An educated, sensitive conscience is God’s monitor. It alerts us to the moral quality of what we do or plan to do, forbids lawlessness and irresponsibility, and makes us feel guilt, shame, and fear of the future retribution that it tells us we deserve, when we have allowed ourselves to defy its restraints. Satan’s strategy is to corrupt, desensitize, and if possible kill our consciences. The relativism, materialism, narcissism, secularism, and hedonism of today’s Western world help him mightily toward his goal. His task is made yet simpler by the way in which the world’s moral weaknesses have been taken into the contemporary church. J.I. Packer

Human beings are supposed to know God. We were made in his image, and enough of his nature and character have been stamped on our conscience that we are eternally without excuse. I ought to know God, not merely some facts about him; and if I do not, my ignorance of him is already a sign of my rebellion against him, of my pursuit of other gods or of myself. Such ignorance is culpable.

We ought to say, with Luther, “My conscience is captive to the Word of God.”

For Luther the conscience was not a neutral faculty of the soul, some God-given citadel of inwardness and introspection. Rather, the conscience was a battlefield on which the forces of good and evil carried on spiritual warfare. For Luther, the basic question of human existence was not, “Who am I?,” but rather “Whose am I? To whom do I belong?” By listening to the “alien word” of God’s promise in Scripture we are delivered from the burden of introspection and self-justification.

Luther was aware of the slipperiness of the conscience which, like a wax nose, could be pulled one way, then another. This is why he insisted, when required to answer “without loops and holds” at the Diet of Worms in 1521, that “my conscience is captive to the Word of God.”

St. Paul tells me what to do in 1 Thess. 5:21, where he says, ‘Test everything; hold fast what is good.

Luther’s conscience was free only insofar as it had been “freed” by divine grace from the shackles of the introspective self.

It was Kierkegaard, not Luther, who proclaimed the gospel of sheer inwardness, who thought that Christ had come into the world in order to calm anxious consciences.

Paul knows that it is important to keep a clear conscience before the Lord. But it is possible to have a clear conscience and still be guilty of many things, because conscience is not a perfect instrument. Conscience may be misinformed or hardened. The only person whose judgment is absolutely right, and of ultimate importance, is the Lord himself.

What Is the Conscience?

A popular view of the conscience is that it is a personal guide to one’s moral actions. “Let your conscience be your guide” is the slogan of this viewpoint. The so-called “new morality” stresses the notion that each person is free to determine for himself his own moral standards. Following “the dictates of one’s conscience” justifies whatever conduct one may desire, for if a person is persuaded that a thing is right, then, it is argued, for him it cannot be wrong.

When a person says “my conscience bids me do this,” he is really saying (1) that he rationalizes that it is right to do it, or (2) that he wants to or feels like doing it, or (3) that he is conditioned by habit to do it. But to justify morally wrong actions by hiding behind the cloak of personal opinions, inclinations, or desires distorts the New Testament meaning of the conscience.

The new concept of conscience sees it merely as an evolutionary, societal-conditioning process that is a result of imposed taboos. How does the Christian sort all of this out?

 Is there a biblical view of conscience?

The Hebrew term translated into the English as “conscience” occurs in the Old Testament, but very sparsely. However in the New Testament, there seems to be a fuller awareness of the importance of the function of conscience in the Christian life. The Greek word for conscience appears in the New Testament thirty-one times, and it seems to have a two-fold dimension, as the medieval scholars argued. It involves the idea of accusing as well as the idea of excusing. When we sin, the conscience is troubled, it accuses us. The conscience is the tool that God the Holy Spirit uses to convict us, bring us to repentance, and to receive the healing of forgiveness that flows from the gospel.

But there is also the sense in which this moral voice in our minds and hearts also tells us what is right. Remember that the Christian is always a target for criticisms that may or may not be valid. Even within the Christian community, there are wide differences of opinion regarding which behaviors are pleasing to God and which aren’t. One man approves dancing; another disapproves of it.

How do we know who is correct?

We see in the New Testament that the conscience is not the final ethical authority for human conduct because the conscience is capable of change.

Whereas God’s principles don’t change, our consciences vacillate and develop. These changes can be positive or negative.

The prophets in the Old Testament thundered God’s judgment upon the people of Israel who had grown accustomed to sin. One of the great indictments that came upon Israel in the days of King Ahab was that they had grown so numb and accustomed to evil that the people tolerated King Ahab’s wickedness. Hardness of the heart had set in. The consciences of the Israelites were seared and calloused.

