Until the turn of this century, mothers in India would take their first-born infant to the Ganges and throw the innocent newborn baby into the waters, which were thought to be sacred, as a sacrifice to a pagan God. The very thought of this is abhorrent to most women in the world, especially those whose empty arms would desperately like to hold and cherish an infant. If you can get away with it, does that make it OK? A lot of people think so, and they are not the ones living in a jungle, a generation removed from the stone age culture which is much different from the one in which you were raised.
The fact is that your conscience—apart from an innate sense of right and wrong which comes from your culture—is only as good as the knowledge of right and wrong that you have.
But when you know that what you have done is wrong before God then your conscience becomes activated. The bottom line is not what you think, or your culture will allow, but how God view your life? But when the Bible talks about guilt, using the same term which psychotherapy uses, it is in relationship to your standing before God—not your feelings, which may reflect your culture and your understanding of right or wrong. Why does the Bible make such a clear distinction between feelings of guilt or conscience and actual guilt before God?
It tells you that you are OK when you are in real trouble. Because the views of society—what it deems moral or immoral—is at juxtaposition with what God says and expects. If, however, there were no God and no ultimate accountability, your personal conscience would be an acceptable barometer or guide for behavior.
This, of course, means that it would have to acknowledge that God does exist and that our actions which they label as poor choices or mistakes are really sin. This is exactly what Peter had to do— rather quickly! God gave Peter a vision of certain kinds of animals that the Old Testament forbade Jews to eat. Thousands had converted under his preaching, and he had even suffered for the gospel. But because Christ himself was commanding him, he had to calibrate his conscience so that he would have the faith confidence to accept food and people that he was previously not able to accept.
Calibrate your conscience by educating it with truth. As best you can, try to discern why you hold certain convictions. Is it based on truth, especially the truth God has revealed in Scripture? A regular diet of Scripture will strengthen a weak conscience or restrain an overactive one. Conversely, error, human wisdom, and wrong moral influences filling the mind will corrupt or cripple the conscience. In other words, the conscience functions like a skylight, not a light bulb.
It lets light into the soul; it does not produce its own. Its effectiveness is determined by the amount of pure light we expose it to, and by how clean we keep it. Cover it or put it in total darkness and it ceases to function. Calibrate your conscience with due process. This is a wisdom issue. Sometimes it will take a lot of time to work through a particular matter. The example of Peter in Acts 10 is unusual because God directly commanded him to do something that his conscience previously prohibited him from doing.
0コメント