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What the Bible says about Conscience , Seared
(From Forerunner Commentary)

2 Chronicles 24:2

Joash, Amaziah, and Uzziah all started out well but later hardened their hearts. They all rejected God's Word and refused to repent. God wanted them to return to Him, but their intransigence forced His hand.

Is God hard? Is He austere and unmerciful? Does God owe us salvation and eternal life? Is He bound to give us blessings regardless of our conduct, despite the direction of our lives? No, our choices decide our fate (see Ezekiel 18:23-28).

God demands individual responsibility. He never condones sin nor grants license for anyone to disobey His commands. The subject here is not about transgressions done out of weakness or ignorance but those committed as a way of life with knowledge of wrongdoing. He judges such sins seriously. Yet, even for such sins, God always desires and allows the sinner to repent.

As we see in the examples of these kings, He will always chase after the sinner with His Word and allow him time to repent. He always leaves the door open for a sinner who will return to Him. But eventually, the mind becomes set (Ecclesiastes 8:11), the conscience becomes seared (I Timothy 4:2), and repentance becomes impossible.

At some point, a sinner will no longer change, and God says that He then makes a final judgment. He tells Moses after he had offered his own life for the sins of Israel, “Whoever has sinned against Me, I will blot him out of My book” (Exodus 32:33). God enters names into the Book of Life, and He has the prerogative to erase names from it as well—a sobering thought indeed.

Essentially, Joash, Amaziah, and Uzziah all quoted Deuteronomy 29:19: “I shall have peace, even though I walk in the imagination [dictates] of my heart.” At a certain point, confronted with their sins, they said, “I will not repent, I will not listen to God's prophets. I will continue in the direction I am going, and despite that, I will live in peace and prosperity.” God says that is the kind of thinking He expects from a drunk: “I can continue to drink and not get become impaired.”

In verse 20, Moses reaches a scary conclusion about how God would deal with such a person at that point:

The LORD would not spare him; for then the anger of the LORD and His jealousy would burn against that man, and every curse that is written in this book would settle on him, and the LORD would blot out his name from under heaven.

Through Moses, God is saying, “Do not kid yourself. You cannot live in violation of My ways and expect Me not to respond.” Most of us have come out of a Protestant society that teaches that God is essentially obligated to give us salvation because of the depth of His grace. Protestant theology proclaims that His mercy is so great that, as long as we have accepted the blood of Jesus Christ, salvation is assured. This claim is not true. While this teaching tickles people's ears, they forget that God's justice perfectly balances His mercy, and His love tempers both.

He knows that anybody who desires to live in a way opposed to His way of life would be miserable for all eternity should he inherit the Kingdom of God. God's sense of justice will not allow Him to give eternal life to such a person. He will not commit a person to that depth of misery, nor will He allow him to cause suffering for others. Like Satan, he would be a thorn in the side of the godly. If God determines that it would not be good for someone to live in His Kingdom, because he refuses to live as God requires, he will not be there.

John W. Ritenbaugh
Three Missing Kings (Part Two)

Jeremiah 32:35

The same thought is expressed in Genesis 6:5-7, when the Lord repented that He had made man to live on the earth. It never occurred to God that humans could become so wretched that every imagination, every thought that came to mind was only evil continually. The only thing He could think to do to preserve these people for their time of visitation (salvation) would be to wipe them out before their minds became so abominably corrupted, their conscience so defiled, their character so set, their heart, mind, and spirit so evil, that repentance would be impossible. The only thing to do would be to put them to death, to set them apart for a time when they would have an opportunity for salvation, when the kinds of temptations that were in the world at that time would not be present.

John W. Ritenbaugh
Image and Likeness of God (Part Five)

Ezekiel 18:24-28

There is an individual responsibility. God never condones sin nor grants license for anyone to disobey His commands. This is not speaking about our transgressions done out of weakness or ignorance. These are transgressions that are done as a way of life with knowledge that one is doing wrong. However, God always allows the sinner to repent. He will always chase after the sinner with His Word, giving him the opportunity to turn around. We see that in the lives of the kings Joash, Amaziah, and Uzziah. God always leaves the door open for a sinner who desires to repent. If he does not repent, his mind eventually becomes set, seared, and over time, repentance becomes impossible.

John W. Ritenbaugh
Why Three Kings Are Missing From Matthew 1

Amos 1:3-15

Before Amos gives specific reasons for God's judgment on Israel, he explains His judgment on the surrounding nations in Amos 1:3—2:3. Some may question God's punishment of nations to whom He has not revealed Himself. But God's response is that every human being knows—to one degree or another—what is moral and immoral (Romans 2:14-15). Abimelech, a pagan king of the Philistines, knew that it was wrong to commit sexual immorality (Genesis 26:10). In like manner, God holds these surrounding nations guilty.

