We can say that your conscience is your capacity to read your convictions. Conscience is the interface between your conscious mind and your convictions. But the conscience needs training; the convictions do not. The convictions are not developed but discovered. They are written on your heart by God’s finger from eternity. They reflect the character of God expressed in your particular individual existence. Convictions are written in the heart, not as data, but as the image of the Holy Spirit stamped on your DNA.
Sinners have hearts, too, but they are formless and void without the Holy Spirit. It can still rattle their cage like convictions do, but the whole thing is limited by being only the flesh without an eternal component. Such people will never understand what God could make of their lives, what they were intended to be. They have no real individual purpose. All they have is a collection of instincts that are ill-defined in their awareness.
The heart is the seat of commitment (AKA, faith) but it can belong to other things beside the Creator. In the West, it’s rare for people to even learn about the faculty of the heart, and faith is poorly defined because it’s not focused on anything that justifies faith. Most American church folks have put their faith in an idea and a collection of impressions that they call “God”, but few of them are personally connected to Him. This is why “faith” is such a slippery term that seldom equates with the Hebrew concept of faith discussed in the Bible.
Even saying this much is merely one man’s attempt to speak in the clinical frame of reference and language to which westerners are accustomed. Any serious attempt to develop a valid concept of conscience from Scripture is hindered by several problems. Because westerners generally have no concept of what the heart does best, they confuse conscience and convictions. It doesn’t help that the Greek in the New Testament has no accurate equivalent terminology for the Hebrew concept of faith and conviction.
Western Christians have little to no grasp of Hebrew psychology and anthropology. I’m not saying we should switch to the Hebrew — I doubt we could — but that we cannot build one better than what the West offers as long as keep wallowing in the western version of everything.
The biggest problem is the linear thinking, the legalism of western philosophical assumptions. We know that the Holy Spirit of God transcends human culture. Something in the Hebrew national history is more than just a taste of the Ancient Near East. Paul told Timothy (2 Timothy 2:15) to “rightly divide” (literally “cut straight”) the Old Testament — to become an expert at carving off the fat of the Old Testament context so that he understood the eternal bone structure beneath it.
What are God’s priorities? Not just the words of revelation to a people-place-time, but who is the Person of God in your life? In Hebrew culture, words do not mean things. Words indicate something you should explore on a higher level than the words. You are not bound by the words, but by the Person of God who gave the words in context. Your conscience won’t know the difference between person and law. You can load it up with law and culture and it will treat that stuff as convictions, as the Word of God. That’s why, if you grow in spiritual understanding and faith, your conscience will change — it will report different answers to the same questions over time.
Even then, we still have one more serious problem: The conscience may have been sickened by (1) not using it properly, failing to obey its warnings, and (2) loading it up with false expectations. False guilt will garble the message. The reason this is such a big problem in the West is because of the western punitive legal system. Rational law is not God; God is your divine Father who doesn’t operate or even think in terms of law and punishment.
The Fall did not saddle us with condemnation. Adam’s sin was not the inheritance; mortality was the inheritance. English translations of Hebrew law are naturally tilted toward the western concept, completely missing what God actually said. It’s not that you stand condemned and must pay a penalty for your crimes, but that you must learn to conquer your fleshly nature. The Cross does not purchase your way into Heaven; it empowers you to shed the burden of your fallen flesh. The Cross opens the way into a covenant privilege with God.
The ransom buys us out of the mortality, out of enslavement to the Devil’s dominion. The reason you feel condemned is because that is a feature of the slavery. The flesh is a ball and chain, a false notion that you deserve every bad thing that happens to you. The misery is merely the result of wallowing in the flesh. This is a false conscience; you need a new one granted from the Father.
Conviction comes from Above; it empowers you to rise above the flesh. Don’t seek to understand the Greek concepts of sin and righteousness; seek the Hebrew. Election means that you are native born to the Covenant of Christ. It’s where you belong. It’s not a question of being a good or bad person in the Hellenized sense that someone can be intrinsically evil or righteous while in this flesh. The Hebrew concept of “good” is whether something is useful to God.
The Hebrew concept of “evil” is a matter of the results of not being useful. To be wicked is to wallow in the flesh that belongs to Satan. It is taking the path of the mortal nature, acting as if there is no eternity. It’s surrendering yourself to the animal instincts of the fleshly nature. It means relying on your senses and reason to make your way in this world. Conviction means rising above that level to see all things from an eternal perspective.
A “clear conscience” is one that has been washed by the clarity of revelation. It pulls your mortal existence into alignment with divine purpose. With this understanding, go back and reread all those passages about the conscience.
“The reason you feel condemned is because that is a feature of the slavery. The flesh is a ball and chain, a false notion that you deserve every bad thing that happens to you. The misery is merely the result of wallowing in the flesh. This is a false conscience; you need a new one granted from the Father.”
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