There are a few questions that every preacher, teacher, and pastor have been asked countless times and one of them is, “What does it mean to blaspheme the Holy Spirit? I am afraid I’ve done it without knowing it.” This week we will be covering the famous Beelzebul controversy and looking into two very serious rejections in Yeshua’s/Jesus’s life and ministry.
Transcript below:
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20 Then he went home, and the crowd gathered again, so that they could not even eat. 21 And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for they were saying, “He is out of his mind.”
22 And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem were saying, “He is possessed by Beelzebul,” and “by the prince of demons he casts out the demons.” 23 And he called them to him and said to them in parables, “How can Satan cast out Satan? 24 If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. 25 And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. 26 And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but is coming to an end. 27 But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man. Then indeed he may plunder his house. 28 “Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter, 29 but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”—30 for they were saying, “He has an unclean spirit.”
31 And his mother and his brothers came, and standing outside they sent to him and called him. 32 And a crowd was sitting around him, and they said to him, “Your mother and your brothers are outside, seeking you.” 33 And he answered them, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” 34 And looking about at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! 35 For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother.”
There are questions that every teacher hears a lot. The first is, “Can a person who denies the Messiah ever come back into the fold,” and the second is, “What the HE double hockeysticks is going on with Ezekiel’s wheels?” and the third is, “What is the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.”
The third, may I point out, is generally asked by people who are scared that they have already accidentally somehow done it and have innocently damned themselves. But today, we’re going to look at exactly what Scripture says about it and how it is deliberate and rooted in religious pride.
Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have five years’ worth of blog at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids—and I have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com and transcripts can be had for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com
All Scripture this week comes courtesy of the ESV, the English Standard Version but you can follow along with whatever Bible you want. The book list that I am using and adding to over the course of these teachings can be found in the transcript for part two of this series on my blog theancientbridge.com.
Now, I read the whole rest of the chapter but we’re going to divide this into two teachings—not because they belong apart but because of time constraints. There’s just too much material to cover. Mark likes to do this sandwiching technique where he places one teaching in the midst of an entirely different teaching. Examples include the healing of the woman with the issue of blood wedged between Jairus coming to Yeshua on behalf of his dying daughter and Yeshua raising her from the dead, and the cursing of the fig tree followed by the cleansing of the Temple and returning to find the fig tree withered. Mark does this with related concepts in order to show a bigger picture, which in this case is the misconceptions and rejection of Yeshua by His own family and by the Scribes sent from Jerusalem. But this week, we will be focusing on the meat of the sandwich, namely the Beelzebul controversy. However, I will quickly cover the first two verses and will hit them again next week.
20 Then he went home, and the crowd gathered again, so that they could not even eat.
Where have we seen this before? This is even more serious than when people were crowding into the door of Peter’s mother in law’s house right before He healed the paralytic. When people won’t even allow you to eat, that’s just crazy.
21 And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for they were saying, “He is out of his mind.”
So, His family comes from Nazareth, presumably His mother and four brothers. Mary would obviously not be in charge here, but her sons. Whatever honor or dishonor He brings on to Himself, would transfer to His family. Know that if Jerusalem is sending official legal envoys, the family would be scared out of their minds. If He is ruined then they are too. David’s family experienced this as well, because they were not safe as long as Saul was hunting David—but they joined David, they did not oppose him. But, we’ll talk about that next week.
22 And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem were saying, “He is possessed by Beelzebul,” and “by the prince of demons he casts out the demons.”
Now, who were these scribes and how were they different than the scribes we see in the first two controversies? First, undesignated scribes were sitting in the house of Peter’s mother in law, silently accusing Yeshua of being a blasphemer when He claimed that the paralytic’s sins were forgiven. Because they were sitting in the house, they had obviously been given a seat of honor as educated men. But we see no affiliation. Were they simply city scribes, legal retainers? Were they local teachers of the Law? Hard to believe that a town the size of Capernaum would need very many of those, having only 1500 people. Matthew 9 also tells the story and again it just calls them scribes, BUT Luke five says that both Pharisees and teachers of the Law were in attendance, so there we go. So, they were teachers of the Law who might have been Pharisees. In the second controversy, concerning Yeshua’s choice of table companions, we are introduced to the “scribes of the Pharisees.”
