Clear Conscience
We can never be at peace when our conscience is disturbed, and our conscience is disturbed when it encounters a moral contradiction. Just as reason doesn't let us rest when we encounter a contradiction in logic, our conscience alerts us when we have a conflict with our inner sense of right and wrong (our personal moral standard)
NO NEUTRALITY
Conscience is the atomic bomb that explodes the myth of relativity. It is the thing that drove C.S. Lewis from Atheism to Christianity. As a respected professor of Medieval and Renaissance literature at Cambridge University, he began grappling with the fact that making ANY moral judgment required presupposing an independently existing moral law. He realized that without this universal moral law, there were no grounds by which to judge any action wrong, even Nazi atrocities. You can read his account of how he worked through this realization in his famous book, Mere Christianity.
Something within us gives us a keen sense of right and wrong. Everybody has a 'code' they subscribe to, and feel great passions raised when this is violated. Those who hold to the code of 'toleration' become furiously intolerant of points of view which they consider a violation of their code of tolerance. Even the mafia has its own moral code. The Mafia code is a twisted one, sanctioning many things that most civilized people would find abhorrent, but it establishes some things as off-limits even to the mafia, such as attacking the wives or young children of their enemies, or 'ratting out' on one another to the authorities.
Unlike animals that are driven purely by instinct for survival, every human will have some code within flashing 'wrong' or 'unfair' when it is crossed.
RECOGNIZING THE CODE WITHIN
The first step is to recognize the code within, and come to understand what you consider to be right and wrong. If your conscience is bothering you, it is because you have violated this inner code. It is no doubt true that our inner codes are heavily influenced by our formative environments. We're likely to share the codes of our parents, friends and the community we grew up identifying with.
However, there are plenty of examples of people who changed from their formative moral code to something else. This tells us that we not only have a moral code inside that guides our judgment, but we have a deeper code that evaluates the code itself. From a biblical point of view, this deeply imprinted code is what is called the 'image of God', which we received in the very process of being created. Genesis 1: 26 Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground." 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. In the image of God we get a finite sampling of all of the infinite characteristics of the divine person. This includes all the attributes of personhood, such as reason, emotion, conscience, will and so forth. You very well may not accept this account of the origin of the human sense of right and wrong, but you're going to have to explain where it comes from somehow. I challenge you to do better than avoiding the philosophical challenge by running behind the skirts of evolution and simply claiming that 'it somehow evolved'. This agnostic cop-out is getting pretty old.
However you choose to explain the inner 'voice' of conscience, you will be disturbed when you feel like you have violated it, and you will not be able to rest until you have resolved this conflict. The process of making it right and settling your conscience is really pretty straightforward and simple. We'll look at that in just a moment, but first we need to consider that our inner code may be twisted. When we realize that the Nazis and Mafia have a very pronounced sense of right and wrong --- from their perspective --- it should make us pause to ask ourselves how we know our inner code is not somehow twisted? I wouldn't want to inspire you to get your conscience resolved if that meant you felt guilty for not being true to your street gang's code.
RECOGNIZING A TWISTED CODE
Here's where we run into a major problem with conscience. Even though the Bible indicates that we get it from God, and it sends out a tracking beacon that helps us be in touch with Him, we're also told that the beacon has become distorted. The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked : who can know it? Jeremiah 17:9 It is possible that we have bought into a code that is very twisted but has come to seem right to us. By employing the mental gymnastics of rationalization and self-justification we can beat our conscience into telling us what we want to hear. How are we to know? Sociopaths and psychopaths may even succeed in extinguishing the conscience. For most people, however, there will remain an innate sense of right, fairness and justice, even if it grows dim. Our ability to hear this voice will depend on our inner desire to be honest with ourselves. How honest you want to be with yourself is something only you can decide.
But even if we determine to be as honest as we possibly can, we know we can be deceived. This is why we consider conscience to be a guide, but not a final guide. We need solid ground outside of ourselves by which to confirm or correct the inner voice of conscience. Revelation has served this role throughout the history of the Jewish and Christian faiths. Francis Schaeffer argued the case for Revelation from the philosophical basis that finite man HAS to be spoken to by an infinite God. This is the only way the finite could know the infinite. The finite cannot comprehend infinity, but the infinite-personal God certainly has the capacity to reach into the finite. The essence of Christianity is the claim that Jesus is the Revelation of God -- God coming as man to man. The case for a Biblical worldview, as well the necessity and validity of Revelation, is laid out in an intellectually rigorous way in Schaeffer's book He is There and He is Not Silent. You can also find a classical and thorough exposition on Revelation by B. B. Warfield here. These resources will help you understand why the concept of Revelation has been held with great sacredness in both the Jewish and Christian faiths.