Man has learned to silence the voice of his conscience (Romans 1:18), which has led to his sinking into total depravity (verses 20-32). Though God does not hold man accountable for understanding every detail of Him and His way, God does judge him for suppressing the knowledge of Him that he does have.

God does not unfairly accuse anyone. When He judges the Gentile nations as guilty, He does it with good cause. David writes poetically in Psalm 19:1-4 that man has ample evidence in the creation to conclude that a great and awesome Creator God exists. In Lystra, Paul and Barnabas preached that God witnesses to the Gentiles through the many things He provides for them (Acts 14:12-17). Paul writes similarly in Romans 1:19: "What may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them." If he follows his conscience, man should bow down in reverence and awe to his Maker. Instead, mankind has worshipped things that God has made.

God's impartial judgment is important to this book. The nations around Israel in 760 BC had one negative common denominator: They had no revelation of God or His law, no priests or prophets from God. Yet Amos shows them as nations under judgment. Even without special revelation, they had a moral responsibility to God and to one another.

They were accountable to God to be good men, not depraved animals. He does not hold them responsible for their horrible and erroneous religious ideas, but He judges them for what they did or failed to do to other men. No human being can escape the obligation to be humanly moral as God intended, not even the Gentiles. Though God has never dealt directly with them, they know enough of His moral standards to be accountable to God.

If God requires this of men who have no revelation of Him, what does He require of us as Christians? The sobering fact is that we are held accountable for our relationship with both God and man. This underlines our need to listen to Amos.

John W. Ritenbaugh
Prepare to Meet Your God! (The Book of Amos) (Part One)

Amos 1:3-5

God's judgment of Syria focuses on her use of total war—take no prisoners and leave nothing productive. Amos says to them: "War or no war, you had no right to treat people like that!" It is barbarism, and even in war people must be treated honorably and well.

John W. Ritenbaugh
Prepare to Meet Your God! (The Book of Amos) (Part One)

Amos 1:3-15

In one way or another, these Gentile nations took vengeance in retaliation for injustices that they believed other nations committed against them. God promises to judge their barbarity, but He does not say when. Many years may pass before He takes action because His overriding goal is repentance and a change in character.

He will execute proper judgment—true justice, and it is our responsibility to have faith in that. Fifty years passed before God avenged the depredating acts of Hazael, king of Syria, against Gilead (Amos 1:3; II Kings 10:32-33). God waited for the right time and place to act. But He did act with a punishment from which He will not turn back (II Kings 13:22-25). When He decides to act, He acts!

When He says that He knows our sitting down and rising up (Psalm 139:2), He is not speaking metaphorically. He is involved with His people. We must learn that sometimes God may not take action within our lifetime, but when He says, "I will repay" (Romans 12:19; Deuteronomy 32:35), He means it!

John W. Ritenbaugh
Prepare to Meet Your God! (The Book of Amos) (Part One)

1 Timothy 4:2

In I Timothy 4:2, Paul speaks of people searing or cauterizing their consciences with a hot iron. Willard Gaylin writes that "the failure to feel guilt is the basic flaw in the psychopath, or antisocial person, who is capable of committing crimes of the vilest sort without remorse or contrition." We could describe the unpardonable sin as the incapacity to feel remorse or a person's determination to override every warning signal of guilt. If people repeatedly violate their consciences, masking their guilt by using escapist "analgesics," the consequences become devastating. Without the stimulus of spiritual pain, they become incapable of changing their behavior.

This seared conscience is the ultimate result of the process Paul describes in Romans 1:28: "And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over [abandoned them, Twentieth Century New Testament] to a debased mind, to do those things which are not fitting." Though God desires to grant all men repentance (II Peter 3:9), a person can reach a point where it is no longer possible because, in his perversion and wickedness, he has burned his conscience to cinders.

We need to thank God for the capacity to feel both physical and spiritual pain. It provides us with the warning and the motivation to change—to be transformed into the image of our Savior Jesus Christ. In accepting His sacrifice for our sins, we take upon ourselves the responsibility—with God's help—to diagnose and eradicate the sins that cause the spiritual pain in the first place, to bring us into vibrant spiritual health. As the author of Hebrews writes, "Now no chastening [painful discipline] seems to be joyful for the present, but grievous; nevertheless, afterward it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it" (Hebrews 12:11).

