Clough Proverbs Lesson 7
Conscience in the Spirit
This morning I
would like to start by reviewing some of the questions that have been asked in
this series on the psychology of the soul.
We’ve got 8 questions that I’d like to answer as we start; these were
handed in last time by some of you and we have the policy of answering these
questions as a review system to begin the next week’s lesson. These are all having to do with the problem
of the soul and its difficulties and so forth.
The first question
is: if God has punished you for something and put you on the funny farm, to use
an expression we use around here, can you follow God and get God to forgive
you. And obviously whoever asked this
question has not been here too long because this is the whole point of 1 John
1:9, you don’t have to beg God to forgive, all you have to do is find out what
it is that He wants you to confess and when this confession is made then the
forgiveness is automatic.
The second
question: I want your explanation of “the life of the flesh is in the blood,”
Leviticus
Three, regarding
your remark that the Holy Spirit removes guilt, is a believer necessarily in
need of forgetting what manner of man he was?
Is it not to our appreciation of the grace of God that we do have
remembrance of what we were? The person
quotes James 1:24, however if you look carefully at James 1:24 you will find
that “forgetting what manner of man you were” has to do with understanding the
text of Scripture in order to confess. So the forgetting there is not
forgetting after the confession is made, it’s forgetting before the confession
is made. And therefore we have the
problem… of course God does preserve parts of the memory about our shortcomings
but He does not preserve those parts of the memory that have to do with the
agony of guilt before Him. The
remembrance of guilt and its agonizing dimension is erased at the point of
confession. If it weren’t there’s be no
solution to the problem of peace in the Christian life.
Four, when the
human spirit separates from the body at death what happens to the soul? The answer is that it goes with the spirit;
the spirit and the soul do not divide.
Acts
Five, what about
astral projection, can the human spirit leave.
The astral projection that you read about in spiritist literature
appears to be some sort of a phenomenon that apparently does go on and may be
the possibility that the human spirit can possibly exit from the body and
return. We have an intimation that this
is possible during lifetime by 2 Corinthians 12:2 when Paul says that he didn’t
know whether his spirit left his body when he saw the Lord or not. You could say he died but even if you say he
died still he rose again, so to speak, he was restored. So this may be a possibility.
Six, modern
medical technology tends to obscure your definitions of life as breath;
mechanical assistance of respiration can keep one alive even after brain
impulses to cause respiration of efforts are long gone. Therefore medical scientists are tending to
define life/death boundary by central nervous system life or death. Even this is not absolute since very, very
rarely the brain ceases all function, such as in extreme drug overdoses, yet
technical advances have allowed return to life by removal of the offending
chemical. How can your approach be
resolved with these observations?
I think we have to
make three remarks in answer to this question.
The first is that the link between the presence of the human spirit and
physical breath is an empirical link given in the Word of God that is based on
common sense observation; in other words, it is not taking into account
technical niceties that were not available to the Jews. God gave a link that would be useful
throughout history regardless of the state of medical technology. And therefore the breath/spirit link is an
empirical link that is based on common sense.
Secondly,
basically the question that we have here is when is the last breath; that’s
really the question and this is the whole problem of why, when we discussed the
problem of the exit of the hi said watch it because just because we define life
ending with the last breath doesn’t really solve the problem because you can’t
tell what is the last breath. And so we
mentioned, as I said, this was a vague boundary at death, not as sharp at all
as the physical birth boundary is, and therefore we cited the ancient near east
custom, the problem of waiting and allowing a period of 72 hours to elapse
before a person was officially considered dead in the ancient world. This is why Jesus had to remain in the grave
three days and three nights to pass through the 72 hour waiting period. If Christ had risen before the three day/three
night period was finished, then on the basis of ancient near eastern custom it
could not be definitely shown that Christ rose from the dead.
My third response
to this would be that it is the problem of modern research to link breath with
the rest of the bodily action, and always remember when we deal with this we’re
not talking about cellular activity. The biblical definition of life does not
mean cellular activity; it means the presence of the human spirit. Medical technology always tends to link life
with cellular activity at times in discussions that I’ve been in, and this is a
dangerous thing as far as the Christian goes because that’s not how we define
life.
Seven, rarely an
extremely defective infant is born with practically no brain; they may breathe
sometimes only an initially small amount of air and then die, or the
hydrocephalic may live a few months or years with almost no brain except a
respiratory center. Do such very
defective individuals have souls? I
think the answer to this would have to be this: would a person living in Moses’
day, looking upon a breathing infant, whether he had brain or not, looking on
the outside with only the definitions of life that he had from the Old
Testament, would a man living in Moses’ day have said that person is a real
person or not. I would say so; another
reason I would say so is because otherwise infanticide in those cases would be
justified morally, and unless one is to say that these are definitely not living
beings then one is justified in putting them in the trash can. This is the moral alternative, either you say
they are real souls or you drop them in the ash can and I haven’t seen most
people anxious to take deformed children and drop them in ash cans; therefore,
implicitly people do regard these as some sort of living people.