Think about this reality in our lives, about the ideals that you had as a child.

Consider the pangs of conscience that may have intruded into your life when you first experimented with certain things that you knew were wrong.

You were overwhelmed and shaken. Perhaps you even became physically ill. But the power of sin can erode the conscience to the point where it becomes a faint voice in the deepest recesses of your soul.

By this, our consciences become hardened and callous, condemning what is right and excusing what is wrong.

It’s interesting that we can always find someone who will give an articulate and persuasive defense for the ethical legitimacy of some of the activities that God has judged to be an outrage to Him. As humans, our ability to defend ourselves from moral culpability is quite developed and nuanced.

We become a culture in trouble when we begin to call evil good and good evil. To do that, we must distort the conscience, and, in essence, make man the final authority in life. All one has to do is to adjust his conscience to suit his ethic. Then we can live life with peace of mind, thinking that we are living in a state of righteousness.

The conscience can be sensitized in a distorted way.

Nurses, and other medical professionals who still want to live under the constraints of the Hippocratic Oath because of beliefs that prevent them from performing or participating in what are now legal but still ethically controversial acts find themselves in a strange situation.

More and more pressure is being exerted on them either to act in violation of their consciences or to abandon medicine. Until recently, “conscience clauses” protected these medical professionals, permitting them to opt out of medical procedures contrary to their conscience.

Now, however, various legislative proposals are attempting to eliminate such conscience clauses.

 Functions of the Conscience

A number of authors suggest a threefold function of the conscience,

(1) it distinguishes the morally right and wrong,

(2) it urges man to do that which he recognizes to be right,

(3) it passes judgment on his acts and executes that judgment within his soul.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica refers to these same three functions: (1) discerning between right and wrong, (2) predisposing to moral action, and (3) bringing remorse to the person who recognizes he has broken a law.

These three functions may be pictured by a courtroom scene, in which the conscience functions in a twofold way as both a witness and a judge. As a witness, the conscience tells the individual if he is doing right or wrong (according to the moral standards he has accepted for himself). And as a judge the conscience (a) causes the individual to feel condemned (and remorseful) or not condemned (and not remorseful) regarding his actions, and (b) urges him, when he has done wrong, to follow his standards more faithfully in subsequent actions.

Some call this prompting action the “obligatory” aspect of the conscience, and  some call it the claim of duty, the obligation to do the right. Romans 13:5 may suggest this judiciary action of prompting toward correct action.

Three times Paul refers to the conscience as a witness, Romans 2:15

Conscience is a little understood human endowment. Literally, the Greek word means “to know with.” The idea is that the conscience is a moral faculty of perception which operates within the human spirit to aid man in decision making.

However, never does the conscience operate in splendid isolation,  it operates within a context.

If that context is the world, then the conscience becomes distorted and is only partially, if at all, reliable, being “seared with a hot iron” and, therefore, insensitive to the things of God. If, on the other hand, the conscience functions within the context of the word of God and the Holy Spirit’s application of that word in various situations, then the conscience becomes an invaluable assistant to the man who seeks a spiritual walk.

The conscience is generally seen by the modern world as a defect that robs people of their self-esteem.

Far from being a defect or a disorder, however, our ability to sense our own guilt is a tremendous gift from God. He designed the conscience into the very framework of the human soul. It is the automatic warning system that tells us, “Pull up! Pull up!” before we crash and burn.

Conscience is at the heart of what distinguishes the human creature. People, unlike animals, can contemplate their own actions and make moral self-evaluations. That is the very function of conscience.

The conscience is an innate ability to sense right and wrong. Everyone, even the most unspiritual heathen, has a conscience: “When Gentiles who do not have the Law do instinctively the things of the Law, these, not having the Law, are a law to themselves, in that they show the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness, and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them” (Rom. 2:14–15, ).

The conscience entreats us to do what we believe is right and restrains us from doing what we believe is wrong. The conscience is not to be equated with the voice of God or the law of God. It

is a human faculty that judges our actions and thoughts by the light of the highest standard we perceive.

Multitudes today respond to their conscience by attempting to suppress it, overrule it, or silence it.

How Sin Silences the Conscience

It is possible virtually to nullify the conscience through repeated abuse.

