Clough Proverbs Lesson 8
How the Conscience Works
We continue with
the problem of the conscience. The
conscience is one of the faculties of the human spirit given in God’s
Word. Again, we preface our remarks by
saying this, that within Christianity man is made in the image of God. If man is made in the image of God, then it
follows that man can only be understood if God is understood. A finite man cannot obtain infinite knowledge
and therefore the only way to secure an absolute or a so-called universal in
the language of the philosophers, which by the way is not a really good term to
describe what we’re talking about but we’ll use it; the only way to establish
this would be revelation. Proof: Look at
history, look at the other civilizations apart from
So when we talk
about man we have to go back to the problem of revelation and it’s this point
that separates our approach here from the approach that you will get in the
usual psychological theories. Those of
you who have had courses in psychology have learned many, many things; a lot of
what you have learned is true, particularly things that you observe in clinical
psychology and working with people. In
clinical psychology you have situation where you obverse real things going on
and you can make some real conclusions.
But when you begin to theorize about the structure of man, then you have
to draw upon your philosophical heritage or the ideas that are being
transmitted in the culture, and at this point modern psychology and psychiatry
is wrong and in total contrast to the Word of God. So therefore we separate our approach from
that by clearly declaring the fact that we draw upon God’s Word as divine
revelation and build upon that instead of human speculation.
We have covered
many things; we have said, for example, that according to the Bible you first have
the body; the body has certain components and the body originates at the point
of conception. And this is why certain
things are inherited and we will see later why, if you use this approach it
will explain something that is a puzzle to many Christians: what is the
difference between a natural talent and a spiritual gift. Every believer has a spiritual gift and every
believer has certain natural talents.
The natural talents are inherited and come to you from the point of
conception. However, God has breathed
into the body a spirit at the point of physical birth, not at the point of
conception. Until a baby is born and
takes its first breath it is not a person.
At that point the human spirit is given and the human spirit has certain
things. I haven’t even attempted here to
be comprehensive so don’t try to take this as a comprehensive statement, this
just so far the good summary, basically of what the bible is saying.
We are starting to
study parts of the human spirit and we are discussing the problem of
conscience. Last week we dealt with six
things that the conscience does. One
thing that the conscience does, we said, was that it undergirds society as part
of the first divine institution. This
means that the conscience acts as a source for communication or as a basis of
communication. If man did not have the
sense, the innate sense that there had to be somewhere absolute unchanging
truth, and therefore an absolute standard of truth, there could be no communication
between people. The very fact, I don’t
care what the person is, whether he’s a Buddhist, whether he’s the most
virulent atheist who ever lived, he still communicates in words to other people
and the very fact of his communication to other people is an implicit assent to
the fact that there are absolutes. So
the fact that there is communication and the fact that all men have basically
some common grounds; the common grounds is that which comes forth from the
conscience.
The second thing
we said about what does the conscience do, and by the way, previous to all of
this we defined conscience by 1 Peter 2:19 and said that conscience very simply
stated is not really norms. A lot of
people believe that conscience is the norms and standards. I do not believe this is totally biblically
correct; it will acquire norms and standards but if you want a very simple
definition of conscience you don’t even have to go to norms and standards. A basic definition of conscience, according
to 1 Peter
So all men
everywhere must have some idol to anchor themselves and the idol will always be
there; this is a safe assumption, every man has the true God for his God or an
idol for his god; there is no neutral ground; all systems are centered upon
either the true God in Jesus Christ or an idol.
This is why the Christian objects to the teaching of evolution on public
money because to the Christian evolution has as its idol chance. In the words of Paul, paraphrased in the last
verse of Romans 11 where Paul says, “For of God, through God and to God are all
things,” the evolutionist would say of chance, through chance and to chance are
all things. So if you take the last
verse particularly of Romans 11 and plug in place of God’s name, “chance” that
is the dogma of evolution. And since
it’s an idolatrous religion and not a scientific theory, the Christian
therefore objects to the violation of his civil rights being funded by public
tax money on public premises. This is
the whole reason, it goes back to the fact of man and conscience with
God-consciousness.
Then in review the
six things that the things the conscience does, we said it undergirds society,
that is, it provided a base for communication and common ground; that was point
1, also found in references such as 2 Corinthians 4:2 and 5:11. The second thing the conscience does, it
restrains the individual, Acts 23:1; Acts 24:16. It restrains the individual not only by the
individual’s own conscience but also by the conscience of the surrounding
people. You will always find a person
who is in rebellion against God wanting to isolate herself or himself from
God. The reason for this is that the
person implicitly feels condemned by appearing to be judged before the
consciences of the peers and so on. And
so you tend to have some sort of an isolation.
Even though this may take a gregarious form, people may go to a lot of
parties and so on but don’t get too close to me, that attitude. So the second thing is that the conscience
operates to restrain the individual; we have to face not only our own
consciences but the consciences of the society.
The third thing,
the conscience orients the ego, 1 Timothy 1:19, when the conscience is
destroyed says it is like breaking a ship on rocks, you no longer have a mode
of transportation through life, you no longer have a vehicle to use. So the
third thing is that it orients the ego.
Those of you who have studied a little psychology, let me just say at
this point, you have learned the conscience under the title “super ego.” What the psychologist is calling the super
ego the Bible calls the conscience and if you think what you have learned about
the super ego in some of your classes you’ll understand the revolutionary
content of what we’re claiming from the Bible.
The super ego or conscience orients the ego.