Today we move to
conscience in the human spirit. Remember
our reasons for saying that the human spirit is in the non-Christian as well as
the Christians is because in James
This morning we
are going to deal with one phase of the human spirit and this is one which we
will be studying 2 or 3 weeks and that is the most important operational part
of the human spirit in your life and that is conscience. And so today we begin a study of conscience,
still dealing with topics under the human spirit. And in particular we’re going to ask and
answer two questions; the two questions under conscience, we’ll ask and answer
a third one next time. This morning
we’ll ask and answer the following two questions: what is conscience? And the second question is: what does the
conscience do? What is the conscience
and what does the conscience do.
What is the
conscience? The word suneidesis in the original language of
Greek is a word that began late. In the
development of the Bible we have the Old Testament ranging for 14 centuries and
we have the New Testament for one century and during the 15 century period of
development language took on a gradually increasing degree of precision and so
we move from Hebrew that is very pictorial to Greek which is highly
technical. And this is as it should be;
this is why in the divine viewpoint framework you must obtain your basic
historical framework from Hebrew because that gives you the pictures of
history, the events of history and so on.
And then we have the rise of Greek and the rise of Greek provides man
with a linguistic tool for describing the niceties of theology.
In other words, we
come face to face with it right here, in that the Old Testament never mentions
the word conscience; that is strictly a New Testament development. Now why, didn’t people have conscience in the
Old Testament? Yes, but the Hebrew only
had one word and it’s called leb,
with the “b” pronounced as “v” and that was the Hebrew word for heart, and the
Hebrew word for heart stood for parts of the soul and the conscience. And therefore the Hebrew noun leb was not able to distinguish between
the parts. The heart was used of the
mind, the heart was used of various emotions, though rarely; most of the time
it was mind and will and sometimes conscience.
Now this should warn some of you against this little cliché that you hear, so
and so has a “head knowledge but not a heart knowledge.” We will see exactly what these people intend
to say when we refer this to the conscience but technically that’s a wrong
expression because in the Old Testament they didn’t have any distinguishment,
head knowledge was heart knowledge; heart knowledge was head knowledge, there
isn’t any difference in the Old Testament, no difference whatever, it’s an
artificial distinction. So we have one
word, leb and it stands for a whole
mass of ideas.
Now when we come
to the New Testament fortunately the Greek breaks this up and we have at least
three different nouns in the Greek. We
have one, kardia, from which we get
the word cardiac and so on, is the obvious Greek noun for heart and that pretty
well translates the Hebrew; however in the Greek language we have two other
nouns that add refinement to our understanding.
One is nous, that means mind,
so the Greek has a word for mind and has a word for heart whereas the Hebrew
did not. And furthermore, the Greeks had
another word for conscience and that’s the one that we’re interested in now, suneidesis, s-u-n-e-i-d-a-s-e-s, if you
want it phonetically. And that is the
Greek noun for conscience. So the Greeks
had three nouns where the Greeks had one.
This means we have an additional refinement and precision in
understanding and so when we come to the New Testament we come to an added
understanding of the soul.
Now, what about
the derivation of this word, suneidesis. What is the origin of this word? It developed earlier from a verb that looked
like this, sunoido, that was one of
the verbs from which this noun came; sunoido
had two meanings and we’re going to study this verb because this gives us a tip
as to what the conscience does and what it is.
sunoido means two things;
first in Herodotus, Plato and other classical writers, sunoido was used to know as a potential court witness. sunoido,
it is made up of two words actually, oido
meaning to know and sun with, by the
way you can obviously see how when it was translated over to Latin you have con, with, and skill which means to
know, from which get conscience, same thing.
So we have sunoido and sunoido means first know as a potential
court witness. In other words, it
carries the implication that there’s an authority behind the knowledge; it
carries an implication that this knowledge is so certain and so true that it
can be used in a court of law. So this
indicates there is a certain certainty about knowledge of the conscience.
Then it has a
second meaning in classical Greek and it means to share knowledge with somebody
else; you can see these two meanings coalesce somewhat and the second meaning
simply is I know something that you know, only the two of us know it, it’s a
shared secret. And that obviously is a
good word for sunoido. If you want another usage of sunoido and you can see how it’s used,
it’s used this way in Acts 5:2, when Ananias and Sapphira were convicted and
Peter says Sapphira, you sunoido, you
knew with your husband what he was doing, you had access to his private
intimate knowledge. So that is the
flavor behind this basic verb.
But to show you
even in a more graphic way what sunoido
is we’re going to study for a moment Acts 12:7 and we will see this verb, sunoido was used in every day
experience. Acts 12:7-12; in Acts 12:7
Peter is in jail; there’s been a prayer meeting by believers to get him out of
jail. God answers the prayer to get
Peter out of jail by sending an angel.
The angel shows up in verse 7, “And, behold, an angel of the LORD came
upon him, and a light shone in the prison; and he hit Peter on the side,” Peter
was sacked out and the angel has a very good way of waking people up, he just
hit him in the ribs. Obviously this is
an interesting problem for some of you philosophers, how an immaterial angel
can affect a physical material contact with Peter’s body but it says this, “he
smote Peter on the side, and rasied him up,” not only did the angel hit Peter
but he grabbed him and just lifted him right upon his feet, “and said, Get up
quickly. And his chains fell off from
his hands. [8] And the angel said to
him, Gird thyself, and bind on thy sandals.
