What Is a "Purged" Conscience?

THERE are two ways in which the grace of God is presented to us in the New Testament.
One is brought out in the Epistle to the Ephesians, where all the tide of blessing attaching to the believer, because he partakes of the Spirit of Christ, is shown. When so looked on by God, as one spirit with the Lord Jesus, that which is said of Christ is said of the believer in Him: he is crucified, dead, buried, raised up, and seated with Christ in the heavenly places. (Eph. 2.)
The other way in which divine grace is taken up is, not beginning with “the new man” (Eph. 4:2424And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness. (Ephesians 4:24)) planted in the heart, but arguing out the case with the conscience of the sinner; and very gracious it is for the sinner that thus it should be. This is most largely brought out in the Epistle to the Romans.
In the Epistle to the Hebrews the question of conscience is introduced, and whether the conscience has been so purged that there is no more sense of sins. As it is said: “That the worshippers once purged should have had no more conscience of sins.” (Heb. 10:22For then would they not have ceased to be offered? because that the worshippers once purged should have had no more conscience of sins. (Hebrews 10:2).)
Now what is this “conscience” which the apostle speaks of here?
It is very plain if we look at Scripture, and take the simple meaning of the word itself: con and science, or knowledge. That is, it is the certain knowledge that a man has within himself about moral things, Scripture declares this to have been in man since he listened to Satan, and partook of the fruit of the forbidden tree. Man from that time onwards has had a knowledge within himself down at the bottom, notwithstanding all his unbelief. Sometimes he puts his thoughts out, as infidels do, and says, “I do not believe in eternity or in the Scriptures”; but afterwards he will say, as has been said to me before now: “I said that to keep you away from reaching me. You have got the advantage over me; for you, by the light you have got, see into eternity, whereas death is to me a dark, black curtain.”
The way in which this works is presented differently in Scripture, and people make a great many mistakes about it. If you turn to Gen. 3 you will see it is said: “The eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked.” This was the first effect of their taking of the tree that God prohibited. God had said, Do not touch it. They took it, and then came the deep inward feeling, I am unfit for God’s presence; so they had recourse to something that lay in their own circumstances; they put their hands on the thing nearest them to cover them, and they were apparently quite comfortable, having thus smoothed over the surface by something within their own range.
But when the voice of the Lord is heard saying, “Where art thou?” this smoothed inward feeling could not abide. And that has stuck in man’s mind to the present time. He knows he is not fit for God’s presence, and God is a heart-searching God.
Thus I get, in the father and mother of the human family, conscience brought in. And have not you got it? Have you not got the same feeling that Adam and Eve had in the garden? As I said just now, you have.
In Romans 2 The apostle, speaking of the heathen, says: “Which show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the meanwhile accusing or else excusing one another.”
There have been many instances of this inward persuasion in the mind of the heathen. One man, an old philosopher, came to the conclusion that there was but one God, and his arguments are as good as those of Paley in his “Natural Theology.” He even argued from His works that this God was a beneficent being. But when he was going to be put to death for saying so, he said to his disciples: “I have vowed a cock to Esculapius, and I have not offered it.”
Just going to be put to death for maintaining the unity of the Deity, he speaks of offering a sacrifice to a false god! So there was no power among the heathen, though they had conscience. We see what a stupid thing conscience is.
And if we go abroad to the individual, we shall see what an equally stupid thing, what a senseless thing, is conscience. Let me put the senselessness of it before you as it was seen in myself.
When as a young man, about twenty years of age, I felt that I was a sinner, I looked at Scripture, and saw that I was descended from sinful parents. I said: “There Satan brought sin in”; and conscience added: “You are not fit for God’s presence.” So I began to do something to better myself. And what was the sense of that? It came to just this: Satan had overcome my parents in the garden, and I thought that I had more power as fallen than Adam had as unfallen.
You see how senseless conscience was in me. And if ever there were a Pharisee who sought to get a good conscience, I was that one, by starvation and fasting till I was at death’s door. What did that do for me? I found I had got into a state of departure from God, and I was just telling God to stand back till I got to Him; thus quietly assuming that I could do God’s work for Him. My trying to do it was only the expression of my senseless conscience. A conscience that can do that is blind and cannot see afar off.
Remark that when the apostle speaks of a “purged” conscience, that is, of a soul that has the sense of sin removed from it, he begins by showing how far the sacrifices appointed of God could give it. It was clear they could not. God had set up a system of sacrifices, and yet He never stopped talking of sin and sacrifices. They began at the Passover; them came the feast of unleavened bread, and so on, till they came round to the great clay of atonement (Lev. 23.)
If we had been on earth then with the light we have now, we should have said: I will gladly offer a lamb, and a kid, and a bullock too; but, dear me, I am a great deal more important than fifty thousand bullocks! And if the sacrifice did not come up in value to the one who offered it, it could not remove the sense of sin. All the bullocks that King Solomon offered did not come up in value to Solomon himself, and so could not remove his sense of guilt.
And then the thought would come up: It is all very well for me to do these things, but even if I lay down my life itself, how can that make any compensation to God who has been insulted by my sin? I say, No; I have a feeling in my breast that God has not got His place here in my heart, and when I meet Him we shall’ have things to settle. He can say to me: You have got being from me, and yet you have not loved me. When young there may have been passions, blasphemy, and the like; and since I have cut off these external bad fruits, inside my heart what a want of trust in Him! I must feel that if I, as a creature, meet Him as a Creator, I have something to settle. The very feeling of this shows a conscience that is not “purged.” It has still blots and spots; it is not fit for His presence.
