01.05. Appendix-How Our God-given Conscience Enables Us to Know and Obey God's Will for Us
Appendix-How Our God-given Conscience Enables Us to Know and Obey God’s Will for Us Timothy Lin, Ph.D. In the mid 1950’s near Ashville, NC, an adult male walked into the police station and openly confessed to a murder he had committed 13 years earlier. He gave the deceased person’s name and related to the authorities how he had murdered this person by shooting him in the back of the head with an arrow. The police reviewed his story from their files and found that the local coroner had ruled the deceased man’s death to be from natural causes. However, when they dug up the dead man’s remains, they found a hole in the base of his skull made by an arrow. The murderer was brought to justice, not by the police, but by his own conscience. Just what is this powerful voice that God has placed within man? The word conscience comes from the Latin conscire, a compound of con (with) and scire (to know), meaning “to know together with,” “joint knowledge with another.”48
Thus conscience is the faculty of man’s knowing right and wrong in connection with laws made known to her, which for us Christians is the Word of God, written upon our hearts by the Spirit of God at our new birth (Hebrews 8:10-11) and implemented by God-called preachers and teachers, and our personal devotions. The Old Testament does not have the word “conscience,” but the word “heart” expresses the idea. After Adam and Eve sinned, conscience gaive them a sense of guilt so that “they hid themselves from the presence of the LORD” (Genesis 3:8). Scripture declares, “David’s heart troubled him” (2 Samuel 24:10), and surely a troubled heart was behind David’s broken confessions in Psalms 32:1-5; Psalms 51:1-19.
Conscience is innate, implanted by the breath of God that gave man his God-like personality (Genesis 2:7), spiritual understanding (Job 32:8), and conscience (Proverbs 20:27).49
Romans 2:14-15 declares it is both innate and universal: “For when the Gentiles who do not have the Law do instinctively the things of the Law, these, not having the Law, are a law to themselves, in that they show the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness, and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them.” Conscience works in exactly the same manner in Christians. 57