And so he did. And he said unto
him, Cast thy garment about thee, and follow me.” Now the angel is not going to dress Peter,
Peter is perfectly capable of doing that himself and the angel is not going to
do what Peter can do himself; he lets Peter do that and then the rest of it
that Peter can’t do the angel takes over.
Verse 9, Peter
went out, now here’s where we start to pick up a few interesting things in the
text. And here is where we begin to see
a little bit about the flavor of sunoido,
this verb. “And he went out, and
followed him, and knew not,” now your King James has “wist not” which is the
word to know, “he knew not that it was true which was done by the angel but
thought he saw a vision.” Now at this
point we have two words used; he did not know is oido, Peter did not know.
What is it that Peter does not know at this point? He does not know that it’s really angel
literally hitting him, that’s what he does not know. And therefore very carefully the text says in
the last part of verse 9, “and he thought [he saw a vision.]” Now the word “thought” is a word which means
a very, weak, weak verb in the Greek to know, and so “he thought” means he
guessed. So at the point of verse 9 in
time, we’re going to watch now, we’re going to draw a little time line and
watch how Peter develops his knowledge.
And this will give you a clue as to what conscience is doing in your
life. He starts off with a guess, that’s
what this means, Peter does not, emphatically does not know what is going on
and he merely guesses, this is just sheer guesswork here. And so we have a very carefully selected verb
to point this out, he guessed that it was a vision.
Then in verse 10,
“And when they were past the first and second guard, they came unto the iron
gate that leads unto the city, which opened to them of its own accord; and they
went out, and passed on through the street; and immediately the angel departed
from him.” So now it’s the end of the supernatural
in this thing, it’s all over. While the
supernatural is going on Peter is guessing about it; he doesn’t really know
what is happening. But then in verse 11
it says, “And when Peter was come to himself, he said, Now I know of a surety”
and here “I know” is oido, oido plus the word which means truly,
which means strongly or certainly. “Now
I know certainly” and what is it that Peter knows certainly in verse 11, “I
know certainly that the Lord has sent His angel and has delivered me out of the
hand of Herod, and from all the expectation of the people of the Jews.” So Peter knows certainly what God has done;
it’s transformed from a mere guess to certainty here. Now so far you say well that’s great but you
haven’t shown anything about the verb sunoido. But just first look at what has happened; you
move from guesswork to certainty.
Now in verse 12 we
have a summary of that process, of moving from guesswork to certainty. “And when he had considered the thing,” here
is sunorao [?]which is a similar verb
to sunoido, these both coalesce and
they both form the basis of suneidesis,
“when Peter had considered it,” it is an aorist participle; an aorist
participle always precedes chronologically or logically the action of the main
verb so during this period of time which is now summarized by an aorist
participle, because actually it should be translated in verse 12, “after he had
considered it, he came to the house of Mary, the mother of John Mark,” this is
Mark the author of the Gospel of Mark; his mother housed believers in her
home. John Mark at this time was a young
teenage boy; Mark was the youngest of the writers of the four Gospels; he’d pal
along with Peter. So we have here John Mark’s home and Peter is going to John
Mark’s home, but he goes to the home after he has passed through this process
of moving from guesswork to certainty and that process is summarized by the
aorist participle from sunorao, which
is very much related to sunoido, the
two coalesce here in meaning.
So what do we say
then? If this is a verb from which we
gain the word “conscience,” then we show that conscience has something to do
with moving from uncertainty to certainty, something. At least that’s the way
it’s used in the New Testament, and this is a very good illustration of this.
That’s the verb
but we still have to deal with the verb suneidesis. That is the noun made up from the verb. Now in the Greek nouns would have various
endings. Some nouns would in “m-a,” ma; some nouns would end in “s-i-s” and
the ending of the noun gives you a hint about the meaning of the noun. If I want to end a noun in “m-a” what that
noun says is this is the content and result of the action. For example, you can take the word for
preach, the verb for preach, add “m-a” and you get what is preached. If you take other verbs and add “m-a” you get
what is done, the result of the action.
Now if you take the verb and add “s-i-s” to it that does not give the
content of the action, it gives the process.
So “s-i-s” has to do with an abstraction that has to do with a process
indicated by the verb. The very similar
ending in English nouns would be “ion,” information, action, so on. We have a
very similar ending to our nouns in English, the “ion” ending which refers not
to the content but refers to the process.
Now this is the
noun and so therefore we are going to turn to 1 Peter 2:19 and we will use this
as one central reference in the New Testament that pictures the work or what
content is. In 1 Peter 2:19 we have this
remark; it’s interesting Peter has the most on conscience. “For this is thankworthy, if a man for
conscience toward God endure grief, suffering wrongfully.” That’s the noun suneidesis. It is
“conscience toward God” and therefore this verse has been taken by
lexicographers of the Greek language to refer to the fact this means awareness
of God or put another way, God-consciousness.
