The picture above is just a meme I saw. It will pop up from time to time on social media or as an “inspirational message ” on decor. The message is pretty straightforward: don’t be too proud to leave a path you’re on just because you’ve been on it for a while. But what I have realized lately is that this can be much, much harder to do than it seems at first. Indeed, there are people, I believe, who cannot do this.
“The point of no return” is a phrase that originates in aeronautics. It is defined as the specific point in time during an aircraft’s flight where it no longer has sufficient fuel in order to turn around and return to where it took off. After that point, a pilot is forced to find some other location in which to land his plane. Now the phrase has also become a kind of idiom as well, and in a more general sense is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a critical point at which turning back or reversal is not possible,” and by Wikipedia as “the point beyond which one must continue on one’s current course of action because turning back is no longer possible, being too dangerous, physically difficult, or prohibitively expensive to be undertaken.” In this more general sense, the point of no return just means the point in time when you make a decision and cannot go back on it. If you’re standing on a bridge with a bungee cable tied to your ankles, you can always turn and walk away, but the moment you jump, you can’t go back. If you’re offered a new job, but you have to quit your old job first, then the moment you turn in your resignation may very well be a point of no return. And there are so many examples of this concept: from having a surgery, getting pregnant, committing a crime, joining the military, etc. But there is a point of no return that few people realize exists, because it is not visible. There is an intellectual (dare I say, spiritual) point of no return. This is not spoken of very often. I heard a more secularized version of this concept spoken of by conservative Catholic podcaster Matt Walsh, but there is a spiritual dimension to it that he did not touch upon. The question could then be: is this concept in the Bible? Yes. In fact, it lies at the heart of a critical passage of Scripture.
But don’t let me get ahead of myself. What is an intellectual or spiritual point of no return, and am I talking about the dreaded and enigmatic “unpardonable sin?” Well, before I attempt to answer that question, let’s look at what we’re really talking about. When you assert a belief, you invest in it to some degree, whether very little or a great deal. I have used this example with my children as it resonates with them: if I said that I believed in faeries, that would be a simple statement, but it wouldn’t mean much ultimately. However, if I also asserted that I do not say the phrase “I don’t believe in faeries” because I believe that doing so causes a faery to die, you would conclude that my belief was quite a bit stronger than my initial statement led you to believe. I am, after all, putting action to my belief. I’m not just saying empty words, but putting my belief into practice. Now, if when we are speaking I also say, “I don’t even like to say the phrase, ‘I don’t believe in… you know what’,” you would conclude that this belief is very strong indeed, such that I refuse to even say the phrase in explanation, for fear it might do damage to the faeries I believe exist. The difference between the first stage of belief, the second, and the third is what I like to refer to as Zeal. This a useful word that refers to the ‘measure’ of our belief, and the stronger we believe something, the more our lives change because of that belief, thus the greater our zeal. The strongest believers in any religion are also referred to as ‘zealots’ because the strength of their belief compels them to act upon that belief often in dramatic ways. We understand and use this casually, do we not?
When we see someone constantly at the gym, we say they are zealous. When one of our friends turns down the decadent dessert due to a diet, we call them zealous. And when someone who believes in a cause is willing to die for it, we call them a zealot. All real belief lives or dies in its being lived out. This is the basis for the dreaded “trust exercises” that companies used to do with their employees, or that some militaries might still do. The idea is to believe something to the point where it impacts you in a real, physical, meaningful way. Every couple on their wedding day pledges to love their spouse in good and bad, sickness and health, life or death, but as we have seen many are not nearly as zealous as they appear at the altar. Even the disciples, who believed that they were zealous enough to stand with Jesus at his arrest and “trial,” fled for their lives when the threat to themselves reached a critical point.
So how does this relate to the point of no return? Well, it is possible to believe something, and then to discover to your horror that you were wrong. I might believe in faeries, only to realize due to some undeniable evidence that I was wrong, and that they don’t in fact exist. But this is little burden upon me, as I have only stated belief in a nonexistent thing. I may look a little foolish, but I have lost little from the exercise. But there are degrees of anything, and there are high degrees. The Apostle Paul is an excellent case. Zealous in his belief in the tenants of his-day Judaism, he was convinced the Christians were simply another corrupt cult, and that the right thing to do was to wipe it out altogether. Likely, he was following the Levitical law to the letter. Paul was present and in agreement with the stoning of Saint Stephen, and we as modern-day Christians think ill of Paul for this, but he was likely simply attempting to obey the Law of Moses:
If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers; Namely, of the gods of the people which are round about you, nigh unto thee, or far off from thee, from the one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth; Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die; because he hath sought to thrust thee away from the Lord thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.