The fourth thing
is that the conscience does, it approves or disapproves of faith. If your conscience does not testify to the
truthfulness of what you are trying to believe in you cannot believe. This operates in the Christian who may know
his orthodoxy but he knows there is something in his life that isn’t right with
God, and he knows therefore, his God-consciousness tells him I cannot face God
eyeball to eyeball. In that situation
the man can’t believe either and in that situation his heart condemns him and
he has no confidence before God and cannot believe. So conscience approves or disapproves of
faith; Romans
The fifth thing
the conscience does, it stores our record for the eternal judgment. All men must face God to be evaluated. The believer faces God at the bema seat of
Christ to be evaluated, whether he has produced human good or divine good in
his life. The non-Christian, the one who
has not yet personally accepted Christ as Savior, that person also must face
God but he faces a different judgment, the judgment seat of the great white
throne in Revelation 20. The persons
will be judged by something that is inside the very person; it will not be a
judgment based on an external necessarily.
Of course obviously ultimately it all is based on God’s standards. But what is going to be so horrible about the
judgment is that the information that will be portrayed before your eyes will
be information that you will immediately recognize as coming from within
yourself. God will use the information
of your own heart to condemn. So this
comes forth from the conscience. So the
fifth thing, the conscience stores our record for judgment, Romans 2:15.
The sixth thing
that the conscience does and a very unique role and one that must play a
tremendous role in our understanding of how we know as Christians is that the
conscience is the thing that responds to the Word of God. Hebrews 4:12.
That is what Hebrews 4:12 means when it says the Word of God in contrast
to human wisdom penetrates further, it is a comparative form, not a superlative
nor a regular normal adjective, it pierces further, it is more powerful, it is
shaper, so the Word of God is sharper than any human philosophy, it is sharper
than any scientific knowledge, it pierces further, it doesn’t stop just with, as
we will see later on, the mind. The Word
of God penetrates through the mind over to the “dividing asunder of the soul
and spirit and joints and marrow and is a critic” or “judge of the thoughts and
intents of the heart.” So the Word of
God penetrates through the mind all the way to the conscience and in that sense
the Word of God is very important.
And it’s this that
the Christian tries to struggle for when he holds to an inerrant Bible; it’s
not that we’re a bunch of old fundies that to just raise the religious roof
because we want to stick to some outmoded doctrine. It is simply this: that if the Word of God is
not inerrant then it can’t be the words of God, and if it isn’t the words of
God, then it can’t pierce to the conscience.
Said another way in the vocabulary of the author of Hebrews, when the
author of Hebrews quotes Scripture he does it differently than perhaps some of
you in BMA or some other program,, he doesn’t just quote it, what the author of
Hebrews does, and this is a very important point to understand the mentality of
the New Testament people. When the
author of Hebrews quotes the Bible he says “God says,” present tense, he
doesn’t say “God said,” past tense. He
says “God says,” present tense and this means that when the Word of God is
quoted, those words are the words of God being re-spoken in history. This is an awesome concept. I’m afraid a lot of Christians haven’t
thought through the very preciousness of what it is that they facetiously call
the Word. The Word of God is the content
of God’s communication and every time it’s spoken God is speaking it.
So we then have
these six things that the conscience does.
Now we want to move to how does the conscience work and we’ll be on this
for two Sunday mornings because it will take us some time to develop how the
conscience works. In connection with
this I’d like to read a question that was handed in last time, a very important
question. So I’m going to begin by
reviewing from the standpoint of this question and then we’ll go in to see how
the conscience works and I think this question will be answered as we go on.
The question is
this: Your remarks concerning the operation of the conscience in Romans 14
seems to support the Quaker teaching about the inner life of the
conscience. If a believer is to act on
his conscience, even when the conscience is in conflict with the clear teaching
of the Word, then does not faith itself become paramount in the believer’s life
instead of the object of faith? An
excellent question and this has not yet been clarified as we move further. The Quaker teaching in this regard is that
persons can obtain a sort of, almost immediate mystical knowledge from
listening to their conscience. This is
in total contrast to what we are teaching, though if you don’t listen carefully
they will sound similar.
Paul, in Romans
14, definitely teaches, as he does in 1 Corinthians 8, that there will come
times and have come times, and always have been that the Christian conscience
doesn’t catch up with the Word of God.
In other words, the Word of God makes advanced statements that the
Christian cannot yet believe. Since the
Christian cannot yet believe these, he is to follow in the sphere of that which
he can believe. Said another way, when
the conscience gives its approval, we then have certainty of the truth, but the
truth that we have certainty of is not a mystical truth that has come in
because of some sort of a feeling in our heart, it has come in through the Word
of God, through thinking, through the use of the mind and so on and we have
arrived at a decision that this is the truth; this will pass before God. In other words, said another way, I can come
and hold my hands up before God and say God, my hands to the best of my
knowledge are clean at this moment. And
that truth which is testified to by the conscience is always checkable and so
on, but the idea is that the conscience is necessary. It just doesn’t circulate in the mind, it has
to have an interaction of the conscience. We’ll try to work this out more clearly
as we go on.
The first thing
about how does the conscience work. We
pass from six things that the conscience does to now how does the conscience
work. By the way, for those of you who
are interested in the political scene, if you will look carefully at how the
conscience works and what the conscience is doing as you take these notes you
will begin to see some interesting parallels where you can have a conscience of
a nation, and so a lot of these principles that I’m giving you for the
conscience of the individual soul can apply, sort of, approximately, in mass to
the nation. And if you’ll look carefully
at some of these things that the conscience does and how the conscience works
it will explain a lot about why America is the way it is. We have conscience trouble.
