A Tender Conscience

““So I always take pains to have a clear conscience toward both God and man.” (Acts 24:16, ESV)”

Five-hundred years ago this weekend, Luther made his famous declaration, “ ‘My conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand; there is nothing else I can do. God help me. Amen.”

What did Luther mean by the faculty of conscience? In traditional Christian thought, the conscience represents the voice of God in the soul of man. It speaks with absolute authority and reminds us of future judgment, the absolute standard of God’s law, and that what we have done cannot be hidden forever.

Paul tells us that God designs conscience to speak on two levels, vertical and horizontal. Vertically, conscience tells us how things stand between God and our soul. Are we pleasing to God, or not? In general and in particular, does God approve of our current course of life? Conscience also speaks on a horizontal level. Have we done right by our neighbor and even lesser life forms in the animal kingdoms?

An alarmed conscience should by definition never rest easy in a healthy soul. When it is alarmed, we should be also. Something, somewhere is almost always amiss. The conscience is designed to take every thought, word, and deed back to the perfect standard of God’s law. In terms of what we did and why we did it, the conscience stands as an absolute standard. So, for example, when David cut the edge of Saul’s garment, even though Saul was ignorant of what had happened, even though David’s men counselled for a much more drastic cutting, even though David hadn’t actually harmed the king’s life, and even though Saul was unjustly seeking to take David’s life, David knew in taking his knife to the king’s property, that he himself had attacked the man God Himself had made King of Israel. He had sinned against God and against Saul. Immediately, the Scripture says that David’s heart struck him, that is, his conscience bothered him. He knew he was guilty, and he was. Although we can try, we can’t really argue with our conscience. No matter how hard we try to justify ourselves, to explain how we didn’t mean to do what we plainly did, how it was only a minor faux pax, the conscience is there reminding us of what really happened. Speaking with knowledge (con-science), it always seems to know better.

To be sure, in a fallen soul, the conscience may be fallible. Sometimes it can be too relaxed as when the Jews sought to kill the early church fathers, thinking that they were doing God a service. Sometimes, at the opposite end of the spectrum, as in the case of the Pharisee, the conscience can be too persnickety and overprecise. Take for example the way the Pharisees parsed the Sabbath law code. As William Barclay (not a particularly evangelical commentator, by the way) explains:

One of the works forbidden on the Sabbath was carrying a burden. Jeremiah 17:21–4 says, ‘For the sake of your lives, take care that you do not bear a burden on the sabbath day.’ But, the legalists insisted, a burden must be defined. So definition was given. A burden is ‘food equal in weight to a dried fig, enough wine for mixing in a goblet, milk enough for one swallow, oil enough to anoint a small member, water enough to moisten an eye-salve, paper enough to write a custom-house notice upon, ink enough to write two letters of the alphabet, reed enough to make a pen’ … and so on endlessly. So for a tailor to leave a pin or needle in his robe on the Sabbath was to break the law and to sin; to pick up a stone big enough to fling at a bird on the Sabbath was to sin. Goodness became identified with these endless rules and regulations. Let us take another example. To heal on the Sabbath was to work. It was laid down that only if life was in actual danger could healing be done; and then steps could be taken only to keep the sufferer from getting worse, not to improve their condition. A plain bandage could be put on a wound, but not any ointment; plain wadding could be put into a sore ear, but not medicated. It is easy to see that there could be no limit to this.

A healthy conscience always sees the spirit of the law behind its letter, resonates with the heart of God, follows the law of God, and seeks the glory of God. It brings life not death, and freedom not bondage. That is not to say, you understand, that a healthy conscience is merely chilled out. J.I. Packer illustrates this well in his excellent book on Puritan piety, A Quest for Godliness:

Richard Rogers, the Puritan pastor of Wethersfield, Essex, at the turn of the sixteenth century, was riding one day with the local lord of the manor, who, after twitting him for some time about his ‘precisian’ ways, asked him what it was that made him so precise. ‘O sir,’ replied Rogers, ‘I serve a precise God.’ If there were such a thing as a Puritan crest, this would be its proper motto. A precise God—a God, that is, who has made a precise disclosure of his mind and will in Scripture, and who expects from his servants a corresponding preciseness of belief and behaviour—it was this view of God that created and controlled the historic Puritan outlook.

The key thing, I think, separating this kind of healthy outlook from the suffocating legalism of the Pharisee is that the Puritan conscience flowed to and from the gospel. It flowed to the gospel in that the offended conscience of the healthy Puritan led him to Christ upon the cross, not to an endless round of navel gazing. The Puritans knew that the answer to an offended conscience always exists outside of the heart. We need the kind of just mercy that only a true atonement can provide, and at the cross, God provides just such an atonement. We can lay our deadly doings down and simply trust what Another has done in our stead. The cross of Christ also sends us back to our consciences not in an effort to redo what Christ has already fully accomplished, but in order that by His grace and Spirit, we might live lives fully pleasing to God, obeying Jesus’ injunction, “Be ye perfect as your heavenly father is perfect.” The grace of God in the gospel strengthens us to pursue this impossible but necessary goal (Titus 2:12ff).

When all is said and done, very often, the difference separating the earnest Christian from the hypocrite can be described in a single short sentence: Nobody’s perfect. This is the hypocrite's comfort: Nobody’s perfect; therefore, there’s no point in my trying to be, and no point in my worrying when I am not. But this same truth that nobody is perfect is also the true Christian’s greatest aim: Yes, only Christ is perfect, but oh, how I long to be like Him! For my Master deserves better service than I have yet ever to give!

As you read this article today, let me ask you an all important question: How is your conscience? Or put another way: How is your soul doing with God? Is it raising any particular area of alarm? If it is, you need to get after it, for ignoring such a voice is neither safe nor sound behavior! Just ask Luther.