NOTES for Mar 3:28-35
Jesus' words about blasphemy against the Spirit of God may seem difficult to understand. Indeed, what difference does it make whether an ungodly person reviles God Himself or His breath? After all, these are essentially one and the same. And yet there is a certain difference.
Indeed, sometimes even militant atheism may have an explanation if we regard it as a worldview or an ideology. What kind of religion did the person who became an atheist encounter? What face did it show them? What believers, or ‘believers’, did they meet in their life? And what image of God took shape in their mind as a result? Often no one but God Himself knows. On the surface, however, we see the consequences of experience that was often far from easy, and one such consequence may well be atheism, even militant atheism.
But what matters to God is not our concepts, but our heart. He knows better than anyone why a particular person became an atheist: whether through stubbornness and unwillingness to see and understand, through inability to see, or because there was nothing to look at. The evident action of God is another matter: one can fail to notice and recognize it only by refusing to notice and see.
A person may even be a militant atheist, but an atheist too, provided they are honest with themselves and others, will not call black white. Yet that was precisely the situation with the accusations the Pharisees brought against Jesus when they claimed that He was possessed: His accusers refused to see God's evident action, trying to explain it in any way they could, so long as they did not have to acknowledge the obvious.
And if even atheism is sometimes not counted as sin by God—if only because a person is not always to blame for failing to recognize Him—spiritual dishonesty and insincerity towards oneself and towards God are undoubtedly a grave sin. Not because God is easily offended—He is ready to forgive a repentant sinner any sin—but because such an attitude rules out, in principle, any genuine relationship, whether with God or with other people. Jesus reminds those with whom He is speaking of this, not because He wants to convince them that He is right, but because He wants to warn them against a path that leads to destruction.