You may not feel like you have the time or motivation to dig into the intellectual foundations of the Judeo-Christian claim to Revelation. Here's a short-cut. Just read the Bible as though it were the revealed Word of God. In other words, give it the benefit of the doubt, if for no other reason that it was the underpinning of Western Civilization for a few thousand years, and produced some pretty good results. Yes, there were some bad results in there too, but let's factor in the nasty influences of the world, the sinfulness of human nature and the Devil as reasons why the application of the Bible became distorted at times. I suggest people break into the Bible by reading John, Acts & Romans, which you can think of as the 'heart' of the Bible, since it covers the life of Christ, the early church and an explanation of the Christian life. Just read it, giving respect to the fact that a vast number of very intelligent and influential people through many centuries have regarded these as divinely inspired words, and see how they impact you.
While the concept of Revelation is seriously embattled today, we contend that neither the need for, nor the validity of Revelation has been disproved. It has merely been displaced by the historical epistemological fads, first of Reason, then Empiricism and now Post-Modernism. None of these claims-to-knowledge have provided the intellectual supports for the all-round needs of human civilization, and the resulting erosion in our culture is showing in a disastrous way. In fact, each of these epistemological challengers to Revelation has in its own way pulled out critical cultural legs from under the table of Western Civilization, bringing it perilously close to the point of utter collapse. No one is suggesting that we shelve science or reason, but that they find a proper place alongside Revelation as tools humanity needs to flourish. In another place we will carry this thought out more extensively. Here, we are going to say that the key to a peaceful conscience is found in the Bible. As a matter of fact, this is the underlying theme of the Bible as a whole.
MAKING PEACE WITH ONE'S CONSCIENCE -- PEACE WITH GOD
The message of the Bible, taken from beginning to end, is that humans were created to be in fellowship with God, that this fellowship was broken by sin and that it needs to be restored. Until it is, we exist in a state of spiritual conflict and hostility with God. The problem is that an offense against an infinite being is an infinite offense, and there is no way finite beings can resolve an infinite offense. It is for this reason that God himself solved the problem and covered the offense. God came into the world as a man, took human guilt upon himself, accounted for the infinite 'repair cost' for the infinite offense, and opened the door for reconciliation to happen between humans and their Creator.
NO NEUTRALITY
Conscience is the atomic bomb that explodes the myth of relativity. It is the thing that drove C.S. Lewis from Atheism to Christianity. As a respected professor of Medieval and Renaissance literature at Cambridge University, he began grappling with the fact that making ANY moral judgment required presupposing an independently existing moral law. He realized that without this universal moral law, there were no grounds by which to judge any action wrong, even Nazi atrocities. You can read his account of how he worked through this realization in his famous book, Mere Christianity.
Something within us gives us a keen sense of right and wrong. Everybody has a 'code' they subscribe to, and feel great passions raised when this is violated. Those who hold to the code of 'toleration' become furiously intolerant of points of view which they consider a violation of their code of tolerance. Even the mafia has its own moral code. The Mafia code is a twisted one, sanctioning many things that most civilized people would find abhorrent, but it establishes some things as off-limits even to the mafia, such as attacking the wives or young children of their enemies, or 'ratting out' on one another to the authorities.
Unlike animals that are driven purely by instinct for survival, every human will have some code within flashing 'wrong' or 'unfair' when it is crossed.
RECOGNIZING THE CODE WITHIN
The first step is to recognize the code within, and come to understand what you consider to be right and wrong. If your conscience is bothering you, it is because you have violated this inner code. It is no doubt true that our inner codes are heavily influenced by our formative environments. We're likely to share the codes of our parents, friends and the community we grew up identifying with.
However, there are plenty of examples of people who changed from their formative moral code to something else. This tells us that we not only have a moral code inside that guides our judgment, but we have a deeper code that evaluates the code itself. From a biblical point of view, this deeply imprinted code is what is called the 'image of God', which we received in the very process of being created. Genesis 1: 26 Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground." 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. In the image of God we get a finite sampling of all of the infinite characteristics of the divine person. This includes all the attributes of personhood, such as reason, emotion, conscience, will and so forth. You very well may not accept this account of the origin of the human sense of right and wrong, but you're going to have to explain where it comes from somehow. I challenge you to do better than avoiding the philosophical challenge by running behind the skirts of evolution and simply claiming that 'it somehow evolved'. This agnostic cop-out is getting pretty old.