Deuteronomy 13:6-10
This law was very explicit, and to Paul, Stephen was simply someone putting forth another false god, this man who called Himself Jesus and made Himself equal with God. Paul was zealous, though he was wrong, and when it was revealed to him how wrong he was, and how he had actually been persecuting those God had saved, he turned from his ways and repented.
But I certify you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached of me is not after man. For I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ. For ye have heard of my conversation in time past in the Jews’ religion, how that beyond measure I persecuted the church of God, and wasted it: And profited in the Jews’ religion above many my equals in mine own nation, being more exceedingly zealous of the traditions of my fathers. But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother’s womb, and called me by his grace, To reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the heathen; immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood:
Galatians 1:11-17
Neither went I up to Jerusalem to them which were apostles before me; but I went into Arabia, and returned again unto Damascus.
Consider, if you can, a man like Paul, believing his whole life had been spent in the full service of God, and that God was pleased with his works and his zeal, only to realize what he had done for God had been against Him. This was a heavy burden for Paul to carry, and it is a difficult thing to accept what you may have done in the past at the point of repentance. This takes great humility. As ordinary human beings, our ability to repent or confess to others that we are wrong is inordinately difficult. Children, teens, adults, and even the elderly spin their wheels when confronted with an undeniable truth, making up excuses to save themselves from the embarrassment, or from the realization. Sometimes believing a lie is much easier than believing the truth, after all, and all the better if you can convince others to believe it too. This can manifest in terrifying ways. Richard Dawkins, the famed atheist thinker and debater, has said that no evidence would be enough to convince him of a God. This kind of thinking is getting us close to the point of this article. Just what kind of thinking is it, especially for a man as esteemed as Dawkins, to state with blind zeal that he would not believe in God no matter the evidence? What could bring him to a place where even if God presented Himself to Dawkins visibly, openly, that he would simply write it off as a hallucination?
Well, now we are getting to it, aren’t we? The Apostle Paul was faced with a terrible reality: that all he had done in God’s service had actually served the Devil. He repented and turned himself to the right, serving God with the same zeal that he had used against God’s people. Famously in near-modern history, Oskar Schindler, a zealot of the Nazi party in Germany and a greed-driven industrialist, had an epiphany that caused him not only to realize the error of his ways, but to use all of his ill-gotten gain, power, and resources to save Jews from the same regime he had served. John Newton, the famous hymnwriter, was a slaver who was gloriously saved by the Lord, and turned fully away from his old lifestyle, fighting instead to oppose the horrors of slavery. Unfortunately, however, these are not the rule. They are exceptions. As the Bible says:
Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.
Matthew 7:13-14
It is not easy to turn from a well-travelled path, especially a path one has been wholly devoted to. And yes, we see this in the Bible very plainly. Even as far back as the Old Testament, we see that while there were times of repentance in the Kingdom of Judah, this too was an exception, and this would ultimately led to the ruin of all Israel, a fate that they were unwilling to turn from.
Yet the Lord testified against Israel, and against Judah, by all the prophets, and by all the seers, saying, Turn ye from your evil ways, and keep my commandments and my statutes, according to all the law which I commanded your fathers, and which I sent to you by my servants the prophets. Notwithstanding they would not hear, but hardened their necks, like to the neck of their fathers, that did not believe in the Lord their God. And they rejected his statutes, and his covenant that he made with their fathers, and his testimonies which he testified against them; and they followed vanity, and became vain, and went after the heathen that were round about them, concerning whom the Lord had charged them, that they should not do like them.
2 Kings 17:13-15
The kings of Israel and Judah were unwilling to turn back. But why? Why would they not turn, even when they had been warned? Why, when the very existence of their nation was predicated on God and belief in Him, would they choose to deny His very existence? Well, perhaps it was because they had gone too far. They had forsaken God, offered sacrifices to idols, even burned their infant children alive upon the red-hot statues of the pagan deity Moloch. They had become so zealous in their belief against God, that to turn from it would require something they could not do: acknowledge the evils they had done.
There is one passage that exemplifies this perhaps more than any other, that more than any other place in Scripture reveals the “point of no return” spiritually or intellectually speaking. And I am referring to the sobering story told Luke 16. Some people believe that this was a parable, some that it was a true story. Some say that it is both. I believe it to be true, as it is not referred to as a parable by Jesus or His disciples, nor is there, as at other points in the Gospels, an explanation to His disciples about it. He simply says, “There was a certain rich man…” and the story flows from that statement of fact. And Jesus proceeds to give an account of a strange interaction among three dead men: the patriarch Abraham, an unnamed rich man, and a beggar named Lazarus (who is not the same Lazarus Jesus raised from the dead, apparently). In a tiny peek into the afterlife, Jesus tells of how the rich man begs for relief as he is tormented, having died unrepentant and unsaved, and how he is rebuffed by Abraham, who tells him there is nothing that can be done for him. Undeterred, the rich man begs Abraham to send Lazarus back to earth to testify of hell to his brothers. In one of the saddest statements in Scripture, the man begs Abraham:
Then he said, I pray thee therefore, father, that thou wouldest send him to my father’s house: For I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment.