The first thing
about how does the conscience work is found in Proverbs 20:27; here is a
description of the conscience but notice that in the Old Testament there’s no
Hebrew word for conscience. suneidesis is a word which we defined last
time as something that has arisen from the time of the Greeks because the Greek
language is capable of specification and detail; the Hebrew language is a
picture language. Again, those of you
who are following the divine viewpoint framework that we’re working on, we’ll
be reading the second and third pamphlets are they printed up will notice this
is why I am doing it that way. We are
first taking history and the events of history to give you a picture of the doctrine. Then after and only after you have the
historic picture, then you begin to develop the fine points of the
doctrine. The picture comes first, the
fine definition comes second. You can’t
make the definition until you first have the historic picture in your
mind. That’s why the Old Testament comes
before the New Testament. The New
Testament presupposes already know the familiar pictures of history given to
you in the Old Testament.
Now the same thing
here, in Proverbs 20:27 “conscience” doesn’t occur here, but we know this is
the conscience that is spoken of because of parallels with the New
Testament. “The spirit of man is the
candle of the LORD, searching all the inward parts of the belly.” Proverbs is written in a very materialistic
way and describes these things in terms of physical organs for reasons again
which we’ll develop later. But the
spirit of man tells us, since this is describing work of the conscience, tells
us then that the conscience is located primarily in the human spirit, not in
the soul, though Hebrews 4;12 indicates that it’s really close to the soul too
because obviously the conscience needs to use the mind. But conscience is located, apparently in the
soul here from this verse.
“The spirit of man
is the candle of the LORD,” this means that the human spirit in its constant
function is something that you have inside you right now, but you have no
control over it. this is very
interesting. It is something, an inner
monitor that God has built into your being; conscience is there, there’s no
surgery that you can have that will destroy conscience. They have found in certain areas, prefrontal
lobotomies that the conscience seems to be semi destroyed; this would only
indicate that its links with the physical brain are destroyed in this kind of
an operation. But apart from this the
conscience is “the candle of the LORD,” “the light of the LORD.” Notice it is God’s light. Now this doesn’t mean it is infallible; this
is not what it’s saying. We’ll clarify
that later, but it is a sort of under-judge by God of our heart. It searches, notice, this, “all the inward
parts of the belly.” This means the
conscience knows things about you that maybe you in your conscious mind don’t
even know about yourself. The spirit,
your human spirit indelibly has written all over it everything that you are,
everything that you’ve ever thought. It
gives you a feeling of nakedness when you think of this, that you must stand
before God with all the clothes of human righteousness stripped off, and there
you stand naked because there you are with your spirit and your conscience
written indelibly, everything in your entire life.
The conscience,
then, is “the candle of the LORD.” A
parallel reference would be 1 Corinthians 2, Paul discusses the problem of the
collision of human philosophy and Christianity in 1 Corinthians 2, it’s a very,
very critical passage. Paul struggled
with this himself, he wasn’t immune to these problems; Paul dealt many years
with these problems. But out of if all
in 1 Corinthians 2:11, this is actually only a footnote to his major argument
but it’s an important footnote from our standpoint this morning. “For what man knows the things of a man, save
the spirit of man which is in him?” Now
if you really believe verse 11 some of you wouldn’t gossip and malign like you
do.
Read it again:
“For what man knows the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in
him?” Now there are times, many, many
times when I counsel with individuals that I wish I could read the conscience;
it would help me immeasurably in helping other people. But I can’t, I have to guess from the
outside, and so sometimes, very often, the counsel is wrong, doesn’t work the
way it’s supposed to, simply because you can’t get an accurate diagnosis. Now if a man who is counseling could penetrate
to the conscience, to the spirit, then he would really know what the person
know has and really have a heart knowledge of the individual. “Even so the things of God knows no man, but
the Spirit of God,” and he uses an analogy that is very difficult to understand
but nevertheless, for our interest this morning I only refer to the first part
of verse 11. The conscience, located in
the human spirit, knows intimately the man.
That’s the first
thing about how the conscience works; it is located in the human spirit but if
you want to say this and you want to think spatially, it is located at a point
in the human spirit that buttresses itself against the soul. Put another way, it’s at the interface
between the soul and the spirit so that it becomes a pathway. Those of you who are electrical engineers,
think of the fact that you have a flowing current two ways; positive and
negative, both ways, you have a full circuit here between the conscience that
is at the interface of the soul and spirit.
A second thing
about how does the conscience work; again, recalling what we learned in
Proverbs 20:27, the second thing we learn about how the conscience works is
that it works continuously, whether you are conscious of it or not. There is not way you can turn off your
conscience; 24 ours a day it’s recording, recording, recording, recording,
recording, recording, this is why Jesus says in the Gospels, do you know what’s
going to condemn you people, He says, the words that you have spoken and
thought, and they will be pulled out of you at the latter day. From where?
From the conscience. The
conscience cannot be stopped. What can
be stopped and we’ll learn the ways of turning the conscience off, many are
experts in this, and we’ll learn from the Bible how to destroy your conscience;
the conscience never is destroyed, what is destroyed is your mind; that’s
what’s destroyed. The gateway between
the conscience and the mind is destroyed so your mind has no consciousness of
the conscience. In other words, it’s
totally unaware of the conscience.
That’s scar tissue development.
When the mind is polluted and destroyed then you are in serious trouble;
the mind can be destroyed but the conscience never can be. You can destroy your awareness of your own
conscience but you never can destroy it.
It’s an automatic tape recording, just think of it, the reel continually
turns, recording, recording, recording, everything and there’s no switch that
you can ever locate that will ever, ever, ever, ever turn your conscience off.
Now we come to the
third thing, how does the conscience work?
