Afraid You Blasphemed the Holy Spirit? What Jesus Meant and What to Do

If you are afraid you have blasphemed the Holy Spirit, you have not committed that sin, and on this an Orthodox priest, a Lutheran pastor, Reformed teachers and a Catholic writer all agree. Jesus gave his warning to men who said his power over devils came from the devil, and these teachers read the sin as a settled refusal of God’s mercy. The fear of losing that mercy is the opposite of refusing it.

Matthew sets a promise right beside the warning. Only a few verses earlier he takes Isaiah’s words and applies them to Jesus: “A bruised reed shall he not break, and smoking flax shall he not quench” (Matthew 12:20). Smoking flax is a wick barely alight, and the fear that keeps us awake over this question is that kind of flame, small and smoky and still turned toward God. Jesus does not put it out.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church places the sin in a refusal: “There are no limits to the mercy of God, but anyone who deliberately refuses to accept his mercy by repenting, rejects the forgiveness of his sins and the salvation offered by the Holy Spirit” (1864). Read that way, a person who turns to God and asks to be forgiven, whatever they have said or thought, is not refusing his mercy.

It does, and pastors and teachers in several traditions give that answer for the same reason. The sin they describe is a hardened refusal, while the fear of being separated from God comes from a heart that still wants him.

“Some are afraid that they may have committed it, and are appropriately distressed,” writes Fr. Lawrence Farley, a columnist on the Orthodox Church in America’s site, and he tells them that “any Christian who asks a priest with trembling whether or not he has committed the unforgivable sin cannot possibly have committed it, for the question proves that the one asking it loves Jesus and fears being separate from Him. Let such devout souls fear nothing.”

In The Lutheran Witness, the magazine of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, the Rev. Jerald Joersz writes that “those who worry that they are guilty of this sin should be comforted in distress and assured that they have not committed the sin.” He finds that comfort in the Lutheran confessions, where the Formula of Concord, in the Book of Concord, speaks to “all godly Christians who feel and experience in their hearts a small spark or longing for divine grace and eternal salvation,” and says they may take comfort, “for they know that God has kindled in their hearts this beginning of true godliness.” The verse it gives them is Philippians 2:13: “For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.”

Matthew Henry, the Presbyterian minister whose commentary on the Bible began to appear in 1708, wrote: “We have reason to think that none are guilty of this sin, who believe that Christ is the Son of God, and sincerely desire to have part in his merit and mercy: and those who fear they have committed this sin, give a good sign that they have not.” Three hundred years later, a Bible study from the Reformed teaching ministry Ligonier said the same thing: “Pastors both past and present agree that a person who worries that he has committed the unforgiveable sin has not really done so.”

Mark Shea, answering a reader as senior content editor of the Catholic website Catholic Exchange, gives “a good rule of thumb”: “if you are worried you may have committed the unpardonable sin, chances are very high that you haven’t. A man who is worrying that he has offended Jesus is generally not a man who is cursing Jesus as satanic and deliberately spitting on everything that is true, good, and beautiful.” And the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association tells a reader who has the same fear, “Their fears are unfounded.”

Matthew tells the story in the twelfth chapter of his Gospel. A man “possessed with a devil, blind, and dumb” was brought to Jesus, and Jesus healed him, “insomuch that the blind and dumb both spake and saw” (Matthew 12:22). The people asked, “Is not this the son of David?” (12:23), but the Pharisees had another explanation: “This fellow doth not cast out devils, but by Beelzebub the prince of the devils” (12:24).

Jesus answered that Satan would not drive out Satan, and that he cast out devils “by the Spirit of God” (12:28). Then he gave the warning:

Wherefore I say unto you, All 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.

Matthew 12:31–32

Mark gives the reason in one line, “Because they said, He hath an unclean spirit” (Mark 3:30), and Luke records the saying too (Luke 12:10). The men Jesus warned had watched the Spirit of God set a man free, and they called that work unclean. The note in the Catholic New American Bible sums up their sin as “attributing to Satan (Mt 12:24) what is the work of the Spirit of God (Mt 12:28).”

Yet the warning itself opens with a promise, that every other sin and blasphemy can be forgiven, even “a word against the Son of man,” a word against Jesus himself. Paul had once been that kind of man. He wrote that he “was before a blasphemer, and a persecutor, and injurious: but I obtained mercy” (1 Timothy 1:13).

A few verses before this warning, Matthew has already applied Isaiah’s promise to Jesus, that he would not break the bruised reed or quench the smoking flax (Matthew 12:20). Smoking flax is a lamp wick barely alight, and the New American Bible translates it “a smoldering wick.”

Each tradition has its own way of saying what the sin is.

Tradition	Source	What the sin is
Catholic	Catechism, 1864	A deliberate refusal to repent, which can harden to the end
Orthodox	Fr. Lawrence Farley, Orthodox Church in America site	Rejecting Christ as a deceiver, and persisting in it
Lutheran	The Lutheran Witness, Missouri Synod	Rejecting the Spirit who brings faith, without repenting
Reformed	John Calvin, Institutes	Knowingly resisting the truth, only to resist it
Anglican	Thirty-nine Articles, Article XVI	Not every grave sin after baptism; repentance stays open
Methodist	John Wesley, notes on Matthew	Calling Christ’s miracles the devil’s work
Evangelical	Billy Graham Evangelistic Association	Resisting the Spirit’s witness to Jesus until death

Five of these sources describe a deliberate refusal of God’s mercy or truth. Wesley ties the sin to one act, the Pharisees’ charge, and the Thirty-nine Articles only say what it is not. They differ, too, over who could commit it: the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association holds that a true believer cannot, while the Catechism addresses its warning to “anyone who deliberately refuses” God’s mercy. The history of these readings is told in what the unforgivable sin is.