Luke 16:27-31
Abraham saith unto him, They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them. And he said, Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent. And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.
When I read this passage, even now, I’m kind of mystified. Surely, if people saw a man rise from the dead, they would believe, right? But then I recall that this literally happened.
Twice.
Jesus Himself, of course, is the greatest example. He was crucified and during the crucifixion there was darkness in the middle of the day, an earthquake, and the rising of other dead saints, who appeared to many in Jerusalem. These miracles were not hid, but open. Thereafter, Christ rose from the dead, and hundreds of people witnessed Him alive after His death (according to I Corinthians 15:6). Yet, the vast majority did not believe.
But a man rising from the dead had happened before Christ’s death, and was just as if not more damning to those who would not believe. Jesus friend, also named Lazarus, was raised from the dead, four days after his passing. Jesus specifically waited that long, at least partly so that no one could claim Lazarus’ death had been faked (remember Lazarus’ sister, Martha, feared that if they opened the tomb her brother would stink because he had been dead so long). And after Jesus raised Lazarus, not only did many not believe it, they told the Jewish leaders so that Jesus could be stopped!
Then many of the Jews which came to Mary, and had seen the things which Jesus did, believed on him. But some of them went their ways to the Pharisees, and told them what things Jesus had done. Then gathered the chief priests and the Pharisees a council, and said, What do we? for this man doeth many miracles.
John 11:45-47
What is worse even than simple unbelief, the Pharisees believed that Jesus had raised Lazarus, but did not care. Instead, it says in the following chapter (John 12:10-11) that they sought to kill Lazarus as well, because through his raising some had believed, and that could not be permitted. They knew it was true, but they refused to believe it, and actively tried to silence the truth. They had passed the point of no return. They had closed themselves off to the truth. Just as the modern thinker Richard Dawkins asserts that even a miraculous appearance of God would not be enough to convince him of the error of his ways, these Jews rejected God in spite of all evidence. This, as an aside, is why even though evidence for God is good, and helpful for many, it is not enough. Faith is required. Faith is required even just to believe the evidence.
The Jewish leaders and those who snitched for them were the literal fulfilment of Abraham’s words to the rich man: “neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.” And even today, despite the fact that Jesus’ existence cannot be credibly denied even by atheist apologists, and the fact that there is compelling and credible testimony that He did rise from the the dead, people are not believing either. It’s written off as folklore, myth, or an elaborate hoax of epic proportions. Despite the evidence for God, for Jesus, for the resurrection, many people will still not believe. As apologists (and novice apologists like myself) have been saying for decades: it’s not about the amount of evidence, or the quality of the evidence, it’s about choosing to believe the evidence. Is there evidence for God? Absolutely. Is there a lot of evidence? Yes. Is this evidence compelling and credible? Yes. But ultimately any evidence, whether great or small, must be received, must be accepted, must be believed.
I may discredit myself somewhat by providing a pop culture movie reference, but in the Empire Strikes Back, the protagonist and would-be Jedi Knight, Luke Skywalker, goes to a jungle planet and studies under the Jedi Master Yoda, learns that the mystical energy power of the Jedi, the “force,” is something that it is not enough to study and practice, but that you have to believe. At one point in the training, Luke’s starship sinks into the mire and all hope of leaving the planet is lost. Luke becomes upset, understandably, but to his surprise, Yoda suggests that he use the force, which grants telekinetic powers, to recover the ship. Luke is skeptical, but tries, and succeeds in raising the ship slightly, only for it to sink back into the swamp, even deeper than before. Yoda then explains that he must commit himself and truly believe that the force can accomplish what he needs it to. Luke gets angry, convinced that Yoda is being unreasonable. But while Luke walks off and sulks, Yoda uses the force to lift the ship completely out of the bog and gently set it on the ground next to them. Astonished, Luke touches the ship to make sure it’s real and not a dream or something, then goes to Yoda and confesses, “I don’t believe it.” Yoda’s line, which ends the scene dramatically, is telling. “That is why you fail.”