And this is the first thing in this particular section that’s going to
take some time to develop. Let me just
state it in one sentence first and then we have to work on it. The conscience judges the ego in the soul by
God-consciousness. The conscience judges
the ego in the soul by its God-consciousness, better put “its” in there. The conscience judges the ego and the soul by
its own God-consciousness. So you have
an evaluation that is occurring constantly in your soul. The ego and the soul are judged by the
conscience against the conscience’s God-consciousness.
Now let’s look at
ego and soul for a minute; we haven’t developed the soul yet and therefore we
will spend a little time on that and ego.
Those of you who are used to some of these diagrams have remarked to me
at the door leaving that you can’t find something on this chart. There are some things missing from that chart
and they’re deliberately missing from that chart. One of the obvious things that you should
look for on that chart and can’t find is volition. It’s missing.
The other thing that is missing from that chart that you can’t find that
you ought to be aware of is self-consciousness.
That too is missing from that chart.
Why are self-consciousness and volition missing? The answer is that this chart is looking at
the ego, which we will define as self-consciousness plus volition. And that ego cannot be seen; this is one of
the great mysteries of man. You can’t
see your own ego. The reason why is that
every time you try to conceive of your ego it’s your ego that’s doing the
conceiving. Think of an English
sentence; the ego is always the subject of the verb: I think about me. Yeah, you think about you and you have
thoughts about yourself but still it’s the “I” that’s doing the thinking. You never can, as it were, here you are, you
never can get outside of yourself to come over here and look at yourself. So the ego can never be seen. And this has caused tremendous problems in
the history of western philosophy; men like Hume have even denied it exists.
But nevertheless,
the ego cannot be seen. So we have to
say what about the ego. And so we have
to come to Scripture and see how the Scripture handles it and when we come to
Scripture we’re amazed to find something very interesting. The Bible in neither Old nor New Testament
has any word that means volition. This
is amazing. One of the key things in the
Bible, volition, there’s no noun in the Bible, in either Hebrew or Greek that
refers to volition. Not one; there are
verbs that refer to deciding; there are nouns that refer to what is decided
upon, but never can you find a noun in Hebrew or Greek that refers to the
faculty of deciding, or what we call the volition. None, never, anywhere. Now this is interesting. The only thing that we have in the Hebrew is
I, me, my, these things, but never a noun; never a noun for the ego.
Let’s see how this
works. Let’s make two observations that
tell us something about the ego. The
first thing that we see in the Bible and this is consistent; in 215 situations
this checks out so therefore this is a very consistent thing, and I fight for
this because I encounter Christians all the time who say that soul, spirit, are
just words to be floated around. I don’t
find that; I’ve done a careful study of this.
You will always find the self or the ego in the Bible talking to the
soul but never to the spirit. I say to
my soul thus and such. But why do you
never… NEVER find the expression I say to my spirit such and such.
Let me show you some illustrations.
Psalm 42:5, here’s an illustration of a situation in the Bible that
occurs over and over and over and over again but it always occurs the same way,
there’s no exception. Now lest you all
lose the forest for the trees, stay with me; what I’m trying to show you is
we’re trying to climb inside the head of the men who wrote the Old Testament
right now, that’s what we’re trying to do.
So don’t lose me. What I’m trying
to show you is let’s come on inside the head and look at the world the way the
Old Testament man was looking at his world, and let’s try to understand what
was going on in his head and how he looked at reality. That’s why I’m taking you to these
verses. I want you to capture in your
thinking for a moment, pretend your head goes inside his, you’re trying to
capture the mentality of the Old Testament men.
Now if you look at
Psalm 42:5 he asks a question of his soul.
This is the kind of question that is never, never, never asked of his
spirit. “Why are you cast don, O my
soul? And why are you disquieted in me?
Hope thou in God; for I shall yet praise Him for the help of His countenance.” Why does he address his soul that way but he
never addresses his spirit that way. A
parallel lesson is Luke 12:19, the rich man said I will build buildings and so
on, and he’s going to tear down the barns and after he gets all his wealth
built up he says soul, you have enjoyed life, and he carries on a conversation
with his soul.
Turn to Psalm
77:6, here’s another reference about these Old Testament people looked upon
their own lives and the details in their lives.
There’s a little fine point in this verse but this fine point is very,
very important. Psalm 77:6 says, “I call
to remembrance my song in the night; I commune with my own heart, and my spirit
makes diligent search.” Now this is
interesting because the translators down through history have tried to change
verse 6. They see that last part where
it says, “I commune with my own heart,” and Jerome and the other later men, not
the Septuagint and not the Massoretic text; the Massoretic text and the
Septuagint are the original documents, so to speak, from which we get our Old
Testament text; in those things it’s written like it is here. “I commune with my heart, and my spirit makes
diligent search.” Now if you go to all
the later church fathers they always tried to fudge this verse and here’s the
way they tried to make it sound: I commune with my own heart, and with my
spirit I make search. What have I
done? I’ve changed the subject of the
sentence, haven’t I? What’s the subject
of the last part? “I commune,” that’s
the first part, that’s the subject; I do it instrumental, with my heart, that
is with my mind. That’s the instrument
that I am using to search, the word communicate means to search out. Then the second, parallel to that is, “my
spirit searches.” Therefore if this is
parallelism what is my spirit parallel with in the first sentence? “I,” so again it seems to say that the ego is
more closely aligned with the human spirit than it is with the soul. This can be very, very important later
on. The ego is closely aligned with the
human spirit rather than with the human soul.