Paul spoke of people whose consciences were so convoluted that their “glory is in their shame” (Phil. 3:19;  Rom. 1:32). Both the mind and the conscience can become so defiled that they cease making distinctions between what is pure and what is impure (Tit. 1:15). 15To the pure all things are pure: but to them that are defiled and unbelieving nothing is pure; but both their mind and their conscience are defiled.

After so much violation, the conscience finally falls silent, but the conscience will not remain silent forever. When we stand in judgment, every person’s conscience will side with God, the righteous judge. The worst sin-hardened evildoer will discover before the throne of God that he has a conscience which testifies against him.

Bob Vernon, former Assistant Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, warns of the increasing number of what he terms “moral flatliners” young people who choose crime as a career and who can commit the most heinous acts with no apparent remorse.

the loss of conscience. The trend is to no longer be ashamed of our darker side. Today it’s not uncommon to literally applaud a person who discloses what in the past has been looked upon

 As G. K. Chesterton once said, the doctrine of original sin is the only philosophy empirically validated by centuries of recorded human history.

What Sin Does to Our Conscience

The most ominous aspect of our culture’s moral slide is that the problem tends to feed itself. Sin denied dulls the conscience. The writer of Hebrews warned about the danger of being “hardened by the deceitfulness of sin” (3:13). but exhort one another day by day, so long as it is called To-day; lest any one of you be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin

Sin defies and deceives the human conscience, and thereby hardens the human heart. A sin-hardened heart grows ever more susceptible to temptation, pride, and every kind of evil. Unconfessed sin therefore becomes a cycle that desensitizes and corrupts the conscience and drags people deeper and deeper into bondage.

Paul made that comment at the end of Romans 1, concluding a discourse about the downward spiral of sin.

The apostle shows how and why the human conscience vanishes. He reveals that those who ignore or suppress their conscience risk a dreadful judgment: God ultimately abandons such people to the devastating effects of their own sin.

Paul says God’s wrath is revealed because people “suppress the truth in unrighteousness” (Rom. 1:18). He is referring to sinners who have successfully hushed their own consciences. “The truth” they suppress is innately-known truth about the character of God, a sense of good and bad, and a basic knowledge of right and wrong. These things are universally known to all, “evident within them, for God made it evident to them” (v. 19).  Because God manifests Himself in the most basic sense within every human conscience.

That internal knowledge about God is further augmented by evidences of His power and deity in the natural order of creation (v. 20). The truth thus revealed is not cryptic or ambiguous, it is “clearly seen.”

Those who feed their lusts are judged accordingly: “God gave them over … to impurity” (Rom. 1:24). The expression “gave them over”. It speaks of a judicial act of God whereby He withdraws His restraining hand from an individual whose conscience is hardened. That person becomes enslaved to his or her own lusts. In other words, God allows the consequences of that person’s sin to run their catastrophic course. (Rom. 1:24).

That is precisely the course our society has taken. Sexual practices that were almost universally viewed as hideously perverted a few decades ago are now flaunted and celebrated in our streets. Many have become bold—even arrogant—in demanding society’s approval for their wickedness. Nonbiblical thinking has so corrupted society’s collective conscience that the consensus is fast growing sympathetic with the homosexual movement.

Those who are not fully committed to Scripture have no line of defense against the tide of public opinion. And so society’s collective conscience erodes even further, hastening the downward spiral.

The Conscience Holds Court

The conscience is privy to all our secret thoughts and motives. It is therefore a more accurate and more formidable witness in the soul’s courtroom than any external observer. Those who gloss over an accusing conscience in favor of a human counselor’s reassurances are playing a deadly game.

Thoughts and motives may escape the eye of a human counselor, but they will not escape the eye of conscience. Nor will they escape the eye of an all-knowing God. When such people are summoned to final judgment, their own conscience will be fully informed of every violation and will step forward as an eternally tormenting witness against them.

How the Conscience Is Cleansed

One aspect of the miracle of salvation is the cleansing and rejuvenating effect the new birth has on the conscience. At salvation, the believer’s heart is “sprinkled clean from an evil conscience” (Heb. 10:22). The means through which the conscience is cleansed is the blood of Christ (Heb. 9:14).

