JANUARY 14TH, 1920
JANUARY 14TH, 1920
[p. 105] MY DEAR BROTHER, — The question you raise is of interest, and one is always glad to know how things strike exercised minds.
My impression is that we may distinguish the knowledge of good and evil from conscience, for God has the former, but conscience is, I believe, always in Scripture connected with responsibility. I would say that it is the faculty in man which applies the knowledge of good and evil to responsibility, either in self-approval or self-condemnation, or in the approval or condemnation of what may be contemplated in another.
But it seems to me that the believer knows good and evil by becoming skilled in the word of righteousness, and as a full-grown man on account of habit has his senses exercised for distinguishing both good and evil. It is in the saint the result of growth and exercise and is more connected with moral formation than with conscience, properly speaking. Saints will be in heaven in the full result and perfection of this moral formation, and they will know good and evil, even as God does, in the blessedness and perfection of the divine nature in which they are made participators.
At the present time moral formation goes on in the sphere of responsibility, and hence is always accompanied and promoted by activity of the conscience. But in a scene where all is wholly and eternally good it is difficult to see what place conscience could have. Evil is known in that scene, but it is known as having been fully exposed and judged in the death of the holy and righteous One, and as having disappeared from God’s reconciled universe. Good that is without measure is known there in its fulness in the blessed God, and every vessel is filled out of that fulness — God is all in all. But both good and evil are known in the divine nature, even as God knows them — a nature which is abhorrent of evil, and all whose activities, the unceasing outcome of love, are only good.
There is indeed the activity of love now, but it is in the sphere of responsibility, and therefore it must needs flow out of a good conscience. But when responsibility is left behind, and God is all in all, nothing active, or even present, but the divine nature, it seems to me that conscience — as presented to us in Scripture — will no longer have any mission to fulfil.
Hence I have felt free to follow J.N.D. in saying that there will be no need of conscience in heaven.
What you say as to grace and the working of divine power [p. 106] in man conferring a condition upon the creature in which he is morally equal to the possession of a conscience, is most blessed, and I delight in the thought of it. But is not this exactly what grace has brought in now in the sphere of responsibility? We do not need to wait for heaven for this.
With much love in the Lord Jesus,
Yours affectionately in Him,
January 14th, 1920.