Human Imperfection, Teboho Kibe [read a book .txt] 📗

blood of bulls and goats, and the washings repeated under the law, could never make the conscience perfect. They could sanctify carnally, so as to enable the worshipper to approach God outwardly, yet only afar off, with the veil still unrent.”

Christ Jesus, for example, warned his disciples that “the hour is coming when everyone that kills you will imagine he has rendered a sacred service to God.” (John 16:2) Saul of Tarsus was one of these. In his zeal for what he conscientiously believed to be right, Saul ‘committed many acts of opposition against the name of Jesus,’ persecuting the disciples, and ‘when they were to be executed, he cast his vote against them.’ (Acts 26:9, 10; compare Galatians 1:13, 14.) Yet later, when experiencing persecution himself as the Christian apostle Paul, he could say in court: “I have behaved before God with a perfectly clear conscience down to this day.” (Acts 23:1) Though his conscience had been “clear” at the time of his fighting against Christianity, its testimony had been defective, woefully false and had led him into fighting against God.

Now, to get going, let’s start by thinking of how we can improve our conscience. Well, knowledge alone of Jehovah’s personality, his standards and purposes is not enough. Increased Bible knowledge by itself will not improve the working of our conscience, even though it may have a profound effect on the mind and heart. The psalmist wrote: “The law of Jehovah is perfect, bringing back the soul. The reminder of Jehovah is trustworthy, making the inexperienced one wise. The orders from Jehovah are upright, causing the heart to rejoice; the commandment of Jehovah is clean, making the eyes shine. . . . Also, your own servant has been warned by them; in the keeping of them there is a large reward.” (Ps. 19:7-11) Yet, despite the rewarding goodness that flows from God’s Word, it must be remembered that the conscience is not simply a mental activity but a reflection of the moral nature of the whole person. The conscience must do more than tell us what we ought to be; it must identify what we are in real life.

Therefore, with strong reason the Bible associates a good conscience with faith and the quality of love, not just with knowledge. At 1 Timothy 1:5 we read: “Really the objective of this mandate is love out of a clean heart and out of a good conscience and out of faith without hypocrisy.” Thus we see that faith, love and a good conscience go hand in hand. To reject any one of these is to reject the other two. To reject the conscience is to make shipwreck of faith. Also, to say that love is not needed is to deny the paramount quality of God, because God is love. Thus God’s personality, revealed in his Word and in his dealings with his servants, is brought to the fore as the focal point around which a good conscience is to be developed.

The young man Saul of Tarsus, known later as the apostle Paul, had to learn this fact. He was well versed in the law of Moses, and had been trained in Jewish schools and in their methods. But after becoming a Christian he expressed this conclusion: “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels but do not have love, I have become a sounding piece of brass or a clashing cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophesying and am acquainted with all the sacred secrets and all knowledge, and if I have all the faith so as to transplant mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.” (1 Cor. 13:1, 2) From these words of Paul it is evident that just adding fact to fact, or even just learning more Bible laws and principles, could fall short of improving the effectiveness of the conscience. One could end up with a head full of accumulated information, without the heart’s ever being touched.

A real danger could develop. External observances could gain the ascendancy over true spirituality. External acts could be performed with or without a sincere spirit to supply the motivating force. Selfish considerations could lead one to live up to outward appearances of religious acceptability. Even acts of seeming love and self-denial could easily become mere outward acts with no inner reality or substance in the one performing them. A person could drift into a smug complacency, believing himself to have a good Christian conscience because of living up to a set pattern of rules and regulations. Life, even worship, could become routine, bookish, a calendar of events, impassively followed. Minor observances could easily be substituted for major responsibilities. Jesus pointed this fact out to the Pharisees, saying: “Hypocrites! . . . you give the tenth of the mint and the dill and the cummin, but you have disregarded the weightier matters of the Law, namely, justice and mercy and faithfulness.” (Matt. 23:23) These small duties can soothe the conscience that condones lovelessness. Small gestures can excuse failure in all the weightier matters of justice and human understanding.

That is why increased knowledge of Jehovah must go beyond improving the mind. The informed mind must act along with a morally sensitive heart. It must make you, a person, more sensitive to the standards and purposes of another Person, namely, Jehovah, whose personality we should try to reflect.

Okay friends, now we’ve come close as regards what conscience may or may not be. As we’ve mentioned, in English, “conscience” basically means the same as the Greek term (sy·nei′de·sis) used by inspired Bible writers. It means “co-knowledge” or “having knowledge of something with [oneself].” It is the voice of what Bible writers refer to as “the secret self,” “the man we are inside,” “the secret person of the heart.” (Ps. 51:6; 2 Cor. 4:16; 1 Pet. 3:4; compare Romans 7:22.)

Now friends, the conflict between rules and conscience is age old. In the article “Casuistry” the Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th edition) explains that morality “has sometimes been thought of as an outward law, sometimes as an inward disposition. . . . Believers in law have put their trust in authority or logic; while believers in disposition chiefly look to our instinctive faculties—conscience, common-sense or sentiment.” Extremes in both positions existed when Jesus and the apostles walked the earth. We can better appreciate the Bible’s helpful balance and godly wisdom by noting the situation then.