And so we come to
a definition of conscience: conscience is not awareness, primarily not
awareness of right and wrong. Please
notice that, we’re going to get into that but primarily it is not the
definition of right and wrong. It is
primarily God-consciousness as the New Testament uses it. That is conscience, God-consciousness. That answers the question what is conscience;
conscience is God-consciousness.
Now the second
question is what does conscience do? What does conscience do? We’re going to discuss six things that
conscience does; you may not be aware of these six things but nevertheless they
are very, very critical because if you do not have your conscience these things
can’t work. The first thing that
conscience does is that it stands as part of the first divine institution,
divine institution number one, along with volition to show creature
responsibility. In other words,
conscience ties all men together before God; it undergirds society. Conscience makes all men responsible. Next week we’ll deal with Romans 1 to see the
details of how this is so. This is the
answer to what about those who never heard the gospel, what about the heathen,
what about somebody that lived off in the middle of Africa somewhere and has
never heard the gospel? Are they held
responsible? No, not for hearing the
gospel, they are held responsible to what light they do have, and the doctrine
of conscience in the Scripture says that all men are God-conscious, all men, regardless of whether they hear
the Word or don’t hear the Word, whether they’re near a missionary or not near
a missionary, all men are responsible.
There’s never a man that’s going to be able to plead ignorance in God’s
sight, well I didn’t hear and I didn’t have a chance. Huh-un, all men are responsible.
So the first thing
that conscience does is that it undergirds society. How does it undergird society? Basically it undergirds society by doing
several things. The first thing that it
does it assures men of an absolute standard of truth… an absolute standard of
truth; it is that as a ministry of conscience, it makes men aware of an absolute
standard of truth. If men did not have
awareness of an absolute standard of truth men could not speak to each
other. In other words, if this were
destroyed tomorrow it would destroy language and communication tomorrow; you
cannot speak, you cannot have a language operating, I don’t care whether you’re
a believer or non-believer, Christian, non-Christian, Hottentots, or anything
else, you cannot have a language system of communication without an absolute
standard of truth. So if conscience were
destroyed language would be destroyed, communication would be destroyed and
later on we’re going to see this is exactly what happens in certain forms of
mental illness. When mental illness fogs
up the conscience the communication with the outside world is destroyed and you
have schizophrenia and everything else.
And the two are linked. You have destruction of communication with the
outside world. So conscience keeps
communication with the outside world going.
Another way in
which it undergirds society, this is still the first thing that conscience is
doing, is that it assures there is common ground between the Christian and the
non-Christian. Here is where there is
such thing as common ground; no matter how weirdo the person may be, no matter
how far out away from the norms of Scripture, the one thing that assures us of
common ground is the conscience. Turn to
2 Corinthians 4:2 and I’ll show you how Paul used this in Corinth. In this passage Paul is speaking to the Corinthians
who had a problem with philosophy. You
need but read 1 Corinthians 2 to know that they had this problem but notice
when Paul went to Corinth how he went to Corinth and how he approached
them. It’s worthwhile looking at Paul’s
tactics because Paul effectively communicated to his world; it didn’t mean he
won everybody to Christianity, that isn’t what we mean by effective
communication. It means you have people
hacked off and irritated at Christianity or you have them accept Christ, either
reject or accept; once you get people into that situation you’ve
communicated. I’d a lot rather have
somebody very mad and angry at me than have somebody just sit there a bump on a
log. You either ruffle feathers of you
do something but at least it shows you’ve communicated.
And 2 Corinthians
4:2 shows what Paul thinks about this process.
“But have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, not walking in
craftiness,” he says of himself, “nor handling the word of God deceitfully, but
by manifestation,” or “showing forth of the truth,” and notice what he adds,
“commending ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God.” Notice what is not said there; Paul does not
say he commends himself to every man’s nous,
or mind; he says we commend ourselves to the suneidesis, the conscience of man.
It’s the conscience that show us the common ground and it’s that to
which Paul addresses himself, always back to the conscience, to every man,
believer and non-believer.
In the same
epistle, 2 Corinthians 5:11 we have a very similar situation. Paul wants to be
made clear to the conscience of his hearers, not just to their nous, or the mind, but to their suneidesis, to their conscience. “Knowing, therefore, the terror of the Lord,
we persuade men; but we are made clear” or “manifest unto God, and I trust also
are made clear” or “manifest in your consciences.” Now if you look at that sentence carefully
you will see the connection between being made clear to God and being made
clear to men’s consciences. The
conscience is a very, very close thing to God Himself. We’ll see more about
that in a moment, but conscience undergirds society. How?
It assures men of an absolute standard of truth and is the common ground
Christian and non-Christian.
What is the second
thing that conscience does for man? The
second thing that conscience does is that it restrains the individual. Conscience tends to restrain the individual;
Acts 23:1. Paul is defending himself
against a Gentile court. Now remember,
Paul cannot defend himself against a Jewish court, he’s not doing that, he’s
not defending himself in Hebrew categories; he’s defending himself in
categories that would be understandable, not just to the Jew but also to the
Greeks, the Gentiles. And so, therefore,
when he makes his defense, in this and other chapters, he says in verse 1, “And
Paul, earnestly beholding the council, said, Men and brethren, I have lived in
all good conscience before God until this day.”