A thought that arrives against your will and appalls you is not a deliberate refusal of God, so it cannot be this sin. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association says plainly that the unpardonable sin is not “thinking or saying something terrible about the Holy Spirit.”

Catholic moral teaching gives the reason. The Catechism counts a sin as mortal only when it is “committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent,” and it describes that consent as “sufficiently deliberate to be a personal choice” (1857, 1859). It adds that responsibility “can be diminished or even nullified by ignorance, inadvertence, duress, fear, habit, inordinate attachments, and other psychological or social factors” (1735), and that “pathological disorders” can lessen it too (1860).

Calvin, too, wrote that the one who sins against the Holy Spirit is the one “who, while so constrained by the power of divine truth that he cannot plead ignorance, yet deliberately resists, and that merely for the sake of resisting.”

If the thoughts keep coming back, horrify you and will not leave, they may be scrupulosity, a form of obsessive compulsive disorder that can be treated.

The very saying that warns of the one sin promises forgiveness for every other blasphemy, and the New Testament repeats the promise in plain words: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). Jesus said, “him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out” (John 6:37).

The churches have each put that promise in their own words. “There is no offense, however serious, that the Church cannot forgive,” the Catechism teaches (982). The Westminster Confession, held by Presbyterian churches such as the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, says that “there is no sin so great, that it can bring damnation upon those who truly repent,” and the Thirty-nine Articles condemn anyone who would “deny the place of forgiveness to such as truly repent.” Calvin held to it too, writing of the hardest warnings in Scripture: “The promise as to those who call upon him will never fail.”

Words said in anger, in a careless moment or as a child are far from the knowing, deliberate resistance these teachers describe, and Paul himself received mercy for blasphemy he had committed “ignorantly in unbelief” (1 Timothy 1:13). The regret you feel matters as well, because the sin Farley and Joersz describe is one a person persists in without repenting. Saying “Oh my God” is a separate question, about using God’s name, and it is answered in whether saying “Oh my God” is a sin.

Some Christians connect this sin with a hard passage in the Letter to the Hebrews:

For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, And have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come, If they shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance; seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put him to an open shame.

Hebrews 6:4–6

The Catholic New American Bible and Calvin both read it as a warning about apostasy, a deliberate abandoning of the faith. The Bible’s note calls the passage’s picture of crucifying Christ again “a colorful description of the malice of apostasy,” and Calvin wrote that “the thing expressed is not some particular vice, but universal aversion to God, and (so to speak) the apostasy of the whole man.” Three verses later the writer turns to his readers: “But, beloved, we are persuaded better things of you, and things that accompany salvation, though we thus speak” (Hebrews 6:9).

1. Tell God what you fear. Pray in your own words, or in the words a father spoke with tears in Mark’s Gospel: “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief” (Mark 9:24).
2. Confess it. Catholics can bring the fear, and any sin behind it, to the sacrament of confession, with the Catechism’s assurance: “There is no one, however wicked and guilty, who may not confidently hope for forgiveness, provided his repentance is honest” (982). The steps are in how to go to Catholic confession. The Westminster Confession speaks of confession straight to God: “every man is bound to make private confession of his sins to God, praying for the pardon thereof; upon which, and the forsaking of them, he shall find mercy.” Confessing the same fear again and again can itself be a symptom, though, and the International OCD Foundation lists “Excessive confession” among the compulsions that scrupulosity may include.
3. Talk to your pastor or priest. Clergy hear this question often, and Fr. Farley begins his column, “I suppose I cannot be the only pastor who has often been asked by his parishioners what the unforgivable sin is.” Tell them what you said or thought, and let them answer you.

A fear that returns however often it is answered may be scrupulosity, which the International OCD Foundation describes as “a subtype of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) involving religious or moral obsessions.” Among its common obsessions the foundation lists “Fear of committing blasphemy, or offending/angering God” and “Fear of going to hell or being punished by God.”

The foundation says the compulsions of scrupulosity may include excessive confession and “Repeatedly seeking reassurance from religious leaders and loved ones,” acts a person performs “to attempt to get rid of the obsessions and/or relieve the anxiety caused by the obsessions.” It gives “spending hours researching religious doctrine” as an example of how such behavior can look like devotion. If you have asked pastors and friends the same question many times, or spent hours reading about it, and each answer helps only until the fear returns, that is the pattern the foundation describes.

Scrupulosity can be treated, and the foundation names cognitive behavior therapy, using a method called “exposure and response prevention,” as the main psychological treatment, with medicines called SSRIs as the main drug treatment. Treatment “may also include consultation with leaders of the patient’s faith tradition,” and its goal is “to disentangle OCD from the religious and moral values of the sufferer.” A doctor, or a therapist trained in exposure and response prevention, is the place to start, and the foundation’s website helps people find an OCD therapist. Catholics can also turn to Scrupulous Anonymous, a ministry of the Redemptorists since 1964, which publishes a newsletter and the book Understanding Scrupulosity. Through all of it the promise in Matthew holds for the one who is afraid: the wick may smoke for a long time, and still “smoking flax shall he not quench” (Matthew 12:20).

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• What is the unforgivable sin in the Bible?
• Bible verses about blasphemy, including the sin against the Holy Spirit
• Prayers for intrusive thoughts
• Prayers of repentance: Psalm 51 and traditional confessions
• Bible verses about being forgiven