This verse speaks primarily about the unbelieving man, implying that purity of mind and conscience is contingent upon belief in the Word. This makes logical sense, as the Word is filled with various moral directions. But God also instilled a sense of morality in most men, regardless of whether or not they believe in him.
Why does God include moral directions in His words to us? Because without that direction, we would not naturally know how to behave. Our nature pulls us towards evil (Promiscuous sex/theft etc.), and the Bible commands us to resist this nature. This is a key idea: the conscience itself must be cultivated, because otherwise it lends itself to sin. What good is a conscience that points us in the wrong direction? These men have defiled, dysfunctional consciences.
The conscience can be polluted.
Each of these sections on conscience should teach us that the conscience itself is malleable, which means it can either be made into a tool, or corrupted into an evil-seeking device. This is one reason why we should not put too much trust in conscience, because we cannot always definitively prove that it is pointing us in the right direction.
The main point of our discussion about each of the conscience types is this: Conscience itself is not action, it is not a substitute for action, and by itself it will never gain salvation for your soul. Salvation can only be acquired by taking action. Neither faith, hope or good intentions can save you if you do not follow the simple salvation outline in the Bible. Obedience based action must be taken in order to claim the free gift of salvation. Whether or not your conscience is good or bad does not matter if you are not taking any action.
Mantra
Action is greater than feelings.
Application
Action will always override any emotional feeling you have. Conscience is an emotional tool, and should be treated like any other emotion. We should not deify conscience, for salvation is not found in it. We should not promote the necessity of conscience to other people, because we do not know what state their conscience is in. If we tell an individual with an evil or defiled conscience to “listen to their conscience”, they will end up doing evil.
This is your task: reject the dogma of the mandatory conscience. You will give account for your deeds, not the way you felt about them. Take action. Do good. Be a Man.
“Let us draw near with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.”
How could this be? A conscience that is evil? The traditionalists are going to faint when they hear about this! Could it be that there is such a thing as a conscience that directs man to do what is evil instead of what is good? Absolutely. Just as it is possible to have a broken compass that points east instead of north.
The Old Testament talks about men whose hearts desired nothing but evil continually (Genesis 6:5). These men were later annihilated by the flood. Think about Sodom and Gomorrah: do you think those guys were interested in doing what was right based on their conscience? They were only interested in sex with any man or woman they could find. Don’t be surprised, this is what the heart, mind and conscience of man can degenerate into.
The conscience of man can be such that instead of leading you to do what is right, it leads you to do what is evil. Again, like the Seared Conscience, you can either develop an evil conscience or be born with it. The difference between the seared and evil conscience is that a seared conscience is devoid of guilt or without regret from doing what is wrong, or the conscience itself is silent; an evil conscience, however, directs the heart of man towards evil instead of good, doing the opposite of what a normal, functioning conscience would do.
In theory: A good conscience keeps us from doing wrong because it is a voice within that directs us towards the right action.
An evil conscience desires for us to do what is wrong constantly, and because of this desire, there is no guilt associated with committing whatever evil deed your heart desires.
You would be surprised to hear that such a conscience is actually quite prevalent in the Church. Because it is easy to do evil and still walk into the assembly like there is nothing wrong. This is popular at highly liberal churches, which I tend to call “Adulterer’s Haven” churches, because many of them ignore the teachings of Christ on divorce and remarriage and allow anyone with an unscriptural marriage to enter their assembly.
An evil conscience will keep you sinning and give you no reason to change. All the popular tools of change endorsed by the Church (Guilt/Shame/Conscience/Fear) have been taken out of your toolbelt. According to them, you will not be able to progress. Without an overwhelming sense of guilt, how will you change?
This statement gives you a bird’s eye view into their ignorance of the subject. No emotion is necessary for change to occur, even though emotions can help on the path of change. However, guilt is uncommon for men, as it tends to be primarily a female emotion or one experienced by weak beta-males.
Men, you must grow, train, progress and improve with or without emotional help.