However you choose to explain the inner 'voice' of conscience, you will be disturbed when you feel like you have violated it, and you will not be able to rest until you have resolved this conflict. The process of making it right and settling your conscience is really pretty straightforward and simple. We'll look at that in just a moment, but first we need to consider that our inner code may be twisted. When we realize that the Nazis and Mafia have a very pronounced sense of right and wrong --- from their perspective --- it should make us pause to ask ourselves how we know our inner code is not somehow twisted? I wouldn't want to inspire you to get your conscience resolved if that meant you felt guilty for not being true to your street gang's code.
RECOGNIZING A TWISTED CODE
Here's where we run into a major problem with conscience. Even though the Bible indicates that we get it from God, and it sends out a tracking beacon that helps us be in touch with Him, we're also told that the beacon has become distorted. The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked : who can know it? Jeremiah 17:9 It is possible that we have bought into a code that is very twisted but has come to seem right to us. By employing the mental gymnastics of rationalization and self-justification we can beat our conscience into telling us what we want to hear. How are we to know? Sociopaths and psychopaths may even succeed in extinguishing the conscience. For most people, however, there will remain an innate sense of right, fairness and justice, even if it grows dim. Our ability to hear this voice will depend on our inner desire to be honest with ourselves. How honest you want to be with yourself is something only you can decide.
But even if we determine to be as honest as we possibly can, we know we can be deceived. This is why we consider conscience to be a guide, but not a final guide. We need solid ground outside of ourselves by which to confirm or correct the inner voice of conscience. Revelation has served this role throughout the history of the Jewish and Christian faiths. Francis Schaeffer argued the case for Revelation from the philosophical basis that finite man HAS to be spoken to by an infinite God. This is the only way the finite could know the infinite. The finite cannot comprehend infinity, but the infinite-personal God certainly has the capacity to reach into the finite. The essence of Christianity is the claim that Jesus is the Revelation of God -- God coming as man to man. The case for a Biblical worldview, as well the necessity and validity of Revelation, is laid out in an intellectually rigorous way in Schaeffer's book He is There and He is Not Silent. You can also find a classical and thorough exposition on Revelation by B. B. Warfield here. These resources will help you understand why the concept of Revelation has been held with great sacredness in both the Jewish and Christian faiths.
You may not feel like you have the time or motivation to dig into the intellectual foundations of the Judeo-Christian claim to Revelation. Here's a short-cut. Just read the Bible as though it were the revealed Word of God. In other words, give it the benefit of the doubt, if for no other reason that it was the underpinning of Western Civilization for a few thousand years, and produced some pretty good results. Yes, there were some bad results in there too, but let's factor in the nasty influences of the world, the sinfulness of human nature and the Devil as reasons why the application of the Bible became distorted at times. I suggest people break into the Bible by reading John, Acts & Romans, which you can think of as the 'heart' of the Bible, since it covers the life of Christ, the early church and an explanation of the Christian life. Just read it, giving respect to the fact that a vast number of very intelligent and influential people through many centuries have regarded these as divinely inspired words, and see how they impact you.
While the concept of Revelation is seriously embattled today, we contend that neither the need for, nor the validity of Revelation has been disproved. It has merely been displaced by the historical epistemological fads, first of Reason, then Empiricism and now Post-Modernism. None of these claims-to-knowledge have provided the intellectual supports for the all-round needs of human civilization, and the resulting erosion in our culture is showing in a disastrous way. In fact, each of these epistemological challengers to Revelation has in its own way pulled out critical cultural legs from under the table of Western Civilization, bringing it perilously close to the point of utter collapse. No one is suggesting that we shelve science or reason, but that they find a proper place alongside Revelation as tools humanity needs to flourish. In another place we will carry this thought out more extensively. Here, we are going to say that the key to a peaceful conscience is found in the Bible. As a matter of fact, this is the underlying theme of the Bible as a whole.
MAKING PEACE WITH ONE'S CONSCIENCE -- PEACE WITH GOD
The message of the Bible, taken from beginning to end, is that humans were created to be in fellowship with God, that this fellowship was broken by sin and that it needs to be restored. Until it is, we exist in a state of spiritual conflict and hostility with God. The problem is that an offense against an infinite being is an infinite offense, and there is no way finite beings can resolve an infinite offense. It is for this reason that God himself solved the problem and covered the offense. God came into the world as a man, took human guilt upon himself, accounted for the infinite 'repair cost' for the infinite offense, and opened the door for reconciliation to happen between humans and their Creator.