Yet we must
confess that the ego, again defining ego as self-consciousness plus volition,
is separate from the human spirit. Turn
to Proverbs 16:32. Again, capture the
mind, we can’t judge how these people, were they wrong or right until at least
we understand them. Everybody tries to
pass judgment on the Word of God and they don’t even understand the Word of God
to start with. You can’t judge the Word
until you understand it. Some day we
will get into Proverbs, believe me, but I hope by showing you these little
references in Proverbs you’re seeing right away that there’s no sense in
tearing into Proverbs until we all have an understanding at least of some of
these basic terms because what’s going to happen? Every time I go through Proverbs I’m going to
have to stop and go through all the basic terms again so let’s get our
vocabulary started now, then when we go into Proverbs we can move in and
understand it.
Proverbs 16:32,
“He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that rules his
spirit, than he that takes a city.” “…he
that rules his spirit,” so therefore the ego is separate, seemingly, from the
spirit. It seems to be allied to the
spirit yet separate from the spirit.
Turn to 1 Corinthians 14:32, a passage on the true tongue. In verse 32 he makes a very interesting
point. By the way, this is one characteristic that separates New Testament
tongues from this phenomenon that’s raging around us today. Verse 32, “The spirits of the prophets are
subject to the prophets.” What does that
mean? It means there’s nothing
involuntary about the New Testament tongue.
He just doesn’t uhh come upon somebody, it is by the volition of the
individual. “The spirits of the prophets
are subject to the prophets,” and for this reason, Paul could say only three
people speak in an assembly worship service, and he says don’t you start blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah, and say God’s speaking to you; nonsense, if you’re a
real prophet you will have control over your spirit. So therefore “the spirits of the prophets are
subject to the prophets.”
Now again, if the
spirit is subject to the ego the ego must be different conceptually from the
spirit. So therefore this is why, to
simplify things, I have avoided on this diagram, any mention of volition and
self-consciousness. If you want to
visualize the ego visualize it as kind of a small ball hanging in mid air over
the spirit, just think of it in the third dimension. I’ve asked an artist and there’s just now
way, we’ve wracked our brains trying to figure out how we can put this on a two
dimensional surface and there’s no way we can do this. So to carry the idea and communicate it all I
can say to you is visualize it in three dimensions instead of two. We have the
ego here and it’s connected with the spirit, and does control the soul too. So that’s the ego.
The soul we
haven’t studied yet but you can see form this chart when we do study it what it
consists of: it consists of your mind, your emotions, and learned behavior
patterns: the mind, the emotions, and the learned behavior patterns. And some of you are going to be in for a
shock when we hit the soul because some of you have thought in terms of the
soul as an integral being and we’ll show you that your soul can be taken over
by alien spirits. You can have your
spirit and other spirits, all using your soul at the same time. The soul, in other words, is not an integral
unit; the soul is open. The spirit is an
integral unit and can’t be taken over.
That is intact, but the soul is not intact, the soul is an open
unit. It’s like a computer and any
number of operators can sit down at the operator’s console and turn on the
computer, start the programming, the read outs and so on. So the soul is an instrument that can be used
by many different spirits, even at the same time. But the spirit itself is an integral
unit. So much for the ego and the
soul.
Now we come to the
heart of the matter. If it’s the ego and
the soul that are being judged by the conscience, what standards does the
conscience use to judge it by? What is
the standard of the conscience? We said
that the conscience judges the ego and the soul; now what is it that the
conscience uses? What does your
conscience use to condemn you? You might
be interested, boy, I get rid of that I’d be happy. We’ll find out what your conscience has in it
that’s condemning you, perhaps, maybe it isn’t sin.
All right
God-consciousness, this is the conscience, God-consciousness. Let’s look at God-consciousness for a
moment. Get rid of the idea that your conscience has
standards from society; later on we’ll come around to that but for the time
being just erase that from you conscious mind for a moment. Just think of your conscience as an awareness
of God, vague, just an awareness of God, that’s all. The first thing about God-consciousness is
this. God-consciousness has a category,
God. In other words, there’s some
ultimate, call if presupposition if you want to be philosophical about it, if
you just want to be normal just say a god, an awareness of a god, something
above everything; top dog, something.
That is an awareness of a god, we’re not saying anything about what kind
of god, whether it’s an idol god or the true God but it has constituted
something. This by the way, in spite of
what all the philosophers would love to tell you is what every piece of
philosophic work that has ever been done always proceeds off a presupposition
and the presupposition is always that of the true God as known in Jesus Christ
or that of an idol substituted in His place.
And there’s no way any philosopher, I don’t care who he is, can get away
from this problem because in the end even he is made in the image of God and
even he must have an idol to his system.
It may be the idol of autonomous reason or something else but it always
is an idol. He always starts with a
presupposition here.
Now the second
thing about God-consciousness besides it being an awareness of a God is that it
is filled with the results of general revelation. Turn to Romans 1:18; this, I
think, in my own estimation, is the most difficult verse in all of God’s word,
difficult not because it is really difficult to understand but difficult
because it leaves all men stripped; a very hard verse, Romans 1:18 and
following; it’s a very, very hard verse for this reason. It speaks of general revelation. What do we mean by general revelation? General revelation is the label that
theologians apply to knowledge of God that is common to all men.
Romans 1:18 and
2:20, let’s just read Romans 1:81-20 maybe you can see what I’m talking about
better. “For the wrath of God is
revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who
hold the truth in unrighteousness.” This
is talking about people who have not heard the gospel. The people spoken in verse 18 are Roman heathen
who have never heard of Christianity.
Look what he’s saying, “they hold the truth in unrighteousness, [19]
Because that which may be known of God is manifest,” “clear in them; for God
has shown it to them.” Who? Those who heard the gospel? Huh-un, the ones who haven’t heard the
gospel, “God has shown the truth to them.”