Few modern men know this. You aren’t going to feel like going to work every day, no one does, but you go anyway. No one is going to feel like working out every day, but you do it anyways. No man is going to feel like listening to and loving their wife every day, but they do it.
Men take action regardless of how they feel at the time. Regardless of all emotion, men must press on and do what is right. They must work, improve, train and move towards being the fully formed and functional men they need to be. Reject the weak man’s idea of conscience, embrace the rigid strength of discipline unaltered by feeling.
Mantra
Reject conscience, embrace action.
Application
If you have an evil conscience, you must do the opposite of what your conscience tells you to do. It is as simple as that. If your conscience is evil, it is pulling you towards evil action, so you must resist your conscience and oppose it in order to do what is right. Again, it does not matter if you feel like doing what is right, or if you want to, or what your motivation is, it only matters if you do what is right or not. What are your actions? They can be good or evil regardless of what kind of conscience you have.
Again, and at risk of being overly redundant, reject the idea of the necessity of conscience.
Conscience is a tool to be used for change, but change is possible without this tool. This is a principle fact of life. You must do what is right regardless of emotional states, including the emotional state of a conscience. You must focus and take action. Do what is right. Be a Man.
“Trust your conscience”, your grandparents used to tell you – As if your conscience always tells the truth. “What does your conscience tell you to do?” your parents ask you when you ask them a difficult question about the course of action you should take; as if conscience is a sentient being that can answer you, instead of a mere emotion. The conscience is a minor feeling that rests in your gut.
What if your conscience has been damaged? Should you trust it then? Should you listen to it then? What if your conscience is not functioning and is temporarily, if not permanently, broken? Should we listen to the emotional dribble of a voice in our head which has been marred by scorching hot metal? No. This is classic dogma propagated by people in the church too weak and afraid to challenge the traditions that have been passed down through generations.
Your father taught you about conscience, just as his father, and his father before him, yet they were all dead wrong.
They all taught you lessons contrary to scripture. They failed to teach you about the reality of perverted consciences, of evil, vile and disgusting consciences. Preachers do not talk about seared consciences.
Some consciences are seared over ages of repetitive sin until nothing but a fragment of what once was a good conscience is left in the mind. The voice of this conscience is frail and fragile, and it can have no more influence over a man.
However, even more frightening than this are those who were born with a seared conscience. From birth they possess a dysfunctional moral compass. These people are classically known as psychopaths or sociopaths. To deny the existence of these individuals is to deny reality.
Maybe it was something in their genetic code. Perhaps the same way that diseases and mutations occur from the genes of an individual, so also a seared conscience generates from the very DNA of a man.
These individuals do exist in the Church today, and they have no idea what to do because they are taught that conscience is mandatory.
And those are just the individuals who feel guilty about their broken conscience, which itself seems to imply that there is some form of a conscience present. But do not confuse guilt with conscience. Those with damaged consciences have no internal, emotional guide, no Christian example, no role model of who to act like because the weak people perpetuate the myth of the obligatory conscience. This is a disgrace.
Defiled consciences (Titus 1:15-16), evil consciences (Heb 10:22), irrelevant consciences (Acts 23:1) and seared consciences are real entities. And guess what? You can receive salvation even if you possess one of these conscience types.
“Impossible!”, cries the traditionalist, “You must have the conscience to act morally”.
Wrong, you must simply know which actions are moral and which are not in order to act morally. Morality is not an emotion. It is an evaluation of the rightness or wrongness of an action based on logic. An evaluation that can be performed with or without that emotion known as ‘conscience’.
Mantra
Action is more important than any feeling I may feel.
Application
Again, purge your mind of the idea that conscience is necessary. It is simply another emotion that is a tool for growth, but not a requirement. Reject traditional conservatism that propagates the necessity of conscience. The irony of this is that the genre of Christianity so renowned for rejecting the emotionalism of liberals still preaches the necessity of the emotion of conscience.
Reject the liberalism that wallows in all emotions and deifies conscience as the gateway to change and righteousness. It is possible to ‘abstain from every form of evil’ (1 Thessalonians 5:22) without feeling positive or negative emotions about the experience. Obliterate all ideas of the requirement of conscience from your mind.