Now the word “lived” is the interesting one, not the word conscience
here. The verb to live is a verb which
means live as a citizen; it’s politeuo,
from which, by the way, the Russians get their word polit bureau, this kind of
thing, the Russian language is very much associated with the Greek
language. “…to live as a citizen,” so he
says to these people, “I have lived as a citizen in good conscience before God
until this day.” He defends himself, he appeals to that secret record in
himself that testifies there’s no hidden motif in my life.
In Acts 24:16
notice what Paul does here, he makes a very strange statement. I must confess that for many times I’ve read
this I’ve been confused about verse 16, “And herein do I exercise myself, to
have always a conscience void of offense” now I could take it if just stopped
here, “toward God,” period, that would make sense to me, “I have always a
conscience void of offense toward God,” period, but the sentence doesn’t stop
there, it’s not a period, it’s a comma and it goes on, “and before men.” Why does Paul bother about having a good
conscience void of offence toward God and toward men or toward society? Why does Paul consider society? Is he compromising with the standards of
society, is that what he means here?
No. What he means is that there
is something that operates in all men, namely all men do have a conscience,
some operating to greater or lesser degrees, but during the time from Adam
until the establishment of human government in Noah’s day, this whole period of
time in earth history and social history, in society, was governed by
conscience. In fact the old
dispensationalist used to call this the age of conscience. During that time men were ruled… now
conscience is not sufficient to totally restrain the individual, this is why
you need force, why passivism is always wrong from the standpoint of the Word
of God. You need force, armed force and
a strong military to solve the problem.
But there is something besides that and that is conscience. Two restraints on men today; conscience on
the inside, government on the outside.
But we have to say that it’s not just conscience on the inside.
Let’s draw a
little picture. Here’s the individual,
the individual may rationalize his way around his own conscience but he has to
face society out here. Here’s society
and society is made up of many, many, many, many, many individuals and each one
of those have a conscience and so therefore what Paul is saying is that I
respect the consciences of all these people in society; he’s not agreeing with
their ideas, he’s simply applying the biblical doctrine of man and saying that
all men have a conscience that is operating and I may get around my own
conscience but I can feel condemned because I can be condemned by someone
outside of myself and I know that I’m condemned through their conscience. In other words, I can short out my own
conscience, maybe, but what do I do about other people, they look at me and
they condemn me in the light of their conscience. So this is why he says “I exercise myself to
be void of offense toward God and toward other men,” or toward society. He’s not talking about compromising with the
relative standards that society may have, he’s talking about the conscience
that lurks in each man.
Now we have some
substantiation of this by men who are experts in the field of mental
illness. One of the men, Meninger, wrote
this: “All mental illness must be a
reaction to some kind of rupture with the social environment.” In other words, what he’s saying is that
forms of mental illness basically is that the individual is trying to live with
offense of his conscience toward man, so what happens. Remember we said conscience links man to
man. So we have a person here and we
have a lot of people out here; these people have conscience; this person has a
problem, he’s done something or something that bothers him and it bothers his
conscience, but maybe he’s able to rationalize his problem out. But he’s still got a problem, what does he do
about the conscience here, the conscience here, and the conscience in that
individual. Hat does do about living before their consciences? Well, he can’t and so what he does is he
begins to erect barriers and the first thing you know you begin to have a
destruction of communication or operation isolation.
We have a case on
record where a psychology student had a problem and he went into a severe state
of schizophrenia, but he came out of that and when he came out he wrote a
lengthy report of how he felt when he was a schitzo, and this report, a student
by the name of Wilkins as reported by O. Hobart Mowrer, and Dr. Mowrer points
out that Wilkins’ report on how he felt as a schitzo completely refutes the
Freudian system because when Wilkins came out of his schizophrenia he admitted
three things. The first thing he
admitted was that he had done something wrong.
Now that’s his privacy, we’re not interested in what it was that was
wrong. He had done something wrong, that
was the first thing he admitted. The
second thing he admitted was that when he started to get mentally ill was the
time when he had a fear of being found out by other people. He had a fear of being found out. Here we have conscience, what is he afraid
of? He’s afraid of this, the operation
of the conscience in other men and now he has a fear of being found out so then
he begins to destroy communication. And
so therefore he said I tried and I had conducted a holy war against my fellow
man. My proximate goal, he said, in life
was to remain misunderstood, and that way I could avoid punishment. Now that’s a very powerful testimony by a man
who went through this and admits to the fact that his schizophrenia was induced
to isolate him from living before the consciences of his fellow man. We’ll get
more into this problem as we go on in Scripture and show you why as biblical
Christians we must disagree wholeheartedly with much of the theory of modern
psychology today; we’re in total collision, there’s no compromise between the
two positions; there’s no such thing as mixing oil and water. We are at utter laugher heads over this issue
and either one wins or the other wins but we cannot compromise at this point.
