OF UTMOST CONCERN TO MATURE BELIEVERS: THE SALVATION OF UNBELIEVERS
Former pastor of the First Baptist Church of Jonesboro, Charles Carter, told about being confronted by an unbeliever who engaged him in conversation about his preaching “Salvation is found only in Jesus Christ - for there is no other name given to men by which we must be saved.”
The challenger presented his arguments in favor of ways other than Jesus Christ, based on his opinion that a God of love would never send a soul to hell.
Carter reiterated key points: All have sinned and need to be saved . . . God so loved us that He gave His Son to die for our sins . . . If we admit that we are sinners, repent, and by faith accept Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, we will be saved and go to heaven. Furthermore:
God does not want anyone to go to hell. Therefore, because of His great love, God gave His only begotten Son . . . To reject God’s gift of salvation is to send oneself to hell. Finally:
We both have a right to disagree, but think of your argument versus mine this way:
If, after all has been said and done, you are right . . . neither of us has anything to worry about. However, if I am right . . . you have everything to worry about.
After his long and arduous search for meaning in life, Solomon concluded that the Lord God is awesome and to be feared . . . but He is awfully good to those who trust and obey Him.
As we concluded our study of Solomon’s arguments which he employed to demonstrate the futility of seeking fulfillment in life apart from God, my challenge was: Be concerned about unbelievers who deny the sovereignty of God . . . defy God’s commands . . . disavow God’s Way of salvation. As for all of you:
Paul said it best, writing to the Corinthians: “You yourselves are our letter, written in our hearts, known and read by everybody.” To you we say: Your love of, fear of, obedience to the Lord is well known . . . Yes, we are concerned about your well-being . . . we are not, however, worried about your salvation. Each of you can say, “I know whom I have believed and am persuaded . . .”
In times like these, however, everyone needs a Savior; therefore, pray for a great spiritual awakening that stirs the hearts of unbelievers - turning them from sin unto salvation - also pray for professing Christians – who need to go back to the Bible for a renewal of Christian faith and practice. Regeneration the unsaved need! Renewal the saved need!
There are folks – among the saved as well as the unsaved - who do not like the hard sayings of Jesus, and therefore modify them to suit personal preference for a gentler approach to dealing with hardened sinners - but to no avail!
When the matter of “life or death” is on the line, someone whose presence commands attention and whose power to change broken lives for God and for good is evident, must step forward and speak the truth in love - tell it like it is!
Comes Jesus of Nazareth, on His way to the Cross, having been in the public eye long enough to be seen as a threat by religious leaders because of the crowds that followed him - to witness His miraculous healings of mind, body and soul!
His enemies - who wanted no part of a peasant carpenter from Nazareth going all over the place, proclaiming liberation from sin, preaching the arrival of God’s Kingdom, healing the sick, pronouncing judgment on those who reject Him as Savior – set the stage for Jesus tell it like it is – Matthew 12:22-32 . . .
In this passage . . . Jesus confirmed His identity as “the Christ” who had come to fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah -“The blind receive sight, the lame walk, lepers cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead raised, the poor told the good news” (Matthew 11:4-6) . Then, Jesus was given the chance by his enemies to set them straight, to speak the truth in love.
Everywhere Jesus went, people “went out to see him”. . . Crowds gathered to hear Him. Very soon they began to laud Him as “One sent from God”.
Spies were dispatched by high-ranking officials to see what He was up to - to observe what Jesus did and said, then report back to the authorities.
All the hullabaloo eventually came to a climactic confrontation on the first day of the Week of Passover when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey. Crowds lined the streets, and they chanted: “Hosanna! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the King of Israel!”
When the Pharisees heard that crowds had gone out to meet him and to proclaim His sovereignty, quickly these egotists huddled and “said to one another, ‘See, this (spy scheme of ours to intimidate him and get rid of him) is getting us nowhere. Look how the whole world has gone after him!”
Folks: You know the rest of the story – the sordid story that unfolded later that week after enemies of Jesus huddled . . . to come up with a devious plot to “get” that miracle-worker being hailed as the Messiah . . . by getting him before Roman officials whom they had in their hip pocket!
Jewish rulers could not kill Jesus . . . Roman authorities could! Undercover Jews in high places set Jesus up for the kill, but publicly, Roman officials (paid under the table) did their bidding of carrying out a mock trial and execution.
What neither Jerusalem nor Rome could silence by a coup d’état was Truth. Sooner or later, Truth always prevails! God’s Word - that which became flesh and dwelt among us – was God’s Truth Incarnate - in word and in deed.
Thus, the human body inhabited by the Living Word could be killed but not kept in the tomb of silence. Of course, at this particular time, they did not know that. Were they ever in for the shock of their lives! To be celebrated on Easter Sunday!
Try as His enemies might - to still His voice, to stamp out His message - not one has ever succeeded – and there have been, and still are many whose aim it is to “take Jesus out”, especially His warning about the sin that God will not forgive!
To “take Him out”, many strategies were employed by His enemies - such as: brand Him as a “traitor” or accuse him of “blasphemy” (a sin of which they themselves were guilty) or “set Him up” as if He had committed a dastardly deed of which they knew he was not guilty. Their ulterior motive? To turn people against Him and therefore away from Him!
So, they spread the falsehood that “this Jesus whose words you ignorantly listen to, and whose actions you blindly believe to be in your best interests, is none other than one of Satan’s operatives” – a charge which Jesus totally destroys via logic:
“Why would Satan cast out demons which he himself afflicted these folks with? To do so would defeat his own plan of seeking to destroy lives. You yourselves have seen the evidence of healing which could not have occurred if Satan had not been bound and rendered helpless by me. If Satan is behind the exorcisms you see me perform, your charge against me would also have to be leveled against your own doctors who have been performing exorcisms for years.”
“No, that cannot be! Our practitioners are in no way connected to Satan!” “True”, said Jesus, “neither is the Son of Man who stands before you!”
Now . . . the charge leveled against Jesus by elitist enemies gave our Lord the chance to use their obvious blasphemy as an illustration of the seriousness of sin against the Holy Spirit.
In Biblical teaching, the Holy Spirit was God’s instrument of revelation, God’s illuminator to human minds of truth and understanding. As taught in the Bible, anyone whose trust is in the Lord God needs (must have) the Holy Spirit - both to receive and to recognize God’s truth.
Plainly put: “There is in each of us a Spirit-given faculty (spiritual insight . . .) which enables us to recognize truth and the goodness thereof when we see it.”
A person who for long enough resists the truth as revealed by the Spirit, shuts his eyes or ears to God’s Way, turns his back on the messages God constantly sends his way, chooses the world’s broad way in rigid preference to the narrow way of righteousness - then comes to a stage or “point of no return” at which he rigidly refuses to recognize God’s truth and goodness but, instead, ridicules the good, rejects the good - calling it evil and attributing it to the work of Satan - is guilty of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit of God. Unforgivable!
Why is this sin unforgivable? For one reason, and one reason only: When a person reaches that concrete stage of unbelief, repentance is out of the question - in their way of thinking. Resistors see themselves as superior to all others, therefore believe they have no need to repent. In their minds, they are “the captains of their souls, the masters of their fate” – a fatal choice to make!
None of you has committed, or ever will commit, the unpardonable sin for one reason, and one reason only: You have given your heart and life to Jesus, and your life is evidence of your salvation - for as Mama and Paul said, “I can read you like a book!” Amen!
