04.06. LESSON 6

LESSON 6

According to Paul, the alphabet of all moral and religious truth and life lies within the human soul. How could men without natural "conscience... accusing or else excusing them" (Romans 2:15) be responsible, moral beings?

Conscience is one of man’s built-in faculties. It is his innate consciousness that he should be honest with himself. Its office is to see that he does what he thinks he ought to do and refrains from what he thinks he ought not to do. It is the very core of his moral being, and, being infallible and final in its domain, it must be respected. One who is willing to disobey his conscience is willing to be a sinner whom neither law nor gospel can reach. For a man to trifle with his conscience is to sin against his very soul.

It is possible for one through lack of knowledge to do dastardly deeds in good conscience. Paul himself is the classic example of this major tragedy. Despite his persecuting the church before his conversion, he said some twenty years after that event: "I have lived before God in all good conscience until this day" (Acts 23:1). Paul’s conscience worked as well before as after he became a Christian, therefore needed no change at his conversion. However, not being legislative, but regulative of conduct, the conscience can neither make law nor alter truth. Does a child’s conscientiously believing that thirty inches make a yard shorten the yard? Moreover, Paul’s conscience could work only within the framework of what he knew. Does the conscience of a savage hurt him because he does not go to church on Sunday? When Paul learned the truth about Christ, his honest conscience made him accept Christ. To be conscientious, as noble and indispensable as it is, is not enough. Energy, piety, zeal, observing ordinances, and good-conscience all combined cannot take the place of knowledge. Though Christ forgave Paul, we gather from Paul’s writings that he could scarcely forgive himself for his ignorant, "conscientious" sin.

Conscience is an exceedingly searching and rigorous test of conduct. Both its restraining and constraining power is great. No greater terrors and tortures than the fires of a guilty conscience are known to men. But "A good conscience is the sweetest meal to which men ever sit down." In common with other delicate and valuable things, conscience is easily abused and damaged. As the compass of a ship may be so deflected by metal on board as to cause the loss of the ship, so the conscience of well-meaning men may be so deflected by tradition, prejudice, indifferent ignorance, or personal preference as to wreck a soul. Here lurks a subtle, powerful, prevalent foe. Conscience cannot he burglarized from without; nor must it be bribed by inclination from within. If conscience, the core of personality, be wrong, what can be right? After searching the Bible and learning truth, "This above all: to thine own self he true."

Jewish Pride Punctured In the second paragraph of Romans 2:1-29, Paul applies the four principles of the first paragraph upon which God judges humanity to the Jews in particular. These principles are the major premise and this second paragraph is the minor premise of the conclusion in the third chapter, namely, that every man, Gentile or Jew, is condemned by law—that is, legal justification is an illusion.

Paul had been "a Hebrew of Hebrews" himself, and knew all about Jewish arrogance and exclusiveness. He begins by granting the Jews five real advantages (Romans 2:17-18), but charges that they have perverted these advantages into racial pride and religious bigotry; and that in spite of their greater light as compared to Gentiles, they are guilty of the sins of heathenism. In three short, sharp questions, cracking like a whip, involving the classes of sin among the Gentiles according to Romans 1:1-32, namely idolatry, sensuality, and ethical wrongs, he indicts them, though they make high boasts of being "a light to them that are in darkness," of the same three sins, only in reverse order: "Dost thou steal?" and "Dost thou commit adultery?" and "Dost thou rob temples?’ To praise virtue, but practice vice always leads to the death-cell of hypocrisy. Thus, Paul convicts the Jews of being mountain climbers who cannot climb. "Josephus records much Jewish history that reads like Gentile criminality." The arrowhead of the indictment is that their transgression of the law, after their glorying in its possession so haughtily, doubly dishonors and blasphemes God before the heathen. The Jews were so smug in their ritual and "form of knowledge and of the truth" (Romans 2:20) that they were impervious to spiritual truth. The fact that it is all but impossible for men who are steeped in self-esteem and clothed in respectability correctly to appraise themselves explains why Paul so roundly and uncompromisingly strips the Jews of their morals and religion, and sets them among the heathen. Having corrected their error that religion is merely intellectual by declaring that it requires ethical expression, he proceeds in the last verses of the chapter to correct their error that religion is merely ritualistic by teaching that it is essentially spiritual. To be told that circumcision was useless unless they kept the law must have amazed the Jews. That circumcision was contingent on anything was a brand-new idea to them. They were dumfounded to hear that a devout Cornelius was more pleasing to God than was the impious Caiaphas; stunned that "neither is that circumcision which is outward in the flesh: but he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God" (Romans 2:28-29); insulted that circumcision "a seal of righteousness," not to be effected by a rite. The Jews must realize that where ore is mined, or who owns it, is ignored at its assay. In this manner, Paul drives home to the Jews that they cannot pass the test of God who judges according to reality, without respect to persons, and turns one inside out down to his deepest secrets. He would have them see that God, since his fenced vineyard has produced no better grapes than the wild land, is removing the fence. But how could mankind have ever been convinced that no choice fruit could be produced by law, had the experiment not been made? To modernize this doctrine by substituting "baptism" or "Lord’s supper" for "circumcision," surely warns us of the perpetual danger of formality supplanting spirituality, and encourages us to be spiritual in our worship and work.

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