But these aren’t those. These are scribes sent from Jerusalem. This isn’t a local squabble or a local controversy anymore—this has gone national. These were the Scribes of the scribes, the legal retainers of the Jerusalem elite, and quite probably sent by the Sanhedrin in order to determine if they had a blasphemer or a “seducer of a city” in play. Let’s look at M. Sanhedrin 10.4 and this is out of the Kehati commentary:
The citizens of an ir hanidachat have no portion in the world to come, for it is said, “Certain base fellows are gone out from you and have mislead the inhabitants of their city” (Deut 13:14). They are not killed unless the misleaders are from the same city and from the same tribe, and most of it has been misled and men mislead them. If women and minors are mislead it, or a minority of it are mislead, or its misleaders were outside it–then these are treated as individuals. And they need two witnesses and a warning for each one. This is more severe for individuals than for the many, for individuals are by stoning, therefore their property is spared; whilst the many are by the sword, therefore their property is lost.
So what is an ir hanidachat? It is a seduced city, a city where its inhabitants have been led astray into following after another God. Sometimes, I actually wonder if this is why Yeshua left Nazareth and worked so few miracles there—if they had been labeled a seduced city with Him as one of their own, they would have been in deadly peril. Capernaum, not so much.
But in order to enact this and to penalize a city for being seduced, there were actual legal requirements to be met. Multiple witnesses and actual warnings given to the person or persons who are going after other gods. You couldn’t convict people based on rumors or hearsay. It is very possible that the Jerusalem legal experts had been sent down in order to see if legal warnings were necessary and if this city was in danger of becoming apostate. Quick fun fact here—it is always up to Jerusalem and down from Jerusalem. Jerusalem was atop Mt Zion and although Mt Zion would only qualify as a hill by the standards of most countries, it was honored by being called a mountain and given the place of supremacy. You always go up to it and come down from it, no matter where you are going. If someone was traveling from Jerusalem to Mt Everest, you would still say they were going down to Mt Everest. Cute, eh?
Now, evidently the scribes felt they had dirt on Him because they were making the public pronouncement that Yeshua was in league with Satan and all His deliverances were just part of some massive plan of Satan’s to get people away from Yahweh. It’s like the ultimate conspiracy theory. Is it, however, at all plausible? And who is this Beelzebul? And why does the KJV say Beelzebub? Well, the Greek clearly says Beelzebul but in 2 Kings 1:2 there is a Ba’al Zebub, the god of Ekron (a Philistine city). It would seem that, despite the clear Greek, the KJV translators substituted in this Philistine god’s name as though it was an equivalent, which makes very little sense to me. But, you know, such things happen. No translation is perfect, no matter what anyone says. Beelzebul, on the other hand, makes perfect sense within this greater story because, if it is a straight transliteration from Hebrew then it means “Lord of the House” and I don’t know if you have ever noticed, but the word house, oikia, appears in this account five times. That’s a lot. Even more times if you look at the references to His family remaining outside—outside what? The house, of course. But Lord of the flies? It really is meaningless.
The scribes from Jerusalem are accusing Him of being possessed by the master (ba’al) of the house (zebul) and that he evidently has special permission to cast out demons in order to put on a show and lead people astray. This isn’t the only time He will be accused of this either—in John 7:20, 8:48, 8:52, and 10:20 at the Feast of Sukkot:
20 The crowd answered, “You have a demon! Who is seeking to kill you?”
48 The Jews answered him, “Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?
52 The Jews said to him, “Now we know that you have a demon! Abraham died, as did the prophets, yet you say, ‘If anyone keeps my word, he will never taste death.’
20 Many of them said, “He has a demon, and is insane; why listen to him?”
But note that every accusation either comes from people from Jerusalem or in Jerusalem and I believe the only people outside of Jerusalem who ever question His sanity are the members of His own family. Strangers are flocking to Him, while His own family is utterly scandalized by His behavior and are undoubtedly worried that he will be labeled as a deviant, which was like fate worse than death.
As for charges of sorcery, those don’t pop up until later in Rabbinic writings and so they are probably anachronistic legends. At His trial, certainly, no one accused Him of it. I will only cite Talmud Bavli Sanh 43a:
There is a tradition (in a Barraitha): They hanged Yeshu on the Sabbath of the Passover. But for forty days before that a herald went in front of him (crying), “Yeshu is to be stoned because he practiced sorcery and seduced Israel and lead them away from God. Anyone who can provide evidence on his behalf should come forward to defend him.” When, however, nothing favorable about him was found, he was hanged on the Sabbath of the Passover. Ulla commented: “Do you think that he belongs among those for whom redeeming evidence is sought? Rather, he was a seducer [of whom] the All-merciful has said: ‘Show them no pity… and do not shield them.’ (Deut 13.8b NRSV) In Yeshu’s case, however, an exception was made because he was close to those who held [political/religious] authority.”