How can you prove to yourself that you are making progress?
These are the important questions. The answers to these questions are the answers that matter, not whether or not you are feeling like doing the right thing or not. Take action. Make progress. Do not get bogged down by the emotions of the weak beta male pew warmer. Be a Man.
This is your task: Work again on rejecting the dogma of the necessity of conscience.
Paul spent a great deal of time persecuting the Church before he was converted on the road to Damascus. Yet he still says that he lived in “good conscience up to this day”. How can a man who persecuted the Church make such a statement? Simple: because he legitimately thought he was doing what was right. Was he doing anything right? No, absolutely not. But he feltlike he was doing right.
The Bible is very condensed compared to secular history. Of all the things that have happened in all of history and to the characters in the Bible, what we have recorded in Scripture is all we have. It is not that much compared to other recorded history. We do not have follow-up volumes to clear up difficult passages. We do not have extra information given to us.
Therefore, it must follow that everything in the Bible is there for a specific purpose.
There are no wasted lines in the Bible. The purpose of Acts 23:1 is to show the irrelevance of conscience. This idea flies in the face of both the popular conservative and liberal logic.
Church people have always passed down “knowledge” about the usefulness and necessity of conscience.
I say “No”. Conscience is irrelevant. Why?
Because based on this passage, we can have our “heart in the right place” (a truly stupid statement), we can “feel” like we are doing what is right, we can have warm fuzzy feelings in our heart and still be taking the worst possible actions.
Paul’s conscience was fine, yet he was a persecutor of the church. Would his conscience have saved him on the day of judgement had he never repented? No. Conscience alone, without correct action, does nothing. Conscience alone is just another emotion stacked on the big pile of worthless emotions. Worthless meaning that without accompanying action, they do not generate any results.
Sure, conscience can be used to direct people to the right actions. But this assumes that their conscience is functioning properly. Many people have malfunctioning consciences. We must reject the dogma that teaches the necessity of the conscience.
A malfunctioning conscience that can lead you straight to hell is not necessary. A conscience that tells you that you are doing what is right when you are definitely doing what is wrong is unprofitable. This was the state of Paul’s conscience. A conscience that convinces you that you have salvation when you live in opposition to the Word is a conscience that should be promptly executed, burned and the ashes buried.
If this teaching makes you uncomfortable, it is because of the dogma you have been force fed your whole life.
Parents, preachers and teachers have always told you that conscience is important and vital. Their teachings go against the explicit examples in the Word.
Did God give us conscience as a tool? Of course. But just like anything else God has given us, we as humans have learned to pervert and manipulate it to our will. This is why many forms of conscience must be rejected immediately, because they have no grounding in reality.
Prepare yourself, because we have more to say on the absurdity of conscience tomorrow. Reject the emotionalistic, ostentatious self-judgement that the weak call “conscience” Be a Man.
Don’t worry about your conscience. Conscience is irrelevant. Nothing matters besides action. Having our hearts in the right place, feeling good, having a good conscience; all these can do nothing to save our souls without obedience. Are those emotions good tools? Sometimes. Are they necessary all the time? No.
Kick to the curb the idea that you have to both have and use your conscience. The truth about the morality of an action can be determined with logic and without involving weak emotions such as conscience.
This is your task: Don’t judge the quality of your actions by how you feel about them, that is for weak men.
It may be your impression after reading a portion of this material that Spartan Christianity is Anti-emotion. After all, we do spend a great deal of time talking about the ways emotion affects the minds of men negatively. But that is not to say that all emotion is bad or useless, in fact it is not the case at all! The principles that are presented here are meant to motivate men to first build a foundation of logic that is later supplemented by emotion rather than using emotions as the foundation.
To help illustrate this, we will look at a few non-religious examples where emotions are used before skill or logic is developed, and how it typically ends in disaster.
