Bible Question: "Is conscience the 'voice' of God?"

Bible Answer: The short answer is "sort of" and "no."

The Bible says much about conscience, and there's a very good definition of it in Cruden's Complete Concordance:

"That faculty within us which decides as to the moral quality of our thoughts, words and acts. It gives consciousness of the good of one's conduct or motives, or causes feelings of remorse at evil-doing. A conscience can be educated, or trained to recognize good and evil, but its action is involuntary. A good conscience is one which has no feeling of reproach against oneself, does not accuse oneself of willful wrong."

Cruden's refers to the key verse on conscience, Acts 24:16.

"This being so, I myself always strive to have a conscience without offense toward God and men," Paul says of himself.

Thus our conscience concerns our relationship both with each other and with our Heavenly Father: "toward God and men."

And the "so" Paul refers to is in the previous verse, Acts 24:15: "I have hope in God, which they themselves also accept, that there will be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and the unjust." The "they" Paul refers to in this verse were the Jewish leaders who condemned him as a heretic due to his belief that Jesus Christ is the Messiah, the only Son of God.

In these verses, Paul is making defense of himself from the charges by the Jewish leaders before Felix, the Roman governor, who had to decide whether to convict Paul as being a heretic.

Paul defends himself by saying he has followed the convictions of his own conscience, knowing that a day of judgment is coming before God, on the resurrection day, that is far more important than any judgment of this life's courts.

But is our conscience "the voice of God" within us? There are 30 verses in the Bible, all in the New Testament, which use the word conscience and none of them will support that meaning.

To begin with, where does our concept of right and wrong come from? It is largely learned behavior, as an innocent little child has no concept of wrong until his parents teach it to him.

Only by hearing "no" can a child learn what it should not do. But yet, there is something within us which is involuntary, something inborn that we call conscience, which we can heed or reject. In other words, there must be something there to educate. So in that way, I think we can say conscience is something within that God put there as a moral barometer to guide us.

But conscience is not the same as the Holy Spirit, Who does a work in the consciences of believers at the moment of salvation.

"Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water," Paul writes in Hebrews 10:22.

For if we rely on conscience alone, without the work of the Holy Spirit, we can lose our sense of right and wrong completely.

Paul writes in 1 Timothy 4:1-2, "Now the Spirit expressly says that in the latter times some will depart the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of demons, speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their own conscience seared with a hot iron."

If we rely on our conscience alone, we can be fooled so badly by a wrongly trained nature that we can lose entirely our sense of right and wrong and never even realize we are in such error.

So to qualify my answer, I think we must say conscience is the "voice of God" only in the case of consciences of true believers.

Submit Bible questions by email to writeme@johnwmyers.com

(John Myers has been a Christian lay speaker, Sunday School adult teacher and newspaper Bible study columnist for more than 20 years.)