Lecture 6: The Unpardonable Sin, the Parables, the Rock, This Generation, and Meeting Mark

The lecture, section by section

1. The unpardonable sin in its setting

   Essex frames the issue pastorally, recalling the hospital visit in his first year of ministry where a member was sure he had committed the unpardonable sin, then sets the text in its context. In Matthew 12 the Pharisees, seeking to destroy Jesus, meet the healing of a demon-possessed man both blind and mute, hear the crowds ask whether this is the Son of David, and head it off: he casts out demons by Beelzebul, the ruler of the demons. Jesus answers on every front: a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand; by whom do your sons cast them out; and if I cast out demons by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you, a microcosm of what the kingdom will be, Satan bound and his house plundered.

2. Blasphemy against the Spirit

   Then the verdict: every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven, even a word spoken against the Son of Man, but blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven, in this age or the age to come. In this historical situation the Spirit was making unmistakably clear who Jesus was; to see that supernatural vindication and pronounce it Satan's work is to cut oneself off from ever recognizing the Messiah. Is it a continuing possibility today? Essex is cautious: the Spirit does convict the world, and to finally reject that work is to be lost, but Scripture gives no outward sign by which we could know such blasphemy has occurred as it visibly occurred before Jesus's miracles. And pastorally he observes that no one who has ever claimed to him to have committed the unpardonable sin has ever meant blasphemy against the Holy Spirit; grievous sins, even sins God disciplines to sickness and death as in 1 Corinthians 11, are another matter, and none of them is called unforgivable.

3. The parables of the kingdom: new truths, not a new kingdom

   With rejection mounting, Jesus begins to speak in parables so that those who reject the message will not understand. He is the sower, the seed is the word of the kingdom, and the fault lies in the soils, not the sower or the seed; the disciples, to whom understanding is given, will bear fruit and carry the message on. Beside the sowing runs a counter-sowing of tares that continues until the end of the age, when the Son of Man's angels gather out all stumbling blocks and the righteous shine forth in the kingdom of their Father. The mysteries of the kingdom are therefore not a different, mystery kingdom, but new truths about the kingdom not revealed in the Old Testament, the scribe's treasure of things new and old. The Old Testament had revealed a despised, rejected, dying Messiah, Isaiah 53 is plain, but not how that death joins to a future coming to establish the kingdom; the parables reveal the extended interval, of undisclosed length, between the sowing and the harvest.

4. Upon this rock

   At Caesarea Philippi, where none of the popular answers slanders Jesus, Peter confesses, you are the Christ, the Son of the living God, and Jesus blesses him: flesh and blood did not reveal this, but my Father. The majority reads the rock as Peter himself, and Carson quips that but for Rome's perversion of the application no one would question it. Essex respectfully differs on the interpretation itself: Jesus draws a contrast, you are Petros, and on this petra I will build my church, when he could simply have said, upon you. The objection that Aramaic has no such distinction assumes Jesus spoke Aramaic in this Greek-speaking Gentile district, and in any case Matthew's inspired Greek preserves a distinction. The rock is Peter's confession of Christ, which becomes the apostolic testimony, MacArthur's broader reading, with Christ himself the cornerstone as Ephesians 2 says, and the binding and loosing given to Peter is extended to the apostles in chapter 18.

5. The nation producing its fruit

   In the vineyard parable's verdict, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation producing its fruit. Nearly all commentators, including Toussaint here, take the nation as the church, whether as the kingdom's present form or as its heirs; others suggest the Gentiles, though Matthew always speaks of Gentile nations in the plural, or the disciples. Essex leans, holding it loosely among good and godly company on every side, to a fourth reading: the nation, singular and literal, a people under a ruler in a land, is future Israel. The parable is about Israel's vineyard, from Isaiah 5, and it is the wretched vine-growers, the Sanhedrin and that generation's leadership, who are judged; the vineyard is not destroyed. The kingdom's privileges pass from that generation to a future generation of Israel that will receive her Messiah, the assurance of Romans 11 spoken in advance.

6. The Olivet discourse: preterist or futurist

   Behind every detail of Matthew 24 and 25 lies the modern debate Sproul has pressed into evangelicalism: the modified preterist holds that everything in the discourse short of the literal second coming happened in AD 70, since the disciples asked when the temple's stones would fall. The futurist answers that the disciples' question joined the destruction to the sign of your coming and the end of the age, and that in Matthew and Mark Jesus does not answer the AD 70 question at all, that answer waits for Luke 21, but speaks of events, from verse 4 through the end of chapter 25, still future. Essex takes the futurist reading as the better understanding of Matthew's discourse.

