What Does Matthew 12:32 Mean?

(32) **Neither in this world, neither in the world to come.**—The distinction was hardly the same for our Lord’s Jewish listeners as it has come to be with us. For them “this world”—better, perhaps, *this age*—was the time before the coming of the Christ; “the age to come” was that which was to follow it. (Comp. Hebrews 6:5, Luke 18:30.) Our Lord thus stood on the boundary-line of the two ages, that of the Law and the Prophets, and that of the Kingdom of Heaven, and He declares that while all personal outrages to Himself as the Son of Man, *i.e.,* the Christ, are capable of forgiveness, this enmity against goodness, as good, shuts it out in both. Practically, however, the order of things since the first coming of the Christ has been one of slow and continuous growth, not of rapid and complete change. There has been no “age to come” such as the Jew dreamt of, and we still wait for its manifestation, and think of ourselves as still living in “*this* world,” in “*this* age,” and of the “world to come” as lying in the far future, or, for each individual soul, beyond the grave. Our Lord’s words, it may be noted, clearly imply that some sins wait for their full forgiveness, the entirely cancelling of the past, till the time of that “age to come” which shall witness the great and final Advent. Does this imply that repentance, and therefore pardon, may come in the state that follows death? We know not, and ask questions that we cannot answer, but the words at least check the harsh dogmatic answer in the negative. If one sin only is thus excluded from forgiveness in that “coming age,” other sins cannot stand on the same level, and the darkness behind the veil is lit up with at least a gleam of hope.