For if, when we were God's enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son,
how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! Romans 5:10
All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ
and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: 2 Corinthians 5:18
But now he has reconciled you by Christ's physical body through death to present you holy in his sight,
without blemish and free from accusation-- Colossians 1:22
how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! Romans 5:10
All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ
and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: 2 Corinthians 5:18
But now he has reconciled you by Christ's physical body through death to present you holy in his sight,
without blemish and free from accusation-- Colossians 1:22
In the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, we see both the perfect justice of God's character and His perfect love. In fact, God took the penalty upon Himself, so the breach between Him and us could be closed. According to the message preached by Jesus and His followers, all that is left is for us open ourselves to Him and receive the gift of this reconciliation.
"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son,
that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. John 3:16
Here I am! I stand at the door and knock.
If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.
Revelation 3:20
that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. John 3:16
Here I am! I stand at the door and knock.
If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.
Revelation 3:20
If you're hearing this message for the first time and want to respond to it or explore it more fully, you'll find it helpful to see the Peace with God page and the Curious about Jesus page.
MAKING PEACE WITH ONE'S CONSCIENCE -- PEACE WITH MAN
Peace with God is the most fundamental issue facing the human life. Getting that issue resolved sorts out a lot of things in one's spirit that makes many of the pieces of life fall into place. We encourage you to take the time to explore that matter well.
Another major area where the conscience will activate is in our relationships with others. Many times in human relationships we will do something that we know is not right, not fair or not kind. We have offended or hurt another person and our conscience makes us feel bad about it. This is remedied by going to the person and asking for their forgiveness or pardon. This needs to be done purely from our own sense of responsibility even if the other person had a part in it. It doesn't usually work to ask forgiveness for our part conditioned on demanding an apology on their part.
The world of recovery (from substance abuse and addiction) has done amazing practical work in this area and their insights can be tremendously helpful in repairing and restoring human relationships. They call it 'making amends'. Few things lift one's internal spirits and hit the refresh button on life than accepting one's responsibility for offenses against another.
MAKING PEACE WITH ONE'S CONSCIENCE -- PEACE WITH SELF
Because our inner being is where we are most aware of our discord with God, going through the reconciliation process with God will put a lot of things right in our own spirit. Once this happens we are not immune from clouding up our relationship with our Creator by doing something we feel bad about. We are still human and imperfect, but we need to keep our house clean by making these internal missteps right. We need to practice confession to God on a regular basis, just as we wash our hands when we sense they are dirty.
MAKING PEACE WITH ONE'S CONSCIENCE -- PEACE WITH MAN
Peace with God is the most fundamental issue facing the human life. Getting that issue resolved sorts out a lot of things in one's spirit that makes many of the pieces of life fall into place. We encourage you to take the time to explore that matter well.
Another major area where the conscience will activate is in our relationships with others. Many times in human relationships we will do something that we know is not right, not fair or not kind. We have offended or hurt another person and our conscience makes us feel bad about it. This is remedied by going to the person and asking for their forgiveness or pardon. This needs to be done purely from our own sense of responsibility even if the other person had a part in it. It doesn't usually work to ask forgiveness for our part conditioned on demanding an apology on their part.
The world of recovery (from substance abuse and addiction) has done amazing practical work in this area and their insights can be tremendously helpful in repairing and restoring human relationships. They call it 'making amends'. Few things lift one's internal spirits and hit the refresh button on life than accepting one's responsibility for offenses against another.
MAKING PEACE WITH ONE'S CONSCIENCE -- PEACE WITH SELF
Because our inner being is where we are most aware of our discord with God, going through the reconciliation process with God will put a lot of things right in our own spirit. Once this happens we are not immune from clouding up our relationship with our Creator by doing something we feel bad about. We are still human and imperfect, but we need to keep our house clean by making these internal missteps right. We need to practice confession to God on a regular basis, just as we wash our hands when we sense they are dirty.
1 John 1: 8 If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.
9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.
9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.
Since God knows all, we can't escape His searing gaze, and neither should we want to. Just as an MRI will scan us for cancer cells, God's Spirit scans us for the sin that is spiritual cancerous to us. His intent is not to make us feel bad, but to reveal to us and rid us of what is destructive within. Sometimes we know we've done something wrong against another person, even though they may not be aware of it. We are carrying the guilt for that offense within us and it weighs us down. Whether or not the other person knows about it, we need to go through the confession process, making amends in an appropriate way. Even if the offense is not known externally, we need to free ourselves of the internal weight of our guilt.
If you haven't been there already, make sure to check out the GROW page which will set you on a journey to understand much more of your inner life.
If you haven't been there already, make sure to check out the GROW page which will set you on a journey to understand much more of your inner life.