Verse 20, here’s why, “Because the invisible things of Him from the
creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are
made, that is, His eternal Godhead and power, so they are without excuse.” What about those who haven’t heard, “without
excuse.” Hard, hardness; you mean to
tell me those poor people… [Tape turns]
… a few verses,
there you find the wrath of God. What
does it say in verse 24, “God gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of
their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies between themselves.” Verse 26, what do you read? “For this cause God gave them up unto vile
affections; for even their woman did exchange the natural use for that which is
against nature. [27] And likewise the
men,” too. Verse 28, “And even as they
did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a
reprobate mind,” and then verse 32, “Who, knowing,” who are these, those who
heard the gospel? Huh-un, heathen
Romans, never heard Christianity. What
does verse 32 say? Do they have a
chance? “They know the judgment of God,
that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same
but have pleasure in them that do them.”
This is what holds
all men judgable; think about it for a moment.
If we did not have general revelation, let’s think of it this way maybe
it tightens it up for you, just eliminate this, we don’t have any general revelation
now; now ask yourself this question: what would happen at the final
judgment? Could God hold men responsible
if they didn’t have this? No, it is
precisely the general revelation in creation that makes all men responsible,
whether the Word of God is taught or not, it is this that damns men. This is why this passage is so hard; it’s
hard because you get very ooochy about where this leads you; some of you
already can begin to see where this leads, it leads in very ooochy areas
because this makes all men responsible because that all men have general
revelation.
Let’s look at it
some more in verse 18, “For the wrath of God is revealed,” Paul means you can
see the wrath of God operate in history and this is most interesting as a
social commentary, he says I can see the wrath of God functioning in society
right now, not in the future, now, this is present tense wrath of God. And does Paul say, “the wrath of God is
revealed” because everywhere, every society that you see where men are
rebelling against their God-consciousness you find the contents of verse 24 and
following. Every time! Now this is why a lot of Americans who wring
their hands and say oh, if our country doesn’t reform we’re going to experience
the judgment of God. In light of this
verse what do you think Paul would say if he were in your living room
discussing this with you over coffee some day and you dropped that remark? Well, if things don’t get better Paul,
America is going to get the judgment of God.
Paul would probably calmly put his coffee cup down and say friend, if
you look out the window that is the wrath of God already. The wrath of God here is present tense; where
you see social chaos Paul says that is the wrath of God already showing itself
because men are turning away by social community after social community against
their own collective conscience.
Now let’s see what
else he says in verse 18, these men, and it’s all of us, “The wrath of God is
revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men,” and
comma, this describes the men, and he wants to be sure and get this in there,
this wrath of God just doesn’t plop down on poor innocent beings who had no
chance to hear, the wrath of God comes upon men who have, on the contrary,
heard very clearly and turned away. And
these are the men, they “who hold the truth in unrighteousness.” Powerful words in the original language;
these truths, he says know those truths, they know the truth, whether a
missionary has gone to them or not, they know the truth. Everybody, they know the truth. Those of you who study philosophy think of
this when you discuss epistemology, “they hold the truth in
unrighteousness.” And Paul says the
word, kataecho here is not only just
hold on to it, it means to grab it and suppress it. That shows you how powerful this verse is in
the original. This is why this verse is
so hard, why it’s so damning on all man.
Not only does he make the audacious claim that all men know the truth
already before you even talk to them about Christ, not only does he make that
statement, but then he goes on to make even another statement that is even more
damning, and that is these men not only know the truth but they pull it down
and suppress it. Freud was right when he
talked about repressing; he was wrong in what he said men repressed, but he was
certainly right that there is a mechanism of repressing in the mind of men and
here it is right here in the Bible. Men
are actively suppressing and defying the truth.
Here in verses
19-20 is why. Here’s his explanation,
“that which may be known of God,” in other words, God can be known apart from
the Word of God, that’s what verse 19 is saying, you don’t have to know the
Word of God to know God. “Because that
which can be know of God is clear in them.”
Why is that which is known of God clear in them? CLEAR, not foggy not hazy, clear! Now this goes back to the conscience; they
may in their conscious minds suppressed it; oh yes, we’re not saying that, that
every man has this in his conscious mind, but in the last judgment day, when
his conscience reads out, just think of the tape recording, God says okay, play
a tape, and soon there’s going to be a space on that tape and that tape will
say here you knew the truth and here you turned against it. And God says there it is, three’s your
record, what are you going to do, blame Me for not telling you enough, blame
the church, blame the hypocrites, blame somebody else. Huh-un, right there, you knew the truth there
and you turned away from it; that’s it, there’s your record…it’s your record,
not mine, yours!
They know the
truth “because that which is known of God is clear in them,” now even a more
powerful statement at the end of verse 19, if all of that wasn’t enough, Paul
even makes the claim that this isn’t general truth, this is general revelation,
“God shows it to them.” How about
that. You didn’t think the Holy Spirit
operated out beyond the domains of the Word of God did you? The Holy Spirit, and this is called in
theology common grace, the Holy Spirit in common grace is revealing to all men
whether they hear the Word of God or they don’t hear the Word, the Holy Spirit
is revealing, revealing, revealing, revealing.
This is why we cannot have in Christian work on how we know, we always
have to encounter the problem of revelation; all basic knowledge is by
revelation only. “God has showed it to
them.”
Now the next
question, if you’re thinking is going to be precisely what Paul answers in
verse 20, wait a minute Paul, wait a minute, what’s this stuff about what can
be known of God that God has shown to me.
Paul, tell me what God has shown to me.
All right Paul says, I’ll show you.
Verse 20, “For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the
world are clearly seen,” how about that one.
It’s a hard statement, if this goes down easy you’re not thinking about
it. If you’re a thinking person these
truths should strike you like swallowed something that’s caught in your throat,
that’s how hard this truth should come to you.