This obviously isn’t corroborated by any first-century source and might have been penned as late as 600 CE. But Josephus certainly doesn’t back up the charges—not even in the uncorrupted Arabic. No one ever says that Yeshua was politically well-connected or that the Sanhedrin was seeking evidence for forty days prior. Or that He was accused of sorcery instead of blasphemy. As I said, although much information in the Talmud is legitimate legal arguments, there is also legendary material of dubious authenticity.
So, two charges (1) He is possessed, and (2) he can only cast out demons because He is in league with the prince of demons. And now Yeshua is about to give His answer, in parables—there are actually two. First parable:
23 And he called them to him and said to them in parables, “How can Satan cast out Satan? 24 If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. 25 And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. 26 And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but is coming to an end.
The first thing we should notice is that Yeshua doesn’t refer to Beelzebul, whom was being referred to by the Scribes as the prince of demons. Yeshua used Satan, the Hebrew word for adversary. Yeshua went straight to the top, so to speak, or maybe the bottom depending on how you look at it. So, how can Satan cast himself out—isn’t it contrary to his expressed nature? Didn’t He exalt himself to the throne of Yahweh Himself? Hasn’t He been trying to win and never trying to lose? Is it in Satan’s nature to “take one for the team” and allow his hold on people to be weakened?
Take a look at Genesis 15 and Abraham’s encounter with the King of Sodom. The King of Sodom tells Abraham that he can keep all of the money—all he wants is his people back. In the garden, the serpent doesn’t try to take over the Garden but the people. This is what the enemy always does throughout Scripture—he goes for the play which will win himself more and more authority over more and more of God’s greatest and most precious creation—people. The battle of the ages between Yahweh and Satan is 100% about people. Nothing else matters. Satan doesn’t take losses willingly. He isn’t a general biding His time, He is a conqueror bent on conquest.
But there is more here than just talking about Satan. Yeshua is talking about their own political history. Why are Herod and the Romans in charge in the first place? Because of a civil war between the grandsons of John Hyrcanus, the great-grandsons of Simon the Wise, last surviving brother of Judah Maccabee. Although Simon was a wise and just Prince and John Hyrcanus was an effective ruler, the leaders after him, who called themselves kings, were as brutal, petty, and bloodthirsty as any tyrants the Gentiles had to compare them with. Aristobulus I starved his mother and brothers in prison so he could take the throne. His brother Alexander Jannaeus was so bloodthirsty that he crucified 800 Pharisees, forcing them to watch the murder of their wives and children—all while he was having an orgy to celebrate the defeat of his political enemies. Although there was a brief season of peace when his wife succeeded the throne, her sons enmeshed the kingdom in such a terrible civil war as they battled for the throne that Rome finally had to intervene, once and for all, and install Herod the Great on the throne. Needless to say that the Romans might have someday conquered the area again, but they hardly had to lift a finger with all the infighting. The responsibility for the destruction of the short-lived reconstituted kingdom under the Hasmonean heirs was entirely the fault of Jewish infighting. And the Sadducees and Pharisees knew it.
And so Yeshua is throwing it back into their faces. “Do you really think Satan would fare any better than our ancestors if he were to fight against himself?”
But not only were they daily living with the consequences of a divided Kingdom, but there was still bitter infighting going on between the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Herodians—who had very little in common except genetics. Even the Pharisees were divided into two schools, those of Hillel and Shammai and they were constantly fighting for dominance over various issues of observance. The Jews were as divided as they were accusing Satan of being. And Yeshua was flat out telling them that there would be grave consequences—which would be all too clear come 66 CE when the Romans finally decided enough was enough and put an end to the Jewish rebellions (they thought) once and for all. Of course, that would only really happen after the Bar Kochba revolt. But their refusal to love one another and be united cost them everything. The Temple would be destroyed and Jerusalem would be remade as a fully realized pagan city, Aelia (eye-lee-ah) Capitolina and we all know how long they were gone before they were able to reclaim Israel, and still, there is nothing but strife in the region. Israel today is still a deeply divided nation of Jews ranging from completely secular to ultra-Orthodox. It’s a heart issue—Israel needs to be united around God. Nothing else works. Not even with the best administration or the most brilliant minds.
