What Is the Conscience?
What Is the Conscience?
A Question
Is it the voice of God? Is it the Holy Spirit? And if it is not so, then what is its relationship to God and His Holy Spirit?
The Answer
The conscience is not the voice of God, nor is it the Holy Spirit.
This is because the conscience sometimes makes mistakes… and at other times it is ignorant, and it changes. Ignorance, change, and error cannot be applied to the voice of God—God forbid.
The proof that the conscience sometimes errs is the Lord’s saying: “The hour is coming that whoever kills you will think that he offers God service” (John 16:2). These people’s conscience justifies killing, and even encourages them to do so, and this is a mistaken conscience—like that rural man whose conscience drives him to kill a sister who has sinned with a man, instead of leading her to repentance.
Among the examples of this is Saul of Tarsus before his faith in Christianity… for he used to drag men and women from among the Christians to prison, thinking that this was holy zeal. When he believed, he regretted what he had done previously and said: “I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and an insolent man… but I obtained mercy because I did it ignorantly in unbelief” (1 Timothy 1:13).
This change in his conscience proves that the conscience is not the voice of God,
because God “with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning” (James 1:17).
The conscience, however, may undergo change as a result of the type of culture that convinces it that something is good or evil, and also as a result of the influence of society and environment. And with all this, we say:
The conscience is not the voice of God, but it is a voice from God, if it is a sound conscience.
It is an inner human voice that guides a person to good and reproves him for evil, but it is influenced by the mind and by emotion, and it rises and falls according to its convictions and influences. Sometimes the conscience needs guidance and enlightenment… and sometimes it sleeps and needs awakening. But in its sound, ideal state, it can be called the moral law or the inner law, and it governed humanity before the divine written law.
The conscience is not the Holy Spirit, at least for two reasons:
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Because it exists in all people, believers and unbelievers alike; whereas the Holy Spirit is in believers only. He may lead unbelievers to faith, but He does not dwell in them.
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If the conscience were the Holy Spirit, it would not make mistakes.
However, the human conscience is enlightened by the Holy Spirit.
The believing person in whom the Holy Spirit works has a conscience that is deeper in perception and greater in understanding in distinguishing between good and evil, and its reproof for sin is more strongly influential on the soul and the will. The Holy Spirit can also guide the conscience.
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