Conscience is a person’s ability to form moral judgments, whether something is right or wrong.
Conscience is a judge, not about everything but whether something is right or wrong.
This is not the same as judging if something is true or false. We may all agree about the facts but disagree about the interpretation of these facts. The world is currently divided about the Russo-Ukrainian and Gaza-Israeli wars, the atrocities, and who did what to whom. We may all agree with a particular fact, that a person was shot, but we may disagree if it was right. Whether or not it was right is a moral judgment, engaging the conscience. The conscience judges according to its chosen moral code.
Right and wrong; true and false
Different opinions arise because people have different moral standards, whereas the determination of truth depends upon available evidence, complicated by different people demanding different standards of evidence.
The failure to recognize this makes most discussions and debates inadequate if the speakers are unable to identify and expose these fundamental issues. They will simply speak at cross-purposes if they use different standards and do not define their terms.
The utility of conscience
The usefulness of conscience is that it is self-policing, which is cheaper than arresting, convicting and imprisoning criminals.
Even criminals have a conscience. Indeed, they justify their criminality by trying to show the “justice” of their actions, to show that it is “right” according to their conscience, operating according to their own standards.
When conscience fails
This shows that conscience operates according to a standard, and different people have different standards.
Hypocrisy or imperfection?
However, people often do not live up to their own standards, far less to anybody else’s standard. Thereby, they are acting “out of character”. This opens them up to the charge of hypocrisy from those who wish to think ill of them. The result of this is that more and more people will not identify what standards they claim to live by.
In the past, there were confessions of faith, and nowadays a political party will publish its Manifesto, but the latter are simply wish lists, aspirations that may or may not be implemented. The excuses for failing to implement Manifesto promises are many, such as there was not enough time, money or consensus, etc. People are now so familiar with broken promises that the term “fake truth” has entered our modern vocabulary.
A seared conscience
People can go against their own conscience until it becomes a habit. A person telling a lie is going against their own conscience. They know that it is wrong, but they still tell the lie. Their own conscience judges it wrong but they still do it.
When it becomes a habit, their conscience is being hardened and less sensitive to the breach of their own standards until they no longer care. The Bible describes this as “a seared conscience”, no longer able to feel any self-conviction, just as an area of skin that had been seared with a hot iron is no longer sensitive to pain because the pain receptors have been destroyed. So tyrants think nothing of killing people in cold blood, with no qualms of conscience, because their conscience is “seared with a hot iron” 1Tim 4:2. The Bible also speaks about people “being past feeling” Eph 4:19; they have no functioning conscience in a particular area of their life.
Thus people use the popular phrase that “they have no conscience” about such and such. However, they do have a conscience, which operates very well on other matters, so that even the Mafia think that it is “right” (a moral judgment of their conscience) to gun down a victim in a revenge killing.
Standards
This shows that our conscience may be calibrated with the wrong standard. The Bible speaks about calling “good evil, and evil good” Isa 5:20. This is happening in society at present. The standards are changing, and people have different ideas as to what is right and wrong.
We can ignore our conscience, saying and doing things that we ourselves have judged to be wrong.
The Problem
The Bible teaches us the problem.
First, we are biased in our own favour. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” Jer 17:9.
Secondly, we can suppress our conscience. “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness” Rom 1:18.
Thirdly, it is because we all have a conscience that we are responsible to God, “so then every one of us shall give account of himself to God” Rom 14:12.
Jesus said: “I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment” Mat 12:36. “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, in order that every one may receive what is their due for the things done in his body, according to what he has done, whether it is good or bad” 2Cor 5:10.
If we did not have a conscience we could not be held accountable for our actions.
The Solution
So we will be held accountable by God, and people need to be told this in good time in order to amend their thinking and their ways. “Prepare to meet your God” Amos 4:12.
How? A Roman soldier with a hardened conscience asked the apostles: “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” They replied: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house” Acts 16:30-31.
When? Now. The apostle Paul put it like this: “Behold, now is the time of acceptance; behold, now is the day of salvation” 2Cor 6:2.
It is time to seek the Lord. The prophet Isaiah put it like this: “Seek the LORD while He may be found. Call upon Him while He is near to you. Let the wicked man forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts, and let him return to the LORD, and He will have mercy upon him, and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon.” Why? “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways,” says the LORD. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts” Isa 55:6-9.
What more could you ask for? Some more reassurance? Well, what does it cost? It cost the life of the Lord Jesus Christ to pay the price for forgiveness and freedom, but for you it is free – it is “without money, without price” Isa 55:1.
For how long? God says: “I will make a covenant with you that will last for ever. Incline your ear, and come unto Me. Hear, and your soul shall live, and I will make an everlasting covenant with you” Isa 55:3.
Donald's Thoughts 