So, yeah, Yeshua is insulting their accusation—saying that their own history shows their logic to be beyond flawed. And here’s the second parable:
27 But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man. Then indeed he may plunder his house.
Very short parable, but also a very vivid picture. And I want to point out that this is the only place in Mark’s Gospel where He explains how and why He can deliver people from demonic torment. At some point, He managed to bind Satan, not collaborate with him. It never says when this happened, mind you, only that he is indeed bound. I am inclined to think that it happened at the end of the wilderness temptation because after that is exactly when Yeshua began to perform deliverance on people and when the demons started crying out when they saw Him.
Remember they referred to Beelzebul? Lord of the house? Well, the last parable had two references to a house and so does this one. The strong man, Satan, is obviously master of his own house—unless he encounters a stronger one. The stronger one, Yeshua, bound Satan in the wilderness and then immediately went to Capernaum to the synagogue and began teaching and amazing everyone there with His authority. An unclean spirit, inhabiting a man, cried out against Yeshua in the synagogue and Yeshua set the man free. This was His first miracle. Satan had been already bound—and perhaps this is why Yeshua was led by the Spirit into the wilderness in the first place, for the express purpose of binding Satan. And then He went out like Joshua and Caleb driving out the enemies—but not people. Saving people from the true enemies. So, it really shouldn’t surprise us that deliverance is the most often mentioned miracle in the Gospel of Mark. This is the prime job, pre-crucifixion, of Yeshua as the Yahweh-Warrior, defeating the spiritual enemies who are oppressing His people. The reason why He was crucified wasn’t that He was threatening the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Herodians—it was because He had bound Satan and was looting His Kingdom. What’s the loot? People, of course. Let’s go back to Isaiah 40 again:
10 Behold, the Lord God comes with might, and his arm rules for him; behold, his reward is with him, and his recompense before him. 11 He will tend his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms; he will carry them in his bosom, and gently lead those that are with young.
Here we have Adonai Yahweh, the Lord God, with His “arm” ruling for Him (remember the Great Isaiah Scroll found among the Dead Sea Scrolls said that this arm is the Messiah. He is returning to Zion, Jerusalem, with His spoils of war—His people. This is how Mark portrays Yeshua’s mission, to herald the Kingdom and to despoil Satan’s possessions. Also, let’s look at Isaiah 53, the suffering servant song:
12 Therefore I will divide him a portion with the many, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong, because he poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and makes intercession for the transgressors.
More talk of spoils, this is battle language in the wake of the servant’s victory. If you recall, when I taught about the Yahweh Warrior about six weeks ago, I mentioned the Melchizedek scroll and the Testaments of Levi and Zebulun where the Yahweh Warrior is clearly portrayed as binding Beliar. There are some seriously deep roots on this stuff, folks.
Yeshua is systematically dismantling Satan’s power structure and chokehold on humanity. If it isn’t clear enough at this point, it certainly would be as paganism throughout the Roman Empire came to be replaced with a monotheism birthed at the cross of Christ. Syncretism and militarization would not begin to occur for hundreds of more years, but that early church turned the world upside down in a hurry. Regardless of what happened centuries later, Rome fell to Yahweh and His Messiah.
28 “Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter, 29 but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”—30 for they were saying, “He has an unclean spirit.”
People ask me all the time if they have accidentally blasphemed the Spirit. I used to reassure them that it was pretty much impossible, but I have reconsidered my position and I will tell you why. The scribes here were sure that this guy who offended them so much and who disagreed with them on so much and who taught in His own authority couldn’t possibly be allied with Yahweh. Could they point to actual gross sin? No. They really just didn’t like Him and what He was saying and how He was saying it. They even had to come up with a convoluted reason as to how He was working all these miracles—Beelzebul was behind His “power.” But these good works weren’t exactly supportive of the demonic agenda, which is to steal, kill, and destroy. He wasn’t pointing anyone toward other gods. He wasn’t telling anyone to set aside even one jot or tittle of the Torah—just some people’s interpretations of it. Yeshua wasn’t getting rich doing what He was doing, but His every action seemed to be a judgment of their lifestyles. He ate with the wrong people—oh, the horror! He pronounced “obvious” sinners forgiven. He performed non-lifesaving acts of mercy on the Sabbath and in the synagogue, no less. He touched a leper, and he wasn’t even a priest. He was just altogether the wrong sort of person. He wasn’t an elite. He was from Nazareth. It was a shameful thought to even contemplate a prophet would finally rise up and it would be this guy of uncertain parentage. His disciples weren’t learned men but tradesmen and tax collectors and the like. They didn’t like Him. They didn’t like what He was doing. They didn’t like what he was saying. They didn’t like how He was doing and saying it. He didn’t show the proper deference for scribal authority. Good gracious, He didn’t come from Judea! Or so they imagined.