David F. Maas
Guilt: Our Spiritual Pain

Hebrews 3:12-14

"The deceitfulness of sin"! In this context, to be deceitful is to be seductively and enticingly misleading. Sin promises what it cannot deliver. It promises pleasure, contentment, fulfillment—life—but its delivery on these things is fleeting and ultimately unsatisfying. Its deceitfulness is the very reason why it has addictive qualities. It lures us on to try to capture what it can never deliver.

The pleasure is never quite enough to produce the contentment and fulfillment one desires. Thus, people are forced into greater and deeper perversions until it results in death. All along the way, from its inception to death, sin quietly produces hardness of heart. Like a callus that forms over a break in a bone or stiffens a person's joints, sin paralyzes right action.

"Hardness" is translated from skleruno, from which name for the disease multiple sclerosis is derived. In a moral context, it means "impenetrable," "insensitive," "blind," "unteachable." A hardened attitude is not a sudden aberration, but the product of a habitual state of mind that reveals itself in inflexibility of thinking and insensitivity of conscience. Eventually, it makes repentance impossible. The will to do right is completely gone.

The will is the power or faculty by which the mind makes choices and acts to carry them out. An old adage says: "Sow an act and reap a habit; sow a habit and reap a character; sow a character and reap a destiny." At first, against his will, a person engages in some forbidden pleasure out of weakness, curiosity, or sheer carnality. If the practice continues, he sins because he cannot help doing so; he is becoming addicted to it. Once a sin becomes a habit, he considers it to be almost a necessity. When it becomes a necessity, the destiny is produced.

John W. Ritenbaugh
What Sin Is

Hebrews 10:26-27

The first thing to note in Hebrews 10:26-27 is the word "sin." Paul is not speaking of sin in general but the specific sin of apostasy from the faith that was once known and professed. The apostasy he has in mind is not so much an act but a state brought on by many individual attitudes and sins, reproducing the original, carnal antagonism a person has toward God before conversion.

Some commentaries insist that the Authorized Version is not quite correct in translating the term in verse 26 as "willfully." These argue that the Greek word, hekousios, will not permit this translation. It appears only one other time, in I Peter 5:2, where it is translated as "willingly." The commentators insist that it should be rendered "willingly" in Hebrews 10:26.

The American Heritage College Dictionary supports their conclusion. To do something willfully is to do it purposely or deliberately. The commentators say all sin is done purposely because human nature is set up to do so, even though weakness, ignorance, or deception may be involved as well. To do a thing willingly is to be disposed, inclined, or prepared to do it. Its synonyms are "readily," "eagerly," "compliantly," "ungrudgingly," "voluntarily," and "volitionally." This sense is contained in the context because, by the time a person reaches the apostate stage in his backward slide, where he has forsaken God and His way, he has no resistance to sin.

The sinner is deliberately, even eagerly, determined to abandon Christ, to turn away from God and His way, having completely become an enemy once again. He sins with barely a second thought, if with any thought at all. He sins automatically, as there is none of God's Spirit left to constrain him. His conscience is totally defiled; he has forsaken God.

Who is in danger of committing this sin? All who have made a profession of faith in Christ but are now neglecting their salvation.

The message of Hebrews is that it does not have to be this way. If the person takes heed and stirs himself awake, if he truly seeks to overcome and grow once again, if he returns to being a living sacrifice and seeking to glorify God, if he truly denies himself and takes up his cross, if he keeps God's commandments to live life as a Christian, he will not apostatize.

He may fall back from time to time, but as long as he repents and honestly seeks God when sin occurs in his life, the sin is readily forgiven. I John 1:9 confidently proclaims, "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." John 14:23 assures us that as long as we are keeping His Word, we are safe.

Hebrews 12:5-10 explains that God is faithfully working in our behalf, even chastening us if He sees fit, to get us turned around and headed again in the right direction and attitude. He does this faithfully because He does not want to lose us. Christ died for each child of God, thus each child He loves - and He loves them all - represents a substantial investment. Christ did not die in vain for anybody. In Hebrews 13:5, He charges us with the task of putting to work His promise, "I will never leave you nor forsake you."

John W. Ritenbaugh
God's Power: Our Shield Against Apostasy

Revelation 6:9-11

This is where today's violence is headed. When people begin killing Christians, they will not feel any sense of wrong in doing so than those who are currently aborting babies. By that time, justifications will have been made, minds will have adjusted, and they will think, "We need to get rid of these people because they are a threat to society. They don't deserve to live."

Do Arabs and Israelis not find justifications for killing one another? Do dictators not find justifications for killing dissidents? The mind, the conscience, adjusts, and when that happens, people feel justified in what they are doing.

John W. Ritenbaugh
The Handwriting Is on the Wall (1995)


 




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