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I20 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
The result was that the following Tuesday the gardener's daughter called to thank me, saying her father had found the Saviour the preceding Sabbath. She said he had long thought he had sinned against the Holy Ghost, but that illustration about the flowers set him at liberty. Going down the garden, standing before a rose bush in full bloom, he said, " Bad as I have been, I have never said these flowers were the creation of the devil. No, my Father made them all." ^
II.
The Language.
1. "Verily I say unto you." This is the earliest occurrence of the phrase in St, Mark, and therefore in the Gospels.
2. " All their sins shall be forgiven unto the sons of men." As if He shrank from the saying that is to follow, He prefaces it with a fresh and loving proclamation of the wideness of God's mercy. There is no shortcoming in the bestowal of the Divine mercy, there is no reluctanse to pardon sin. Equal, abundantly equal, to the human need is the Divine provision. " For as the heaven is high above the earth " — and we have no line to measure that distance — " so great is his mercy toward them that fear him." " All their sins " — not one of them shall be put down as unforgivable ; they may all be taken away, though they be red like crimson. The very thief upon the Cross, the vilest at whom the world hisses, may appeal in his last desperate hour for mercy, and receive the assurance of it from the lips of Christ. It is a very tender proof of the love and longing of Christ for men's souls that He speaks thus ere He lets fall the most solemn warning that ever came from His lips. " All their sins shall be forgiven unto the sons of men." What more do we want to hear ? Is not this enough ? " He shall redeem Israel from all his iniquities"; "the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin." But there is more.
3. " And their blasphemies." What is meant by blasphemy ? It is hardly necessary to explain that the word blasphemy means primarily injurious speech, and, as applied to God, speech derogatory to His Divine majesty. When our Lord said to the
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ST. MARK 121
palsied man, " Thy sins are forgiven," the bystanders complained
that the words were blasphemous, for no one but God had the
right to say them. To blaspheme is by contemptuous speech
intentionally to come short of the reverence due to God or to
sacred things ; and this, according to Jesus, was the offence of
•jthe Scribes and Pharisees. What He says is occasioned by
j their charge that He had an evil spirit, that is, that the power
I acting in Him was not good but bad. Their offence lay in
■ their failure to value the moral element in the work of Jesus.
They saw what was being done ; in their hearts they felt the
power of Christ; they knew His words were true, and that
His works were good works. Eather than acknowledge this,
and own Christ for what He was, they chose to say that the
spirit in Him was not God's Spirit but the spirit of the devil,
involving a complete upsetting of all moral values, and revealing
in themselves a stupendous and well-nigh irrecoverable moral
blindness.
4. " But whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost." From this the sin is often and properly described as " Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit," though the popular title, taken from what follows, is " The Unpardonable Sin."
5. " Hath never forgiveness." Literally " hath not forgive- ness unto the age " (eh top aioova). The phrase is used in the Septuagint for the Hebrew V'olam, which means " in perpetuity " (Ex. xxi. 6, xl. 15), or with a negative, "never more" (2 Sam. xii. 10; Prov. vi. 33). But in the New Testament it gains a wider meaning in view of the eternal relations which the Gospel reveals. It signifies "this present world" in Mark iv. 19, the future life being distinguished from it as " the world to come " {ala>v 6 ip'^^o/nevoi;) in Mark x. 3 0. In the passage in Matthew about the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, corresponding to the present passage in Mark, the two words are " neither in this world, nor in that which is to come " (Matt. xii. 32).
6. " But is guilty of an eternal sin." The passage is in no case easy to understand, but it is made much harder in the Authorized translation than it is in the original. The Greek word (/cpto-t9), which in the reading adopted by the Authorized Version, ends the 29th verse of the chapter, is not "damnation"
122 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
or even " condemDation," but simply "judgment." It is now, however, universally allowed that the word in the original manuscripts is here not " judgment " at all, but " sin " — " is guilty of (or "liable to") an eternal sin." Some early com- mentators, not understanding the expression, inserted " judgment," as more intelligible, in the margin, from which it crept into the text.