Cleansing the conscience
God in forgiving man, gives him the heredity of His son, meaning, He turns them into the standard of the forgiver.
A man may say, “I don’t deny that God will forgive me, but what about the folks I have done wrong to? Can God give me a clearinghouse for my conscience?”
Hebrews 9:13-14
The blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkled on those who are ceremonially unclean sanctify them so that they are outwardly clean. 14 How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God!
It is because these things are neglected in the presentation of redemption that men are kept away from Jesus Christ. Men are kept away by honesty more than by dishonesty.
When a man gets rightly adjusted to God his conscience staggers him, and his reason condemns him from all standpoints.
Conscience is not the voice of God; conscience is that faculty in me which appeals to the highest I know; it may or may not be religious. God has a conscience toward human beings and toward himself, that is, he has a standard to keep, and the problem He is up against is not to wipe the muddle off the slate, but to resolve it back again, and redemption is his way of doing it
Jesus Christ’s revelation is the forgiveness of God, and the tremendous miracle of redemption is that God turns me, the unholy one, into the standard of himself, the forgiver, by the miracle of putting into me a new disposition. The question up to me is-“do I want him to do it?” God’s forgiveness is a bigger miracle than we are apt to think. He will not only restore to us what the canker worm has eaten; not only deliver us from hell; not only make a clearinghouse for conscience; but he will give a totally new heredity; and many a man who has shut himself down in despair need not despair anymore. God can forgive a man anything but despair that He can forgive him.
It is a great thing to have a spiritual experience but another thing to think of the basis of it.
The highest standard God has is Himself, and it is up to God to make man as good as He is Himself; and it is up to me to let him do it.
Supposing the view of the Bible to be the right, to whom is it “up to” to right the wrong? The creator, has He done it? He has, and He has done it absolutely single-handed. The tremendous revelation of Christianity is not the fatherhood of God but the babyhood of God-God became the weakest thing in his own creation, and in flesh and blood he levered it back to where it was intended to be. No one helped him; it was done absolutely by God manifest in human flesh. God has undertaken not only to repair the damage, but in Jesus Christ the human race is put in a better condition than when it was originally designed. It is necessary to understand these things if you are able to battle for your faith the deity of the Christian religion
Jesus Christ’s view is that the Christian religion has been tried and abandoned, but never in tried and failed.
God’s conscience means he has to forgive completely and finally redeem the human race. The point about Christian forgiveness is not that God puts snow over a dung heap, but that He turns a man into the standard of the forgiver. The great thing up to God is that in forgiving me he has to give me the heredity of His son. God himself has answered the problem of sin and there is no man on earth who cannot be presented “perfected in Jesus,
Oswald Chambers- The Highest Good – The Shadow of an Agony
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