You can damage the gift of conscience, just as you can damage other gifts from God. Oddly enough, you can damage it in two opposite ways: by making it insensitive and by making it oversensitive. We make conscience insensitive by developing a habit of ignoring its voice of warning so that the voice gets weaker and weaker and finally disappears. Paul calls this “searing” the conscience: “Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron” (1 Tim. 4:2 NIV).

Note: This article is part of the 10 Things You Should Know series.

A Shoulder Angel?

Most people probably think of the conscience as the “shoulder angel.” Comic strips and films often depict an angel dressed in white on a person’s right shoulder and a demon dressed in red and holding a pitchfork on the person’s left shoulder. The angel represents the person’s conscience, and the demon represents temptation. The angel attempts to persuade the person to do right, and the demon tempts the person to do wrong.

This picture resonates with people because we commonly experience internal conflicts that seem like voices in our heads arguing about what to do in a particular situation. What is right? What is wrong? Thankfully, we’re not left to popular perception in regard to conscience. We have the Bible to teach us what conscience is and is not. In this article we want to lay out some introductory principles about conscience.

1. Conscience Is a Human Capacity

To be human is to have a conscience. Animals don’t have a conscience, even if they often seem to. I (J. D.) have a dog, Lucy, whose tail is almost permanently fixed between her legs, her eyes always averted, always guilty. We think she was mistreated as a puppy. But in spite of all appearances, Lucy doesn’t have a conscience—not even the trace of one. She doesn’t have a conscience because she doesn’t have the capacity for moral judgment. Our cat doesn’t have a conscience either, but you already knew that.

Notice we said conscience is a capacity. Like other human capacities such as speech and reason, it’s possible for a person never to actualize or achieve the capacity of conscience. A child dies in infancy, having never spoken a single word or felt a single pang of conscience. Another child is born without the mental capacity to make moral judgments. Others, through stroke, accident, or dementia, lose the moral judgment they once had and the conscience that went with it. Still, to be human is to have the capacity for conscience, whether or not one is able to exercise that capacity.

2. Conscience Reflects the Moral Aspect of God’s Image

It shouldn’t surprise you that you have a conscience. You’re made in the image of God, and God is a moral God, so you must be a moral creature who makes moral judgments. And what is conscience if not shining the spotlight of your moral judgment back on yourself, your thoughts, and your actions. A moral being would expect to make moral self-judgments.

So conscience is inherent in personhood. It is not the result of sin. It is not something that Christians will lose after God glorifies them. This means that Jesus, who is fully human, has a conscience. Unlike our consciences, though, Jesus’s conscience perfectly matches God’s will, and he has never sinned against it.

3. Conscience Feels Independent

But what ought to surprise you is that you would even care about the verdict of your conscience. Yet you do care, intensely. Many have taken their lives because of a secret guilt—a sin that no one else knew except that impossible-to-suppress voice within. Others have gone mad from the telltale heartbeat of a guilty conscience.

But when you think about it, why should you care what your conscience says about you? If you heard that a judge accused of a crime had decided to hear his own case, you’d laugh. First he sits on the bench and reads the charges. Then he jumps down to the witness stand to defend himself and then jumps back up to the bench to pronounce himself “not guilty.” What a joke! And yet you judge yourself every day, and it doesn’t feel like a joke. It’s deadly serious. Why?

The why is a great mystery. No one knows why the conscience feels so much like an independent third party, but it probably has something to do with the relationship between two universal realities that Paul discusses in Romans chapters 1 and 2. Romans 1:19–20 claims that all humans know intuitively by the witness of nature that God exists and must be absolutely powerful. Romans 2:14–15 goes on to teach that everyone also has a conscience, an imperfect-but-accurate-enough version of God’s will, as standard equipment in their hearts.

These passages seem to explain conscience like this: though we all have a sense that what’s going on in our conscience is secret, we also have a sense that an all-powerful, all-knowing God is in on the secret and will someday judge those secrets at his great and terrifying tribunal. We’re not saying that people actually reason it out like a syllogism but that all of us intuit very strongly our accountability to an all-powerful, all-knowing God, even if we suppress that intuition, as Romans 1:18 claims. Perhaps that is why the voice of conscience seems so much like an independent judge rather than a kangaroo court.

4. Conscience Is a Priceless Gift from God

The conscience is a gift for your good and joy, and it is something that God—not your mother or father or anyone else—gave you.

Consider your sense of touch. That sense is a gift from God that can function as a warning system to save you from great harm. If the tip of your finger lightly brushes the top of a hot stove, your nervous system reflexively compels you to pull back your hand to avoid more pain and harm. Similarly, the guilt that your conscience makes you feel should lead you to turn from your sin to Jesus. God gave you that sense of guilt for your good.

The conscience is also a gift from God for your joy: “Blessed is the one who has no reason to pass judgment on himself for what he approves” (Rom. 14:22b). Like everyone else, you long to be “blessed” or happy. That’s how God wired you.

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