That’s the second
thing that the conscience does; it undergirds society, and secondly it
restrains the individual. The third
thing; in 1 Timothy 1:19 we have the third thing that conscience does and that
is that it orients the ego; we’ll deal more with what the ego is next week; but
it provides an absolute point for the ego.
Paul is speaking about an apostate here, but notice the language that he
uses to describe the apostate. He say,
verse 18 to get the context and the flow here, “This charge I commit unto thee,
son Timothy,” now Timothy wasn’t Paul’s son, he was his son in the faith, Paul
taught Timothy many things, “according to the prophecies which went before on
thee, that you by them might war a good warfare.” Verse 19, here’s how he fights a good
warfare: “Holding faith, and a good conscience, which some,” now “some”
referred to the people who have turned away from Christianity in the first
century during Paul’s life, “which some having put away concerning conscience
[faith],” it means they refused; what is it that they refused? They refused conscience and when they refused
conscience, some refused conscience, they “have made shipwreck.”
Now this is a very
picturesque word but really it means… it has the idea that you’re going through
life on a boat and here’s your trajectory.
The conscience is one of your guides in this thing; you conscience is
one of the guides and when the conscience is refused, as these people were
refusing the conscience, the result was collision, shipwreck, now they are
without a means for moving through life.
The conscience was the vehicle that was giving orientation to the ego as
it moves through history and without this conscience they are shipwrecked. It’s a very interesting use of the word, how
he uses it to describe the destruction of conscience, a “shipwreck.” You’re left with nothing to use to move, and
so you get a problem when conscience is destroyed, not only does it destroy
society and you will always find social entities where conscience is destroyed
manifest tremendous instability and individuals who destroy their conscience
and rebel against it are always unstable individuals; they are moving from one
thing to the next, they have no stability, up and down, here, there,
everywhere, but they never can settle down, never have any orientation, always
upset, always trying something new, never any stability. And that’s a characteristic of a destroyed
conscience. So the third thing is that
the conscience destroys the ego.
The fourth thing
and we can see it here still in 1 Timothy and then we’ll turn to Romans. There are three verses in Timothy that I want
you to look at; just notice how suneidesis
occurs in the text; notice the context of how the apostle uses
“conscience.” Notice how he uses the
noun. 1 Timothy 1:5, “The end of the
commandment is love out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and faith
unfeigned.” Do you see the link between
conscience and faith? You watch how
those two words are linked very, very closely in Scripture. 1 Timothy 1:19, the passage we just studied,
conscience and faith. Look at 1 Timothy
3:9, “Holding the mystery of faith in a pure conscience.” Do you see the link between conscience and faith? Conscience and faith, conscience and faith,
conscience and faith, over and over again.
Now turn back to
Romans 14:23, this is a very powerful statement about the conscience, though suneidesis is not mentioned
correctly. It’s talking about men in
the first century who had a hang-up with their culture. In other words…. [Tape turns] … one of the
things about Americanism is a do-it-yourself attitude, it’s totally anti-grace
and this is why so many Americans have trouble with the concept of grace,
because culturally we are brought up to, at least were, brought up to do
everything ourselves which is nice in the sense of responsibility, but this
business of do it yourself fails when it comes to salvation. You can’t do one thing in order to receive
salvation; it all has to be received by faith by grace and so American culture
is in collision with Biblical Christianity at a very, very critical point.
In Romans 14:23
they had a similar problem, here it was a problem of eating food offered to
idols and Paul says, “And he that doubts,” that’s the person that doubts that
he can eat certain things, a modern analogy, if you doubt you can do certain
things with good conscience, in other words, your conscience bothers you, you
don’t have certainty that you can do it as unto the Lord, Paul says, “he is
damned if he eats,” now the word “damned” means condemned or he’s out of
fellowship, he’s under discipline. Here
is where you have a strange imperative in the New Testament text. You are commanded to follow your conscience,
even when the conscience is not totally informed by the Word of God. If there’s a doubt between the Word, what is
said in the text, and your conscience, follow conscience. Now that may be new for some of you but here
it is. The Word of God said these people
could eat and Paul says if you can’t believe the Word is the truth, then don’t
follow it. He has doubts, and “He that doubts is damned if he eats, because
eats not of faith; for whatever is not of faith is sin.”
So Paul says right
here and this is the key, the fourth thing that conscience does: Conscience is
the faith switch, it approves or disapproves of faith. If you have a bad conscience there’s no way
under the sun you can believe; no way.
The conscience has to be clean before you can believe. You have to have a certain amount of
confidence before God in order to believe or trust. Remember what conscience is by definition:
God-consciousness. If you are hesitant,
embarrassed, condemned in the presence of God-consciousness with full heart
believe, no way you can believe. So
therefore conscience has to do with faith.
And by the way, link this back to Acts 12 and see again the certainty of
knowledge. You cannot believe if you’re
not certain of knowledge and this is why 95% of evangelism today is all wet,
and why this business of talking a few sweet words about Jesus and raising
hands, coming down an aisle and all the rest of it is destroying people’s
conscience. Do you realize that? That is
a fundamentalist tradition and it is not taught in the canon of Scripture. That didn’t even start until after 1830; how
do you suppose people became Christians before 1830? If they didn’t trot down the aisle how did
they ever become Christians? The reason
they became Christians… do you know how they became Christians? The same way they became Christians in the
first century, they sat and they thought and thought and thought and thought
until it clicked and it was true and it was certain to them and they believed.
