That still, small voice
God and the conscience

(This article originally appeared in Prophecy Today magazine)

In 1942, at the height of the Second World War, a German reserve police battalion from Hamburg was given the mission of rounding up and massacring over 38,000 Jews in a village in Poland. These Germans were middle class and most had no particular hatred of Jews. About a dozen out of the 500 refused to take part, some more refused to carry on once the shooting had started, but the majority got on with it. Later on, some actually developed a taste for the job. They had acquired a taste for killing and it didn't concern them.

One of them said this: "It was possible for me to shoot just the children. It so happened that the mothers led the children by the hand. My neighbour shot the mother and I shot the child, because I reasoned that the child couldn't live without its mother."

They were just following orders. As one man later admitted, it was not until years later that he began to consider that what he had done had not been right. He had not given it a thought at the time.

It is difficult for us to put ourselves in their shoes. Yet we must ask, would we have behaved in the same way as those ordinary Germans? Everything within my being wants to say no, these were evil people, from an evil race, who had chosen to live under such an evil regime. But the fact remains that they were ordinary people, living in such extreme circumstances, that the simple matter of what is a right action and what is a wrong one had been muddled. Once free of this evil regime, these men were going to have to live with the facts and consequences of these actions for the rest of their lives.

So how do we make decisions? It may seem an obvious question to ask, but why did these Germans live the rest of their lives in guilt, knowing that they had perpetrated such evil in the war years? Who or what told them at the time that they were doing right in killing those innocent Jews. Who or what told them later that they had done wrong in killing those innocent Jews? A defence could have been that they were following orders, but that's a cop-out as some refused to join the killing squads without regard to the consequences. The majority carried out these deeds out of a sense of duty, yet, years later, they would be appalled at how they could have done so.

The answer to this mystery lies mainly at the foot of one man, Joseph Goebbels. As the Nazi Propaganda Minister, his job was to justify Hitler's hatred of the Jews by convincing the German people that the Jews were a natural enemy to the German race and did not deserve to inhabit the same planet as them. The ultimate aim of Goebbels (and Hitler) was to create such a negative picture of the Jew in the German psyche that every negative action against them could be justified, even the merciless killing of large numbers of Jews by death squads made up of ordinary Germans.

What Goebbels managed to do was to write a set of rules for the German people that would overwrite any others that, pre-War, they had lived by. He had, in fact, replaced their conscience and was most proud of this. "Conscience is nothing more than a crutch for cowards", he proclaimed. This is in stark contrast to an earlier quote by Abraham Lincoln, who said "to sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men." So what is this conscience, a crutch for cowards or a condemner of cowards? Two views in opposition and we would say that one view was made by a man utterly without conscience and the other made by a man governed by it. No wonder they said what they did.

Here is a quote from Christopher Reeve, the actor who played Superman.

"I think we all have a little voice inside us that will guide us. It may be God, I don't know. But I think that if we shut out all the noise and clutter from our lives and listen to that voice, it will tell us the right thing to do."

A little voice inside us? What little voice? Has it always been there, were we just made that way? We need to think about this because don't they put away people who claim to hear voices?

This 'little voice' is the voice of your conscience and is considered the part of your mind which tells you whether what you are doing is right or wrong. We know all about it when we've done something wrong, because, assuming we are functioning correctly, we have a guilty conscience about the situation. It seems that the conscience's main job is to convict us of this guilt when we've 'transgressed', rather than commending us when we've been particularly good - that's when pride takes over and we start telling ourselves how wonderful we are!

As we found out, sometimes conscience can become confused or overruled. A member of a cult, or one of our 'ordinary Germans' would have been given a whole new set of values. They could be told such nonsense that killing is good and compassion is a waste of time. Their consciences would thus be re-programmed and a sense of right and wrong would be utterly distorted.

But who programmed it in the first place? How does your conscience know what is right or wrong? Are our consciences taught to us? I believe that our conscience is as natural to us as is our breathing. We are not taught to breathe as otherwise we'd all be dead before we reached the maternity hospital scales. In the same way the organs of our body automatically go about their business, from birth until they finally pack up a lifetime later. Even though we may teach our children to do good and we live according to the laws of the land, the basic instinct is there already, with our conscience acting as our internal alarm to keep us on the right track.

Conscience has been variously explained by philosophers. They speak of it as something that is developed by the individual, explained as a set of biological impulses in the brain and animal instincts.

The other alternative puts us fairly and squarely within our conspiracy of grace, in a universe governed by God. In this scenario our conscience provides us with a connection to this conspiracy, a conduit between the natural world and the supernatural world. It's an invisible umbilical cord between us and something greater than ourselves. My contention is that our conscience is an identical filter built into all of us by God, to provide us with an absolute indicator of what is right and wrong. It's not a case of "what's right for you" or "I can see both sides in this case", instead you can see it as green and red lights deep inside you, lighting up either as "yes" or "no" for those important moral situations, where a decision is needed.

In all conscience, the choice is totally yours what you believe in. You have your own individual conscience, whatever you may believe about its origins. Tune into your "little voice" and listen to what it's telling you. Perhaps it will lead you to the same conclusion as mine.

In the next article, the final one, I will attempt to explain why, these days, it is more important than ever to provide a clear picture of who our God is, to those who are blown here and there by every wind of teaching (Eph. 4:14).

(This article is based on material from "The Truth is Out There" published by Authentic)