Blasphemy Against the Holy Spirit Revisited

Someone at church this morning asked me what I thought about the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.  In the course of our conversation, he and I agreed that God doesn’t condemn or forsake people for being mad at God, for Moses, David, etc., were mad at God sometimes.  What went on in my head (but I didn’t say it out loud) was, “What do I think about the passages concerning blasphemy against the Holy Spirit?  I wish they weren’t in the Bible, that’s what I think!  It seems to me that they’ve done more harm than good.”

I expressed my problems with the conventional understandings of the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit a while back, in my post here.  If you want to read it, you should also read the comment by “Mike”, who disagreed with me.  I still have many of the same questions and problems that I asked in that post—-except that my understanding of the Greek aorist is different today in that it recognizes more nuance—-but perhaps the conventional understanding I was critiquing is not so wrong.  Maybe Jesus was warning his critics that they should beware lest their hearts become hardened against God, since, once it becomes hardened, they are closing the door to God forgiving them because they most likely will not repent when their hearts are hardened.  I wouldn’t make that an absolute, though, for there are times when God can soften a person’s heart.  But I myself don’t want to find myself in a place where I am hardened against God, or at the very least against what is good and right.