That’s how they became Christians. But
this business of giving a five minute sermonette and then asking everybody to
come forward while we sing 41 stanzas of Just
As I Am and create all the emotional environment, and isn’t there one
person here who can come forward, all the people with mothers come forward,
this kind of stuff that goes on. And I’m
accused all over the city for not giving invitations. Well, with that kind of
environment hell would freeze over before I’d give an invitation; I’m never
going to give one here because any time the Word of God is taught that is an
invitation. It’s an invitation to think
So we have, then,
certainty. And it’s the certainty that
is the prerequisite for faith. This
business of oh, I’m going to believe anyway, I can’t understand… now some
things you can’t understand, true, finite knowledge, but this business, I’m
confused over the gospel but come forward anyway, Jesus will solve your
problems. Jesus isn’t going to solve
your problems, all you’re interested in is a psychological aspirin and this is
what is happening. We have certain
ministries in this city right now that are majoring in this kind of thing,
hocus pocus, they have a lot of people who are untrained, they have certain
people doing teaching that hate the local church and hate Bible doctrine. And all it is is an emotional type operation
and it is destroying the image of true biblical Christianity in this city. Be watchful for this kind of thing and please
understand why we’re against it; it destroys conscience; the person can’t
believe with good conscience under tremendous pressure. They have got to think it through for
themselves in the privacy of their own souls, without anybody else butting in.
The fifth thing
that conscience does, it stores a record of our life. We won’t go through all the references
because of our time but if you’ll turn to Romans 2:15 we’ll have at least one
reference. The firth thing that
conscience does, it stores a record of our life for future judgment. It’s like, if you can visualize it although
this may be a bad analogy, if you can visualize a tape recording, constantly
taping everything you say, everything you think, everything, everything, it’s a total tape recording,
that is conscience.
And in Romans 2:15
it’s talking about people who never heard the gospel of Christ. These are the heathen who never heard, look
at them in 2:15, and these people may live certain moral lives and what Paul
says, verse 14, is, “[For when] the Gentiles, who have the law do by nature the
things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto
themselves; [15] Who show the work of the law written in their hearts,” in
other words, they know what the requirements of God are, “their conscience
bearing witness,” remember the original word for sunoido in the Classical Greek, a witness before a court; see how
it comes into the noun, the conscience is your record, the record that will be
used to condemn or vindicate you before the Lord, “the conscience bearing
witness.”
Notice verse 32 of
the previous chapter, again, people who do not know, we’ll deal with more of
that next time but just notice 1:32, “Who, knowing the judgment of God,” but
they haven’t heard the gospel yet, had no exposure to Christianity but Paul
says they know, they know “the judgment of God, that they who commit such
things are worthy of death, not only do the same but have pleasure in them that
do them.” So conscience, then, the fifth
thing is it stores a record of our life for future judgment. Other references on this are Romans 9:1; 2
Corinthians 1:12 and 2 Corinthians 5:10-11.
The last thing
we’re going to speak about that conscience does, the sixth thing, is that
conscience is the prime responder to the Word of God. Hebrews 4:12. In Hebrews 4:12 we have a verse
often quoted but it tells us something about what the conscience does and
Hebrews 4:12 points to the fact that the Word of God is different from all
other ideas that come to us. In this way
it is a different kind of knowledge.
“The Word of God is quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged
sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the
joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the
heart.” Now the word “powerful” and the
word “sharper” point to the fact that the Word of God is different from just
normal human ideas. It is divine
viewpoint; it is words spoken by God Himself.
Now this is hard
for you to get at, let me see if I can bring this up so you can get in your
mind what the New Testament is saying here.
What this is saying, and I could prove this if I had an hour and half to
go through Hebrews, the epistle to Hebrews, if you doubt this, check me out by
looking at the book of Hebrews and watch how the men quote. What he is saying is that this text, this
text when you read it it’s as though God Himself was sitting in front of you
speaking those words to you. Now this is
far different from 95% of modern theology; this is where as conservatives we
have to utterly disagree with the existentialist interpretation of the Bible;
we come in total collision at this point.
Either the Bible is this, we say, or it should be tossed in the nearest
ash can. It’s absolutely useless if this
is not so; if it’s just men’s ideas of God we might as well go read Plato and
Aristotle. But the Bible does not plead
for itself; the Bible says and the writers say that the text, when you read,
that God is speaking those words to you.
Now the reason why
I mention this is even in our own fundamentalist circles people don’t have this
idea; they have the idea that somehow this is a history about something that
happened in the past and it’s nice to read for Sunday School stories or
something like that; maybe some of you were raised this way, but very, very
rarely do you ever meet people who really believe that when they read this God
is speaking to them, that those words are the words of God Himself.