If it’s going down easy either you have high spiritual finesse and have
thought this through before, in which case very well, or you just don’t catch
the point. This should catch in your
throat and unh, I can’t get rid of it, I can’t cough it up and I can’t swallow
it, it’s just stuck there. That’s the
way this truth should go down.
“The invisible
things of Him from the creation of the world,” that means from the beginning of
time, it’s a temporal point, not instrumental there, “from the creation of the
world” is time, chronology, “from the creation of the world,” [can’t understand
words] the theistic evolutionist, “from the creation of the world, they are
clearly seen.” Now I have to show you
something that you’ll only see in the original language; it’s a word play but
it’s a very important word play. Notice
the word translated “invisible” in your English text. Here is the way it looks in the Greek: aoratos, now the Greeks had an alpha
negation on the front of their words, that means no, or not. So you take a noun and add “a” to it, it
means “not” similar in English; aoratos
comes from the Greek word to see, and so this means the not seen things. So Paul is saying that there are things here
that are not empirically observed in verse 20; he’s saying there are things,
the knowledge of God is not that which we can go out and see, we did in Jesus
Christ but general revelation is not talking about things you see, “the
invisible things of Him,” the not seen, clearly empirically perceiving, but
what is this verb, “are clearly seen,” and here’s what that one looks like: transliterated
it’s kathorao notice the word orao, here it is, see it there, it’s a
word play. He says those things that are
not empirically seen are clearly empirically seen. Now it sounds like a contradiction; these
things that you cannot observe with your eyes, you cannot hear them with your
ears, those things are seen with your eyes and heard with your ears. And not only that, but the prefix, kata, is always the prefix on a verb
that intensifies the content of the root, so this is intensified. So not only is Paul saying the things that
you can’t see or can’t hear about God are clearly, kathorao, clearly seen and heard.
And not only that but he’s put the verb in the present tense, this means
not only are they clearly seen but they are continually clearly seen and
clearly heard. How about that for a
strong statement.
Now you say wait a
minute, I still don’t see if there’s a contradiction here; the contradiction is
resolved by the Greek participle because the participle describes the mode of
how you see it. He’s deliberately done
this to catch your attention as you read.
“The invisible things of Him from the creation of the world,”
chronology, “are clearly seen,” and then the participle, “being understood,
this comes from the participle which means mind, the verb is noieo, and the word for mind is nous, so you can see how this is… this
is talking about mentally comprehending it.
So how do you kathorao? How do you clearly see the native in South
Africa who has never heard of the gospel, how does that person clearly see the
things of God if he can’t see and hear them?
Paul says what happens is that he sees and he hears and his mind says
there’s God. The mind operates on what
is seen, Paul’s making that claim here in verse 20. “…being understood,” and then he uses an
instrumental case, “by means of the things that are made.” So, by seeing and hearing empirically of
things around us may come to say there is God and there is something I know
about God and the two things that he characterizes, “eternal power and Godhead”
the only word I can think of in the English that comes near to this Greek word,
is Supreme Being. Men talk about a
Supreme Being; that’s about the good translation of this word “Godhead” in the
original language, the Supreme Being. So
they are aware of this.
And here’s an
interesting thing; when you study history you can see this. [can’t understand name, tape hard to hear]
one of the great phenomenologist of religion has written histories of this and
he points out over and over and over again, you go back to polytheism in these
ancient cultures, but he says there’s always the same thing, that the
polytheisms are always preceded by a primitive monotheism. Now those of you who are gung ho evolution
and like to explain everything as the polytheism slowly evolved into monotheism
like the high school history textbooks in Texas all say, you can see here that
history contradicts that. [can’t
understand name] is not trying to make a case for fundamentalism. He is simply recording the facts of history
and the facts of history are that monotheism precedes polytheism. And all your great cults and all your great
religions evolve after the collapse of early primitive monotheism.
For example, one
of these works he points out that the ancient Chinese symbol for heaven looked
like that. Why is this, it looks to me
like a man [can’t understand words] and apparently the concept of heaven was
the man in heaven. Now where did the
ancient, ancient, ancient, ancient Chinese ever get the concept of the man in
heaven? What did they know about the man
in heaven? We don’t know exactly how
they knew but we do know they did know.
We know this. So Paul, what this
claim is fits what we know of history and this is why, in conclusion in verse
20, “they are without excuse.” No man
can ever come before the judgment and say you know God, sorry about that, it
just wasn’t clear to me, I couldn’t make a decision. God will say you made a decision, your
conscience says so right here.
Now there’s a
third thing and we want to close today on God-consciousness, remember we’re
studying the third function of how the conscience works; it take the ego and it
takes the soul and it compares them with God-consciousness. God-consciousness has a category called God,
it becomes more and more aware of God through general revelation and common
grace and the third thing that a conscience has is special revelation, or the
Word of God. I’ve already done Hebrews
4:12 for you last week, so let’s turn to 1 Corinthians 8:7. See the problem, why there has to be
revelation, two reasons why God has to reveal this kind of knowledge: number
one, you and I are finite; we can’t get this knowledge by our own work. The second reason, we’re sinners and don’t
want the truth. So the Holy Spirit does
two things; He has to supply information by direct revelation and then to the
revelation He has supplied He has to clean our consciences so we can stare
truth in the face and not get hurt by it or feel threatened by it. That’s why it has to be by revelation and
common grace.