Yeshua, here, begins with Amen, which is generally translated into English as “truly”—in the Bible, Amen is spoken in order to affirm someone else’s words (usually God’s) but never one’s own words. Yeshua is the only person in Scripture who says it in order to endorse His own words and he does it thirteen times in the Gospel of Mark. That’s actually huge—it’s almost akin to saying, “I am.” So we know that He is deadly serious about what He is about to say: “Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter…” and this actually says “whatever blasphemies they blaspheme” so we do a double-down on the blaspheming here. But still, it will be forgiven. Whatever slanders people speak about Yahweh, or Yeshua or you or me, all forgivable. But “…but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”—
Make no mistake, when they looked at these miracles and said it was Satan, they weren’t just slandering Yeshua. They were (1) saying that Yahweh was not intervening and keeping the promises spoken through the prophet Isaiah, and (2) that these works didn’t strike them as particularly being representative of Yahweh’s character. It’s like they were looking at Yeshua and saying, “No, I know what the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is like and He isn’t like this guy. I don’t see the family resemblance. The doctrines are all wrong and He’s criticizing us and not the Romans.”
This is a warning to all of us—just because we don’t like a messenger, or how they operate their ministry or what they preach, or whatever, we must never ever EVER claim that their works of healing and demonic deliverance are the acts of Satan. Yeshua says that Satan doesn’t operate like that. He doesn’t set people free, He only enslaves them. Now, the gifts and callings of God are without repentance, right? Romans 8:29. God calls people and gives them gifts and even if they distort the message or go seeking after money, they still have that spiritual authority and can deliver people of demons and heal them and perform miracles. But we can’t just go off and say it’s the devil doing it now. That’s attributing the good and wonderful works of the Holy Spirit, working through a flawed vessel, to the enemy. That’s blasphemy. Blasphemy means slander. We don’t give the enemy credit for how the Spirit moves to deliver and heal just because we maybe hate the vessel. We must always be finding ways to honor the Spirit of God and not slander.
And, you know what? Sometimes we are just plain wrong and there isn’t anything wrong with the messenger at all—we might just not like their theology but it might end up being superior to ours. Or maybe they have details wrong that offend us but their walk is a hundred times superior to ours and the Spirit loves flowing through them into people to do the work of the Kingdom. Sometimes our biggest issue and malfunction about people is that they have the audacity not to be enough like us. But that’s just petty tyranny and self-worship.
Okay, so we looked at the penalty for blasphemy against the Spirit—what about the perks of acknowledging Yeshua? Let’s look at a somewhat parallel account in Luke 9:
8 “And I tell you, everyone who acknowledges me before men, the Son of Man also will acknowledge before the angels of God, 9 but the one who denies me before men will be denied before the angels of God. 10 And everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but the one who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven.
Again, we have the warning about not blaspheming the Holy Spirit and the forgiveness available to anyone who slanders Yeshua—but this time we get a promise of being acknowledged in high places if we acknowledge Him here in “low places.” Low places meaning on earth among human beings great and small. That’s the flip side. Yahweh wants our obedience and rewards us for it—He isn’t just one of those ancient Near Eastern Gods who punished for non-compliance but really wasn’t in the rewards business except for their personal favorite pet humans.
So, you know, be on the safe side and don’t do anything to inadvertently label the Holy Spirit as a demon, okay? Be humble. If God can work through you when so many people disagree with you and don’t like you then He can and will work through people you disagree with and don’t like. We need to get over ourselves. Heck, He’s seriously slumming in order to work through even the best of us—which isn’t you or me, that’s for sure.
Oh, and one more verse—Isaiah 63;10. It’s a humdinger
10 But they rebelled and grieved his Holy Spirit; therefore, he turned to be their enemy, and himself fought against them.
No forgiveness, indeed!