The Jewish Pharisees zealously advocated rules. Not content with the Mosaic law, they developed numerous rules or “commands of men” that invalidated God’s commands. Besides developing these rules that went beyond what God asked, their legalistic outlook encouraged the view that righteousness could result from knowing and keeping these human regulations.—Matthew 15:1-20; 23:1-5; Luke 18:9-12.

“At the opposite pole stood ancient Greece,” comments classical scholar Samuel H. Butcher. “Among the Greeks . . . no system of doctrine and observance, no manuals containing authoritative rules of morality, were ever transmitted in documentary form. . . . Unvarying rules petrified action.” As to the Romans, the Encyclopaedia Britannica says: “Cicero and Seneca took common-sense as their guide. They decided each problem on its merits, looking more to the spirit than to the letter.” This Grecian/Roman philosophy was popular in the first century. Would it appeal to Christians? Paul wrote: “Look out: perhaps there may be someone who will carry you off as his prey through the philosophy and empty deception . . . according to the elementary things of the world and not according to Christ.”—Colossians 2:8; Acts 17:18-21.

In later centuries, too, both extremes had their advocates, even among persons called Christians. The Jesuits were noted for stressing a morality based on innumerable Church laws. After the Reformation, Protestantism emphasized individualism and conscience, which has led to the current view known as “situation ethics,” popularized by Episcopalian Dr. Joseph Fletcher. The National Observer reports: “Dr. Fletcher has spelled out a controversial manifesto of individual freedom and responsibility, based on an ethic of brotherly love, which he says should free modern man from rigid, archaic rules and codes like the ‘Ten Commandments.’ . . . With love as the only guide, then, abortion, premarital sex, divorce, . . . and other conventional wrongs become morally acceptable to Dr. Fletcher in some situations.”

Clearly, humans tend toward extremes—being guided either by rules or by conscience. Some who see the weakness of one extreme overreact by going to the other extreme, just as a pendulum swings from the far right to the far left. For example, during the Middle Ages the pendulum swung from the rule-minded attitude of the Jesuits to the Reformationists’ stress on freedom and conscience. Also, you may know parents who were overly strict in rearing their children. But when these children grew up, they reacted by going to the opposite extreme, allowing their own offspring to take any and all liberties, with disastrous results. We can see the truth of the Bible comment: “I well know, O Jehovah, that to earthling man his way does not belong. It does not belong to man who is walking even to direct his step.”—Jeremiah 10:23.

For attaining salvation a good conscience toward God is absolutely necessary. The natural Jews tried to attain it. They tried to avoid defilement of their flesh by not eating and drinking this and that, and by various washings of various utensils and clothing and parts of the body, to keep away the filth of the flesh. Also they offered up sacrifices of clean, unblemished animals on the holy altar at Jerusalem’s temple, but it never made those Jewish worshipers perfect as respects their conscience. They still had an inward consciousness of being condemned sinners in God’s sight. The continual need for them to repeat these washings, cleansings and sacrifices only reminded them again and again of this disturbing fact. (Heb. 9:9; 10:1-3) But now such a good conscience toward God is attainable by means of the Greater Noah, Christ Jesus. Through him we get rest for our consciences and we enjoy peace with God.

This good conscience toward God is what all lovers of eternal life crave and request in their prayers toward God and in all their efforts. We long to have a consciousness of being no longer sinners but to have a righteous standing with him and be at peace with him. Now it can be won, not by just putting away fleshly filth as the Jews tried to do in an effort toward self-righteousness, but by faith in God and in his provisions through Christ Jesus. The blood of the animals which the God-fearing Jews sacrificed worked only as far as cleansing their flesh in a typical or pictorial way, but those animal sacrifices all pointed forward to the real, effective sacrifice of God’s High Priest, Jesus Christ. Hence, says Paul, “how much more will the blood of the Christ, who through an everlasting spirit offered himself without blemish to God, cleanse our consciences from dead works that we may render sacred service to the living God?” Then he encourages us believers, saying: “Since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us approach with sincere hearts in the full assurance of faith, having had our hearts sprinkled from a wicked conscience and our bodies washed with clean water.”—Heb. 9:14; 10:19-22, NW.

God’s forgiveness of our sins is now possible only through Christ’s blood. Any of our own works for justifying ourselves by merely cleaning up our flesh outwardly are dead works; they have no life-giving quality about them. They do not make us alive toward God and his proper service, no more than the “rich man” in Jesus’ parable made himself righteous and alive toward God by wearing purple and linen over his bathed flesh, in contrast with the beggar Lazarus covered with ulcers. The “rich man” came under a baptism of fire afterward. Faith in Christ’s sacrifice and faith in God’s promise to Abraham respecting Christ as the Seed for blessing all the families of the earth is the vital thing.—Luke 16:19-31.

When you hear the argument that living forever on earth in perfection would eventually end our enjoyment of living,