Special
revelation, 1 Corinthians 8:7, this is in the middle of a discourse on people
who had weak consciences. And I want you
to notice how and what a weak conscience is, or how it comes about. Let’s read verse 7, “However, there is not in
every man,” the problem here, by the way, is that people were eating meat
offered to idols and the new believers in Corinth would not eat the meat
offered to idols because they said well, this is offered to idols, I don’t want
to compromise my Christianity and I’m not going to eat it. I can’t eat that meat with good conscience,
just like to put it in another phrase, there are some people in fundamental
circles that can’t touch a drop of alcohol in good conscience. Now that’s their privilege; that’s their
privilege! And sometimes it comes about
because of bad situations in the family and their own personal experience has
been bad and they can’t touch it and for medical reasons they shouldn’t. But you go to France and you talk to the good
fundamental evangelicals and they will sit there and talk to you about Jesus
Christ over a bottle of wine. Now do you
see the absolute? There is no absolute
here; the absolute in the Bible is don’t be drunk.
I Corinthians 8:7,
the same thing here, if this doesn’t mean anything to you, if this doesn’t
really grab you with the meat and you’re not concerned with meat think of
alcohol, certainly between meat and alcohol we should get most of you. “However, there is not in every man that
knowledge;” the word knowledge, gnosis,
and the knowledge is of something and let’s see what it’s of, “for some with
conscience of the idol unto this hour eat it as a thing offered unto an idol,”
now the word conscience here in the King James should not be translated
“conscience,” it should be translated “custom,” that word is not conscience,
the best text… we haven’t got time to explain it, the word for custom and
conscience look about the same and in the transmission of the text these two
words got screwed up, but actually verse 7 should read, “However there is not
in every man that knowledge for some with custom,” it’s a social custom, now
this is most interesting. Most people
think conscience is just something that comes out of society, here it’s exactly
the opposite. There’s a social custom,
they eat is as of the idol, and so therefore because of their social custom,
their conscience tells them don’t worship an idol, don’t worship an idol, don’t
worship an idol, but their custom says this is of the idol, this is of the
idol, this is of the idol, so now you have the God-consciousness which is
anti-idolatrous operating against social convention, and in the collision they
say I can’t eat it, I can’t eat it because my God-consciousness here tells me
don’t be idolatrous, my social custom says this is idolatrous; putting the two
together my conscience says huh-un, you can’t eat this in faith, and so
therefore you don’t have any confidence so you refrain.
Then Paul
describes this situation, in other words, here is a conscience that has, number
one, a sense of a god, number two it has general revelation, but number three
it has very little special revelation.
Very little doctrine, very little of the Word, and this person is
described in the last part of verse 7 as a person with a weak conscience. I don’t know if this strikes you as wrong but
it struck me as wrong for a long time while I read that because here’s what I
think of a weak conscience. I think of a
weak conscience as one that doesn’t function and a strong conscience as an overbearing
conscience. But do you realize that’s
not the way Paul does it. This
conscience is overbearing, there’s not problem with the action of the
conscience, here he applies the word “weak” to mean inaccurate conscience, and
the accuracy of a conscience is proportional to the amount of the special
revelation received by that individual from the Word of God. So a weak conscience is one that will okay
faith only over a little area, and as that conscience expands and gets stronger
and stronger by taking in Bible doctrine and believing it, what happens? The area over which you can believe grows and
grows and grows and grows. And your
conscience is strengthened. A strong
conscience, contrary to popular American custom, in the Bible is one that okays
a maximum number of things with perfect confidence before God. A weak conscience is one that won’t let you
do anything, practically, because it has no confidence before God. This must not be confused, by the way, with
scar tissue situation which we’ll develop later on.
Notice one final
thing about verse 7, “their conscience, being weak, is stained.” The word here, stained means defiled, and it
means that this conscience therefore, here’s what happens, here’s the
conscience, the conscience says don’t, red light, don’t! Why?
Because over here in the mind, that is in the soul, you have a social
custom; the social custom says meat is idolatry. Over here in the human spirit or in the conscience
you have something that says huh-un, nix of idols. So therefore the conscience looks over here
at the soul and sees this social custom and it sees the person eating and says
no. So what does the conscience do? It condemns it. And so what are these people doing? They’re getting blackjacked by other
believers and they’re saying go ahead and eat, go ahead and eat, go ahead and
eat, go ahead and eat, and so they go ahead and eat against their conscience; they’re
following their (quote) “objective” standards of the Word, but their conscience
doesn’t okay it yet and they go against it and their conscience is
defiled. And here’s a strange situation,
but you can follow something that is objectively true in the Word of God and be
out of fellowship because you can be doing the right thing for absolutely the
wrong reason. These people were eating meat because of believer group
pressure. And that’s wrong and they were
out of line, they were absolutely out of fellowship. They should eat it as unto the Lord, not
because other believers ganged up and bullied them into doing something. So therefore they eat by personal individual
conviction before God. And that is
mentioned as defiling or staining.
Now one further
thing, just to clarify. Paul says that conscience will say yes if they’ll input
something from the Word that clarifies this issue about meat offered to
idols. If they would add the Word,
special revelation to the conscience, the conscience would say okay, social
custom is wrong, the social custom is knocked out by the truth of the Word and
therefore we will go with conscience, and you can go ahead and eat it.
So this shows at
least two things that we’ve done today on how the conscience works. The first thing, it works because it’s
located at the interface of soul and spirit.
Secondly, the conscience works continuously, whether you like it or not,
24 hours a day. The third thing is that
the conscience judges the ego in the soul by its own God-consciousness. Something which I have not covered and have
not proved but some asked questions, I’ll go into this next time, and that is
I’ve answered another question that hasn’t been asked and the question is: does
the conscience ever acquire false norms and standards and the answer is no; the
conscience only can acquire God-consciousness, nothing else. With our heads bowed…