Tue 17 Mar, 2009
“Some things never change. The problem of a dirty conscience is as old as Adam and Eve. As soon as they sinned, their conscience was defiled. Their sense of guilt was ruinous. It ruined their relationship with God—they hid from him. It ruined their relation to each other—they blamed. It ruined their peace with themselves— for the first time they saw themselves and felt shame. All through the Old Testament, conscience was an issue. But the animal sacrifices themselves could not cleanse the conscience. As a foreshadowing of Christ, God counted the blood of the animals as sufficient for cleansing the flesh—the ceremonial uncleanness, but not the conscience. So here we are in the modern age—the age of science, Internet, organ transplants, instant messaging, cell phones—and our problem is fundamentally the same as always: Our conscience condemns us. We don’t feel good enough to come to God. And no matter how distorted our consciences are, this much is true: We are not good enough to come to him. We can cut ourselves, or throw our children in the sacred river, or give a million dollars to the United Way, or serve in a soup kitchen on Thanksgiving, or perform a hundred forms of penance and self-injury, and the result will be the same: The stain remains, and death terrifies. The only answer in these modern times, as in all other times, is the blood of Christ. When our conscience rises up and condemns us, where will we turn? We turn to Christ. We turn to the suffering and death of Christ—the blood of Christ. This is the only cleansing agent in the universe that can give the conscience relief in life and peace in death.”
Reflecting on this statement reminds me that no matter how much I worked to purge my conscience with good works, donations to charity, volunteerism, doing penance, or working at church, my conscience still condemned me. I had one big question…How much did I have to do to earn back right standing with God and stand before him with the clean conscience and how would I know when I had reached that point. The answer I found was a paradox. I could do both nothing but also everything. I could do nothing to please God. Thus what I was doing through acts of service, was futile. This in itself was condemning. Yet I also found out I could do everything to please God, but not through my actions but by those perfect acts that Jesus performed on my behalf. Thus I could do everything to please God, through Christ. I needed a substitute to stand in my place. And that’s what Jesus does but faith in him. Not only can I stand before him uncondemned, but also with a clear conscience, confident that he will be pleased by the sacrifice of his Son.
Questions: Have you tried to purge your conscience with good works, donations or acts of service? Have you ever asked yourself why? Did those acts solve your problem? Are you sure? Why are resisting the only hope you have by coming to faith in Christ?
Quote from “The 50 Reasons Jesus Came to Die”.
Questions and reflections by me.
Picture – The cross at Mount Erebus, Antarctica, commemorating the 1979 Air New Zealand Crash near Mount Erebus.