7. This generation will not pass away

   The crux is the promise that this generation will not pass away until all these things take place. Some futurists, Hagner, Blomberg, Carson, refer it to Jesus's contemporaries, with AD 70 an anticipation of the greater tribulation, which Essex finds overly subtle; others make generation mean the race, or the sinful people, neither the word's ordinary use. Essex reads it as a specific generation, the generation that sees and endures these things, the tribulation generation. The disciples who ask the question stand as representatives of the Israel that will experience those days, just as in Acts 1 they are still asking whether the kingdom comes now; historically they learned, as the church did, that Jerusalem's judgment came first, and believers fled the city before AD 70 so that, so far as we know, no Christians remained at its destruction. Meanwhile the whole New Testament keeps its note of imminency: any generation could be that generation.

8. Preaching Matthew: count the cost

   Essex is candid: Matthew is the hardest of the four Gospels to preach. Congregations arrive carrying mixed and half-formed ideas of the kingdom, liberal, dispensational, Laddian, or none, and Matthew constantly requires the Old Testament its hearers may never have read. MacArthur took eight years to preach it through. Essex himself has preached chapters 1 and 2 as a Thanksgiving-to-Christmas series and 26 through 28 toward Easter, and has found the gospel easier to teach midweek than to preach Sunday morning. The counsel is not to avoid Matthew but to count the cost: lay a foundation, give your people the Old Testament and perhaps another gospel first, and study how the great expositors have done it.

9. Meeting Mark: the author no one invents

   Mark reads faster than Matthew, pulls the reader through in a sitting, and ends with startling abruptness. Its title, according to Mark, comes early, and the authorship has never seriously been attacked, for who would attach a gospel to the man whose desertion in Acts 13 split Paul and Barnabas? Yet this is John Mark of the Jerusalem house church of Acts 12, restored in the end so fully that Paul's last letter asks for him as useful for ministry, and Peter calls him my son. The gospel fits him: he knows Palestine's geography, explains Jewish customs like the handwashings of chapter 7, and translates Aramaic for his readers.

10. Vivid, full, and Peter's voice

    Though shortest, Mark is no abridgement: wherever he tells an event the other synoptics share, his account is the fuller, cast in the vivid historical present. The call by the sea leaves Zebedee sitting in the boat with the hired servants; the five thousand recline on the green grass, spring grass, as a Californian instantly understands; the transfigured garments are whiter than any launderer on earth could bleach them. Peter's words and deeds are prominent, and rarely flattering, which matches the tradition that Mark wrote down Peter's testimony. And then there is the young man of chapter 14 who flees the arrest naked, leaving his linen sheet behind: introduced nowhere, needed by nothing in the flow, he is from earliest times taken to be Mark himself, the one experience with Jesus that Peter could not have told him, perhaps in the very household whose upper room the church later filled with prayer.

11. Roman readers and a courtroom purpose

    The readers are Gentiles, and more precisely Romans, as the fathers said. Customs are explained and Aramaic translated; where Greek and Latin both offer a word, Mark transliterates the Latin, the famous Latinisms; the night is divided by the four Roman watches; and only Mark names Simon of Cyrene the father of Alexander and Rufus, a Rufus being known in the Roman church when Paul greeted him in Romans 16. The tradition's date fits: between the deaths of Peter and Paul, about AD 65 to 68, in the Neronian years. So the purpose comes clear: Roman Christians who might imminently stand in a courtroom for their faith are given, in this beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the means to know their Lord, to give their testimony, and, even if their lives were laid down, to see the gospel go on through this written witness.

1. Essex notes that those tormented by fear of the unpardonable sin never actually mean blasphemy against the Spirit. How would you counsel a believer gripped by that fear, and what does the very presence of their grief suggest about their heart?

2. The parables reveal a long interval where wheat and tares grow together and are hard to tell apart. How should that shape both your patience with a mixed church and your seriousness about the coming separation?

3. Mark equipped Christians who might have to answer for Christ in a hostile courtroom. If you had to give an account of who Jesus is under that kind of pressure, how ready is your testimony, and what would you draw from Mark to give it?