What George Lucas used for his fake sci-fi show resonates with so many because it is based on a reality that is baked into the nature of humanity. Human beings cannot be separated from their belief. It is one of the biggest hurdles for the theory of evolution because no other “animal” on the planet has belief. People can believe radically different things that completely alter their behavior, even from other people, whereas animals do obey only the instincts they were created with. Humans are driven by belief, to the point where it could be convincingly argued that to not believe is in itself a belief. This is why Christians often assert that atheism is in itself a religion, or at least a belief system, to which atheists themselves vehemently object, as they assert that atheism is a only lack of belief. But isn’t that just belief in the opposite direction? We all believe things, and even believing in nothing is itself a belief.
While I am by no means proposing that we just have to believe hard enough to make our desires happen (“manifesting”), but I am proposing that we can believe in God to any extent, as long as we are able to accept a “no” from Him on the basis that He knows what we need (and what those around us need) better than we do. Belief is critical, and there are some, like Luke being faced with the reality of what he thought was impossible, who simply say, “I don’t believe it.” But even he, ultimately, within the confines of that narrative, did believe. There are so many very real people who cannot bring themselves to believe in God, just like the Jewish leaders who tried to kill Jesus and Lazarus, or the kings of Israel who worshiped Moloch, or the rich man’s brothers.
And why? Well, we touched on it already, when we talked about the kings of Israel and Judah. How could they admit that they were wrong? After all, they had slaughtered their own children. They could not in their own minds admit that what they had done had been wrong, because how could they live with themselves after that? If this sounds familiar, that’s because we see it every day. We see people with this dilemma every time you turn on the news. They march in DC wearing hats shaped like women’s body parts, refusing to admit that an unborn child is a human being, and insisting that it is something less than that. Why? Because they have slaughtered their own children. How could they live with themselves after that realization? I submit to you that many do not. Quietly, and unreported by the news, they end their own lives rather than face what they have done, only to end up in a worse place yet. This is the reason the Devil loves abortion: because it quickly and easily leads many to the point where they are unable to go back. It leads them past the point of no belief.
But the abortionists are not alone. I mentioned Schindler, the converted Nazi. How many other Nazis sat on trial at Nuremberg after the war, and even when all was utterly lost, refused to go back on their beliefs? They continued to live in their delusions because the reality of what they had done was something they could not endure. Their minds refused to believe that they had directly participated in the extermination of over 6 million people in cold blood, without mercy or restraint. The lie they had believed was one from which escaping was nearly impossible. As we’ve seen, God is able to forgive even such people, and will, but the more important question is, will they face their own evil? Can they say to themselves, “What have I done?” and face grisly, terrible answer? God’s forgiveness is infinite, but man’s ability to accept it is often far, far less.
And the stronger the zeal in the wrong direction, the harder it is to turn, just as a freight train takes much longer and more cost to stop when it is running at full speed than when it is just rolling forward on the track. Many of us have done things we regret, some to a much greater degree than others perhaps, but if we are here today and under the blood of Christ, they weren’t sufficient to stop us from believing in God. This is a somber lesson, I realize, but it also helps us to understand why so many refuse to believe, even in spite of strong evidence, so that we do not get discouraged. If God can work miracles like Paul, He can work even in the lives of folks in this town, rich and confident or poor and destitute. We need to follow our own zeal, which is in the correct direction, in order to do God’s work and bring more people to that narrow gate.
Is this the “unpardonable sin?” Perhaps. Jesus once said this:
And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but unto him that blasphemeth against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven.
Luke 12:10
People often blaspheme God and our Lord, but few ever even mention the Holy Ghost. So what does it mean to blaspheme Him? Could it mean to simply resist Him? The Holy Spirit is the workhorse of the Trinity. It fills Christians, draws unbelievers, reveals truth, convicts hearts… the Holy Spirit (or Ghost, as the Bible often says) is the vehicle by which God interacts with human beings. To feel the pull of the Holy Ghost and to reject is Him is something we as human beings are gifted to do. It is our free will. And yes, that is a gift. It is a gift to be allowed to say “no” to the One who commands all things with His very will. So yes, this very well could be the sin that cannot be forgiven, since it directly involves a negative response to the working of the Holy Spirit, but I am unwilling to say for sure. All I know for sure is that we must be humble at all times, willing to admit our mistakes, willing to bow the knee before our God and turn from the wrong path, no matter how long we’ve traveled it, no matter how zealously we have pursued it, and no matter what we must accept about our past, because with God all things will be made new.
I leave you thus with this encouraging passage, which we all know, but I hope you now see in a different light, as I do:
Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. When his disciples heard it, they were exceedingly amazed, saying, Who then can be saved? But Jesus beheld them, and said unto them, With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible.
Matthew 19:23-26
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