I want to draw your attention to what it is that gives a “purged” conscience, for it is very important at a time when knowledge is so much on the increase; when there is so much instruction as to the superstructure; and when the hour of trial comes it is found there is no answer within as to this settlement of God about things.
In the Epistle to the Hebrews we find that the platform is drawn above. I am down here, but God has spread the heavens above, and pitched a tabernacle there; He has arranged the heavens after an entirely new order. Jesus Christ has sat down there in the true tabernacle, and God, in taking His Son into the heavens, has taken Him there as the One who was “holy, harmless, undefiled, and separate from sinners,” and has set Him at His own right hand according to His plan and counsel before the world was. (Heb. 7:2626For such an high priest became us, who is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens; (Hebrews 7:26).)
But what has that do to with my conscience? Directly I get into the light of it, it has everything to do with it; because when there is trouble within me about the things I have to settle with God, I lift my eyes there, and I say: “He has been there before me, making the throne of the Highest a throne of mercy, and letting the only question now be whether mercy suits me. I am a sinner, and God has a right to show mercy.”
I cannot say He is bound not to let out mercy because man has rebelled; He had not shown it out in creation or providence, but He thought He had a perfect right to show it out when His Son was in the heavens at His own right hand. And what mercy and compassion this is! God looks down and says: How will you be when you stand before me, and plead guilty as one who has had to do with the God of mercy?
“Oh!” I say, “I will not settle then; I say for myself now, that if He look over the whole of England He will not find a specimen better fitted to show what mercy is to, than myself.”
That is the feeling in one’s own conscience, and then one gets rest.
But He here shows me how He makes His throne the throne of mercy; He explains the ground on which He feels justified in His holiness to speak to a sinner. He would have felt that His honor was tarnished if He had spoken to a sinner about mercy except through the death of Christ. But now He has used sin itself as an occasion to show out His mercy. On the cross He showed out the horrid character of the world and the horrid character of Satan; and then He took Christ up to a new place as man at His own right hand, and so He says, I am free to speak of mercy to the sinner.
I would press the fact of the death of Christ in connection with the character of God. People look for something to satisfy themselves; and we need to have this. But God needs to be satisfied, for there had been an impediment in the way. How could He be just, and yet the justifier? His own Son bore the wrath; and, if so, God can now speak of mercy; nay, God can come out and look for the sinner, because Christ has died.
Now, heaven is arranged at present in a way to throw out in the light the accepted sacrifice of Christ; and if I come to that, can I have a spot remaining on my conscience? Can I have conscience of sins? I do not say, the consciousness of sin. I have got that, or I could not have forgiveness; but I have not conscience of sins.
Conscience and consciousness are two different things. Saul had no consciousness of sins when his conscience was so hard that he was putting God’s saints to death. If anyone had said to him, What a dreadful sinner you are! he would have answered, No, I am a righteous man. When he saw the sacrifice of Christ he had “no more conscience of sins,” but he became perfectly conscious that the law of sin and death was in his members, and that he could not have it taken out until he was glorified.
Am not I a happy creature to have “no conscience of sins” at all? Do I go into His presence and say: I have been trying to rub out this score and that score; sometimes I think I have succeeded, and then again not?
No! I go and say, This is astonishing! I have learned in Jesus, alive at Thy right hand, the full volume of Thy mercy and of my sin, such as it defies a finite mind to grasp.
I can remember, when trying to get the consciousness of rest, and I have seen it over and over again in others, trying to get a measure for sin, something to measure sin by, as perhaps by looking at it in its aggravations. For instance, that it was much more awful in a Christian land, and with the Bible in one’s hand. All this supposes that the person does not admit that sin is infinite because it is against God. But directly I saw sin finished on the cross, I got rest, because I had got a measure by which I saw sin infinite; and until you, a human being, can get into a state to, in a measure, understand what passed in the soul of the Son of man, you will never know what passed between Him and God. Sin was indefinitely great, but sin was indefinitely put away, and sin too that was against God.
And who was the person who bore it? The Son of God, who is also the Son of man.
Now, I could not say that I am better than He. Thousands of bullocks are not so much worth as one man; but put the whole human race together, and can they be compared to the worth of the Son of God as Son of man? No! Well, He went in, and bore what was due to me, and the whole thing was settled then and there, and settled to my faith directly I knew it.
In the tenth chapter of Hebrews, then, I find that this tablet written in me, called “conscience,” directly it gets into the light of heaven (unless I am prepared to judge God, and Christ, and the Holy Ghost), must say that the whole question is settled (verse 12-22). If God feels perfectly free to speak to the sinner; and not only so but looks out for the chief of sinners to show His mercy to; what if I should say, I am more punctilious than Thou, and do not feel that I am free to go? If He say, You are free to come right clean into the presence of the Majesty in the heavens, and if you say, I cannot come, then all that it proves is that your eye is not upon CHRIST.
CHRIST took my place in death and judgment on the cross; and now I get Christ’s place before God, by faith in His blood. Is this right? Clearly so. It is due to Christ that, if He took my portion to extricate me from it, I should share His portion, if, in grace, He is willing to share it with me. God, therefore, against whom I have sinned, is “just” in now “justifying” me, because Jesus has been delivered and condemned for my sins, and then raised by God in proof of His satisfaction and delight in Him and in His work of redemption for me. (Romans 4:2525Who was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification. (Romans 4:25).)