For example, if
you look at Hebrews 3;15, here’s how the author writes it, maybe this will get
it across clearer, this is the way the author if Hebrews deals with the text;
remember he’s dealing with the Old Testament text. He says in verse 15, “But it says,” it
doesn’t say “said,” “said” is your English translation, he uses the present
tense, “But it says, Today if you will hear His voice, harden not your hearts,”
it is all present tense. Now, just think
and test yourself with an attitude. You
pick up the Word of God and it’s boring to you. You pick up the Word of God and
oh well, I gotta read this today and this kind of attitude. Do you realize what you have just said? If it’s really true, now I challenge you,
maybe some of you really don’t believe this and if you don’t you’d better
examine your own heart, do you really believe that the canon on inerrant
Scripture is the words of God, so that when you pick it up those are the words
that God Himself would say to you if Christ, for example, sat in front of you
He would say those words to you. Would
you dare have the guts to come up and say oh, I have to listen to you Christ?
Now when you put
it in terms like that it should quicken your mind to what you’re really saying
when you run down and malign the Word of God.
That is running down and maligning the person of Jesus Christ
Himself. That’s what it is. Now Christ invites questions, it’s all right
to test this intellectually and in other ways, fine. But this attitude, oh, it’s boring to me,
kind of thing, well that’s your attitude toward Christ and it shows a lot about
you, it doesn’t show anything about the Bible, it just shows a lot about how
you act and what your heart is like.
Now in Hebrews 4:12 this is what it means, “The Word of God,” the text we have,
“is powerful and sharper than any two-edged sowrd,” this is the sharpest sword
and the most useful sword in the ancient world, it’s machaira, used by the
Roman soldiers, the reason why it’s two-edged is the soldier could us it and be
off balance when he was using it. Many
of the ancient armies had single-edged swords and after you swished that way,
there you were, exposed. Well, the
Romans got wise to this kind of thing so they had the sword sharpened on both
sides so he’d hack this way and then he could come back across you and catch
you, if he missed one way he’d hit you
on the way back and that was the two-edged sword.
“…piercing even to
the dividing asunder of soul and spirit,” we’ll see next time that that is the
place of the conscience, the conscience is located at the intersection of the
soul and spirit, and then notice, “of the
joints and marrow,” now this tells us something very interesting. Soul and spirit, there’s a dividing line
between the soul and the spirit. Then he
connects this in the original language, “of joints and marrow,” and this
phrase, “joints and marrow” is connected by te,
te is a Greek participle that means these two phrases should be packed
closely together. This is not just
saying the inner and the outer. What this apparently is saying is that the soul
and spirit division is very much located in the actual physical body itself, at
the point of the joints and the marrow.
Now what about this? I checked
out the word “joint” and you can… this is not talking about pot by the way, the
word “joint” here is a word that was used in Classical Greek for shoulder
joints, leg joints and so on by Hippocrates, you can read his writings and
watch how he uses the technical medical term.
And the word that’s translated “marrow” is one that can refer to the
central nervous system. Here’s why: our
word marrow refers to the bone marrow.
Now evidently what happened in the ancient world is that they didn’t
distinguish between the bone marrow and the nerve tissue, to them it was all
the same. So their word “marrow”
included what we would call bone marrow and nerve.
Here, for example,
is an interesting passage. By the way,
[sounds like: Gal lon] uses this, another doctor who was writing in the early
world, he uses this word for brain. And
the second place where this occurs is in one of Sophocles plays and in this
play he speaks of a man and here’s what he says. Now watch this phrase and how he uses this
word “marrow.” “He heard him at the surf
beating rock in the sea and he made his white brain to ooze from the hair as
his skull was dashed to pieces.” I thought
that would be good for your Sunday dinner.
But it does show you that the marrow isn’t just what we call bone
marrow, that’s talking about brain tissue, as the skull was collapsed this
thing oozed out is what happened, if you’ve ever seen somebody with their head
bashed in that’s what happens. So this,
obviously then refers to the brain.
So we find then in
Hebrews 4:12, “The Word of God is quick and powerful, it pierces to the
conscience,” and that conscience is somehow located and intimately related to
the body itself; you see what we have tried to show on this chart over and over
again; you can’t separate the spirit from the body very neatly. You have the body and then you have the
indwelling spirit and the result of the two is the soul. And they all come together in a complex that
functions together. That’s why we have
the central nervous system in the body and we have conscience over here in the
spirit but they are very, very tightly related.
So then we have
the sixth thing that the conscience does is respond to the Word of God. These six things are what the conscience
does. Next week we will deal with how
does the conscience work. We haven’t got
with that yet; we don’t know where the conscience gets its information, how it
does, or how it judges us, all we’ve said it does certain things.
Again, by way of
review, what are those six things that the conscience does: First what is the conscience: The conscience is God-consciousness,
ultimately. Secondly, what does the
conscience do? It undergirds society by
providing for communication on common ground.
Two, it restrains the individual because the individual must face other
people’s consciences. Three, it orients
the ego to life, it serves as an absolute point of reference. Four, it approves or disapproves of
faith. Five, it stores our record for
eternity. And six, it responds to the
Word of God.
Now, how’s your
conscience. With our heads bowed….