Here are a few examples:
No doubt you have seen a singer or watched one of those television singing shows and seen someone who was clearly filled with passion and excitement about singing but had absolutely no skill in it whatsoever. He may have had a certain amount of talent, or some potential that could be built on through training, but he had no appreciable level of skill with music.
Yet he still tries out for the show thinking that passion alone is enough to allow him to fulfill his dreams. This is not the case, passion can only be added after a respectable skill level has been reached.
Also consider the aggressive man who exercises and channels all his anger into his physical training, but injures himself because he lacks proper form in exercise. No doubt aggression improves the intensity of training, but only if an appreciable level of skill in training has been established first.
Proper body mechanics must be established before aggression or other emotions can be unleashed.
The best singers in the world or the best athletes in the world undoubtedly have high levels of passion for their skill. But they also added that passion to an already high level of pre-existing skill. The best singers in the world are the ones who have high levels of technical skill built on hours of practice that they later supplemented with passion. That passion provides the human element that allows music to be a connecting experience between people. But the value of a man’s passion is stifled when he obviously lacks technical skill in music.
How many times has one of your favorite songs been ruined for you because someone played or sang it badly?
The best athletes in the world are the ones who know their exercises, drills and sports plays so fluently that they do not need to think about them. Their skill level is so high that they can go on mental autopilot and then focus on concentrating massive amounts of energy, aggression and passion into the sport.
The Spartan Christian must be the same way.
It is absolutely necessary to have supplemental emotions for your faith, but you must not build upon them as the foundation. Emotions alone are not enough. First you must cement in your mind what it is you believe through logic and rationality. Upon a Foundation of rationality you can add your emotions to make your faith unbeatable.
Once you understand the evils of sin, you can concentrate your aggression into crushing those evils. Once you mentally appreciate the magnitude of gifts and blessings that God has given you, then you can thank Him with tears and emotional joy.
Emotions are jet fuel for the mind and for action.
But you must first build a functioning plane before the type of fuel even begins to matter. What good is the best jet fuel if your engines blow out two minutes after takeoff? What good is jet fuel if you can’t even “crank up” your plane?
The greatest structures in the world started out as logical blueprints on paper. Those blueprints later became a concrete foundation and stable wooden frame. Creating the beautiful appearance of a building is the final thing to be completed. You cannot have a beautiful building without a strong foundation first.
Your faith must have titanium architecture built on logic before you can add the beautiful aesthetics of emotions.
Even God designed parts of the human body to be the same way.
Consider all your bones. Bones are 50% collagen and 50% ground substance, which is made up of minerals like calcium. Both pieces are vitally important for the structural integrity of your bones, and your body wouldn’t work without this combination.
The collagen gives the bones flexibility. If we didn’t have collagen, our bones would crumble and break because they would only have calcium and other salts. It would then be as easy to break a bone as it would be to snap a calcium pill in half with your fingers.
But the calcium is still important. It provides the bone with rigidity and strength. Without the calcium and other bone salts, your bones would bend and snap like a sapling.
But when combined together, the benefits of each substance create bones that pound for pound are stronger than concrete at a fraction of the weight.
Emotions are the same way. Our emotion must be combined with logic for there to be any appreciable level of strength in each one.
Emotions are not strong without logic, and logic is not strong without emotion.
Emotions alone will crumble under adversity. How strong is the faith of an emotional person when those precious emotions fade to nothing? How faithful is the emotional Christian once it is no longer safe or convenient for him to be a Christian? Most people leave the church as soon as it becomes dangerous to be a Christian.
Logic alone is not enough for some men to maintain their faith. When atheists seem to make such great, logical points about the origin of the universe many men must call on emotion to maintain their faith.
This is the main point: emotion and logic are complementary.
You will be weak if you have one without the other. But many Christians today are so concerned with increasing their emotions or their passion that they neglect logic altogether. At Spartan Christianity, the purpose is to increase logic in a world of men who worship emotion.
Build your faith with the mind before you add your emotions to it. This is the Spartan way. Once your faith is built, then add emotional conviction and become unstoppable.
