Conscience

We used to hear references to conscience in serious discussion.  We seldom include conscience in our discussions at the time of this writing.  For some persons conscience appears to be ephemeral, and appears in other terminology of the publics and the courtroom, as well as the church.  Perhaps the loss has emerged from the displays of poor, even tragic, performance of distorted conscience.  Again, the mass of mankind may be interpreting the value of something on the basis of its violations.  Violations of conscience on the part of some persons from whom we expect to see admired conduct or affirmations are not to be used to condemn the uses of good conscience for rightness.  Though society may fall to some false ideas, or objectionable conduct, conscience ought to be held in integrity to feel what we are and do are right.

Righteousness (affirmative standard from God’s holiness) is our biblical word for rightness and rightness is a coinage related to the combination of truth to belief and conduct – especially to affirmations that do not violate others.  Holding to rightness, the conscience calls upon the person to commitment of truth and conduct to application for the good of self and others.  Conscience is a self-possessed watch-dog in a person.  It sniffs out the route to righteousness, and any deviation from it as well as confidence in its applications.  The benefits of conscience may be poisoned in various ways, so that even the conscience may become a weapon to undermine righteousness.  What happens to consciences of persons like Hitler, or Alexander the Great, the Boston Strangler, or millions of other enemies of the right in human context?  What happened in the background, education, experience, character (or lack of the factors) that caused them to lose a God-given factor of personal light for belief and conduct?  Conscience like all else in life needs to be trained on the nourishment of a value system to arrive at even automatic functions that it is presumed to influence.  It is a built-in factor that contributes greatly to what we have decided to be, even when we are not conscious of its presence or meaning.  We can become conscious of conscience.  We are in serious danger of losing the right when we permit conscience to slumber, to be dissembled or corrupted.

Conscience development is rather closely related to nurturing.  This process is readily followed in the uses of the words for ears and hearing in Scripture.  There is some reference to the process in relation to the eyes and sight, but sounds (symbolic in carrying truth), even silent-sounds, belong to an understanding of conscience and its cultivation seems to be the greater emphasis.  What, in silence, drives us?  Often the relationship between vocal words and written words, requiring different senses for register seem to be used interchangeably. We have within us the silent-sounds of conscience.  They begin early.  The child reveals in bowed head, and general mien that he or she knew that dumping the cereal on the floor was not approved by the god-like parent nearby observing the alleged accident.  The judge in the courtroom must make a legal decision on whether or not the confessed murderer knew what he or she was doing at the time of the crime.  In this decision there is a judgment about the conscience of the person.  It may have nearly everything to do with the trial.  It certainly has something to do in the way God functions with us.

Christians learn to believe and do the right from the interpretation of Scripture by self, pastors, teachers, parents and others using the Bible in seeking truth and conduct directions.  One of the rails on which that effective education rides is in the conscience of the listener and/or reader.  So it is that we need the church, the society, insight to truth, effort of modeling to complete the portrait of the person determined not only to be a good person in society, but a faithful child of God – and know them to be so.  We are expected to develop pure conscience, and then follow it.  There will be penalty for deliberate failure, and remorse for denying ourselves to responsibility.  The Apostle Paul pressed the point of conscience to his spiritual son, Timothy, his heir.  The Apostle related it to a commandment of love, a pure heart, and a faith unfeigned.  (I Timothy 1:5)  He returned to conscience in relationship to faith at least in three additional comments in the Epistle – (1:19; 3:9; 4:2)   He warned about the danger of conscience being seared as with a hot iron.