, I don't know, a limit of God's grace, God's tolerance with us.

Could you speak to that? Sure. It's hard. It was hard to get into in a sermon, but I think one of the problems with blasphemy is that blasphemy is actually a loan word from Greek.

So if you look, if you're reading the Greek New Testament, it's going to speak of blasphemy, blasphemeia. And so, you know, we've just kind of copied the word over. But in our setting, the word has picked up a lot of nuance and meaning that it didn't necessarily have in the first century when Jesus was speaking.

So it was a word typically used for slandering or demeaning of someone else. And today it's taken on a lot of religious overtones as being some kind of special, you know, God-type, divine-type curse or taking God's name in vain. And the best way I know to explain the danger here is if it makes so much sense.

For example, we have a word theater for a lot of different venues in our modern world. That word comes from the Greek word theotron. And if we were to say, well, a theater is a place where you go and watch a movie in a dark room with a bunch of people and then read theotron in our Bibles and assume that all those nuances read back into the New Testament, I mean, it's obviously ridiculous.

And that's just something you have to be cautious about. Our Bibles are translations, and we have to be careful not to assume all the nuances and meaning of the English word in our translations map directly back into Greek language. So that was an issue here that's kind of hard to understand or explain in a sermon, I guess, but actually a pretty simple concept when you get it.

Yeah. So Pharisees were basically slandering the Holy Spirit, the work of the Holy Spirit, demeaning it. So that's, I think, what Jesus is speaking against.

So, I guess, are you saying it's sort of important to consider the original text time period and language and audience before applying it to your own life? Well, you know, you need to understand Scripture, and it's kind of a touchy subject because we don't want to give people the impression that you can't read the Bible and understand it. I mean, clearly, you can't. You just need to have a few guardrails in mind that keep you on track and realizing that all the nuances of an English word shouldn't be pressed into service to come up with your interpretation, necessarily.

Yeah. In your sermon, you highlighted the word forgive, noting that it's in the future tense. Could you maybe give a brief overview of what you said about that? And then I was wondering, how does that tie into verse 32b when he says, in this age or in the age to come? Yeah.

Yeah. I didn't have time for that one either, did we? I went a little longer than I intended as it was. I should have picked it up in my English Bible as well.

Some translations don't pick up the future sense of that forgive and not forgive, but the translation we were using did. But for some reason, it didn't hit me initially. But when I realized that and then saw the other warnings about future judgment in the context, it just fell in place for me that what Jesus is talking about is a warning about how the state, you leave this life and then appear before God in the final judgment.

So that's just something I thought was important to work through because it deals with that fear that we might do something that cuts off all our chances for God to forgive us and find salvation in Jesus or even take that away. And I don't think that's Jesus' intent at all. He's giving a warning to us to prepare now for final judgment.

And if we refuse to, if we refuse to accept his provision, we will not find forgiveness. We'll be standing on our own merits at the final judgment. Now that that last phrase about either in this age or the age to come has caused some confusion in the past.

I know there have actually been some people that thought, well, that must mean that you if you miss your chance for forgiveness in this age, then you might have another chance in the age to come. But I think it's better to understand this as a Greek idiom that just means forever. We might say something like today and forever in an English idiom.

And by that, we're not making a distinction between the two periods where we just have an expression that means from now on forever. I don't know. And I guess I never thought about there being idioms.

And it's something we take for granted in our own language. It's very interesting. Yeah.

Our translations take care of a lot of them for us, thankfully. So, yeah. The sense, yeah.

Some detailed work goes into that. Yeah. In your sermon, you also mentioned that Jesus was speaking to the Pharisees.

I was wondering, why is it important to consider the specific audience? And how can this passage still apply to us? Like, I'd like to think I'm not a Pharisee, but... Yeah, that's... In this case, if you just read those verses in isolation, who knows what kind of understanding. Obviously, people have come up with all kinds of understanding of what it meant. But if you read it in the context of the story that is being told, the account that's being told of yet another controversy between Jesus and the Pharisees, it's clear that Jesus is giving a warning to them.

And it's also clear what they've done. They see this healing of this blind and mute man. They hear the crowd say, oh, wow, I wonder if this could be Messiah.

I wonder if this could be God's Redeemer. And the Pharisees, they just will not accept that. They don't find Jesus to be the right package for that to even be possible.

So they look at this work that was pretty obviously the work of the Holy Spirit in the life and ministry of Jesus, and they attribute it to Satan. And that's a pretty blatant refusal to accept God's offer, God's provision of salvation, attributed to Satan. That's pretty grievous error.

Yeah. When talking about the difference between blaspheming against the Messiah versus the Spirit, correct me if I'm misunderstanding this, but you said that Jesus was confusing to them, like they expected a warrior king to defeat the Romans. But they had seen the Holy Spirit at work for ages and ages and ages.

And so it was a bigger offense to blaspheme against the Spirit. Could you go into a little more detail? Yeah, I wouldn't classify it as a bigger offense. I think the situation is that it was understandable that people in Jesus' day were confused.

He did not look like the Messiah they were expecting, which was indeed a conqueror. But what was and should have been expected, which is what the people in this story saw, all the common people, was that even though Jesus didn't look like the Messiah they expected, it was pretty clearly obvious that God was working through him. And why do we say that? Well, it's just like Jesus pointed out to John the Baptist when he's confused.

Yeah, you're in prison. Things don't seem to be working out the way you thought they were. But look, look at all these wonderful evidences that God is at work through me, all these healings and this wonderful, inclusive teaching.

So it's not the issue is that basically Jesus, I think, is saying it's understandable that people would be confused by me, but it is less understandable that people would be not be able to identify the obvious prophesied outworking of the Holy Spirit in his life. So the issue is, the first, confusion is understandable. The second, and the confusion about the work of the Holy Spirit.

So obviously before then was just obstinate refusal to accept what God was doing. And I think, Anna, that we can relate to that in life as well. Sometimes there's understandable confusion about the way God shows up in our world.

And we can fail to see it. We can miss it. But to refuse to see the expression of God's love through the incarnate Son of God is basically to make the same mistake.

To miss the way God has showed up in Jesus Christ, our Savior. Yeah. The difference between our expectations and his actual actions.

Yeah. Do you have any advice on how to see what God's actually doing instead of moving forward and pushing with our own expectations? Yeah. You know, there's just kind of a Western notion of Christianity, prosperity, that assumes it's all part of that same package.

If we live a good life, basically God's promised to give us a good life back. It's kind of the natural human tendency to fall into this kind of business deal with God. It's a situation where we think basically we're controlling God.

If we keep our side of the equation, he's bound to keep his side of the equation. And it makes all kinds of sense from a human perspective. It's kind of the way we go through life.

We take care of and respond to each other in gracious ways. But it is not the way that God has chosen to respond and receive us. It's not on the basis of how good we've been, how we've been able to please and please other people that are in our Christian community or standing before God.

It is based solely on what Jesus Christ has done for us. So our need is total and the provision is total. And God's love is expressed through Jesus.

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for sharing today.

Is there anything else that you want to bring up right now? I think we beat this one pretty good. And thank you so much for kind of keeping me on track as I meander through my thoughts. Hey, thanks for sharing your thoughts.

I enjoy hearing them. Thanks again. Yeah, thank you so much.

Have a good day. You too. Bye.

Wow. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Cut for Time. If you wish to submit questions to our pastors following Sunday's sermon, you can email them to podcast at faithchurchindy.com or text them into our Faith Church texting number and we'll do our best to cover them in next week's episode.

If this conversation blessed you in any way, we encourage you to share it with others. We'll be back again next week.

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