Conscience

There are many people who believe that conscience is a safe guide. There are those who refuse to accept Christ, as they claim to find sufficient light in their own consciences.

The folly of such an attitude is apparent to those who know the truth about the human conscience, and even more apparent to those who know the Word of God. In the unregenerate man, conscience is frequently twisted to be nothing more than a guardian of convention. H. L. Mencken has said that conscience is an inner voice that warns us when somebody is looking.

Many people have trained their consciences so that they will behave exactly as they wish them to. They are able to find a way to please their own desires, while at the same time they are directly transgressing that which they know to be true. Alexander Woollcott in his book, While Rome Burns, tells of an experience in the great gambling casino at Monte Carlo. He saw a "pallid old gentleman whose hands, as they caressed his stack of counters, were conspicuously encased in braided gloves of gray silk. It seems that in his youth he had been a wastrel, and on her deathbed, his mother had squeezed from him a solemn promise never to touch a card or chip again as long as he lived." He had lived up to his promise, for his conscience had provided the gray silk gloves.

When man sinned, he learned the knowledge of good and evil. This is conscience. For hundreds of years, from the Fall to the Flood, it was demonstrated that this recently acquired knowledge could not furnish the power to do the good and to avoid the evil. God's observation at the time of Noah was that "every imagination of the thoughts of man's heart was only evil continually" (Gen. 6:5).

We may thank God that we do not have to live by conscience. Our Guide is the indwelling Holy Spirit who does not have to play upon the finer elements of the old nature, but provides a life that is not our own, and which ever points to the Word of God. This is infinitely safer than living by conscience.

1. How does Jeremiah 17:9 give us a detailed look at this principle?
2. Are there particular topics in society today where we can see people hiding their conscious with their sinfulness?