Most important, whenever our own conscience would mercilessly condemn us, the blood of Christ cries for forgiveness. Christ’s atonement fully satisfied the demands of God’s righteousness, so forgiveness and mercy are guaranteed to those who receive Christ in humble, repentant faith. God, cleanse[s] your conscience from dead works to serve the living God” (Heb. 9:14). Our faith communicates to our conscience that we are pardoned through the precious blood of Christ.

Does that mean believers can persist in sinning and yet enjoy a clear conscience? Certainly not. “How shall we who died to sin still live in it?” (Rom. 6:2). The new birth entails a complete overhaul of the human soul (2 Cor. 5:17). A washed and rejuvenated conscience is only one evidence that such a transformation has taken place (cf. 1 Pet. 3:21

A sound conscience therefore goes hand in hand with assurance of salvation (Heb. 10:22). The steadfast believer must maintain the proper focus of faith in order to have a conscience that is perpetually being cleansed from guilt: “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to [keep on cleansing] us from all unrighteousness” (1 Jn. 1:9).

“Fight the good fight, keeping faith and a good conscience” (1 Tim. 1:18–19).

To feel guilty for having offended God’s principles is healthy. But can the conscience always be used as a guide in such matters? Consider the implication of a verse like Hebrews 9:14: “The blood of Christ [will] … cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God” (NASB). In this instance God stands against the conscience. The key question in determining whether the conscience is a reliable guide is, Does the conscience agree with the Word of God? When God convicts the conscience, he never goes against his Word.

In general, if there are no principles in the Word of God that relate to the matter in question, feelings of guilt are unnecessary. If such feelings do exist, the conscience may be overly strict. Guilt that drives a person to work all the time, and thus to pay little attention to his family and neglect daily devotions, is unnecessary. There is no text in Scripture that encourages guilt if a person does not work all the time. In fact, the principles of Scripture in this case would encourage less work in order that more time might be spent with God and the family.

The guilt we feel about matters not explicitly covered by scriptural principles is sometimes popularly referred to as “false guilt.” Of course, it is debatable whether guilt is ever really false since it does in fact exist. Perhaps a more accurate term is “unnecessary guilt,” although this term also has its drawbacks.

Precisely what is involved in false or unnecessary guilt? Several factors complicate the issue. For example, there is what Francis Schaeffer calls the “false tyranny of the conscience.”

Overcoming a Weak Conscience

Scripture indicates that some Christians have weak consciences. A weak conscience is not the same as a seared conscience. A seared conscience becomes inactive, silent, rarely accusing, insensitive to sin. But the weakened conscience usually is hypersensitive and overactive about issues that are not sins. Ironically, a weak conscience is more likely to accuse than a strong conscience. Scripture calls this a weak conscience because it is too easily wounded. People with weak consciences tend to fret about things that should provoke no guilt in a mature Christian who knows God’s truth.

A weak conscience results from an immature or fragile faith not yet weaned from worldly influences and not yet saturated in the Word of God. a weak conscience is often the companion of legalism.

A weak and constantly accusing conscience is a spiritual liability, not a strength.

Keeping a Pure Conscience

How can we keep our consciences pure? What is the proper response to guilt feelings?

Confess and forsake known sin. Examine your guilt feelings in light of Scripture. Deal with the sin God’s Word reveals. Proverbs 28:13 says, “He who conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will find compassion.”

First John 1 speaks of confession of sin as an ongoing characteristic of the Christian life: “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (v. 9).

Ask forgiveness and be reconciled to anyone you have wronged.

Make restitution

Don’t procrastinate in clearing your wounded conscience. Paul said he did his best “to maintain always a blameless conscience both before God and before men” (Acts 24:16).

Some people put off dealing with their guilt, thinking their conscience will clear itself in time. It won’t.

Dealing with a wounded conscience immediately by heart-searching prayer before God is the only way to keep it clear and sensitive.

Educate your conscience, teach it to focus on the right object—divinely revealed truth. If the conscience looks only to personal feelings, it can accuse us wrongfully

The death of the conscience

Without a functioning conscience, people are destined only to sink deeper and deeper into wickedness. Humanity is merely storing up wrath against the day of wrath ( Rom. 2:5).

Is there hope?

  For those willing to repent and follow Christ, there is. They can “be saved from this perverse generation” (Acts 2:40). Their consciences can be renewed and cleansed (Heb. 9:14). They can become new creatures (2 Cor. 5:17).