The Comforter and
the Conscience
By John Gavazzoni

By "the Comforter" in our title, I refer to...as the KJV has it...the One Jesus promised to send after His resurrection, which He also identified as "the Spirit of Truth," whom the Father would send in His (Jesus') name. By "the conscience" in our title, I refer to the side-tracking of human consciousness that occurs when our consciousness presumes a responsibility to make a determination between good and evil, and with that a presumption of responsibility to act in righteous accordance to such determination.

While that side-tracking of our consciousness was a matter of divine foreknowledge because it was a matter of divine predetermination, it was so for that reason that belongs to the wisdom of God, that what is native to our humanness must be subjected to what is alien to it, in order for our humanness, with its inherent consciousness, to become fully what God intended...totally freed from the above so that the ultimate intention for our consciousness might be realized, i.e., to know God experientially and intimately in such a union of being that, loving as God loves, determines all creaturely interaction. That is to say, to act as creatures of God consistent with being the children of God.

Because of that side-tracking of the function of consciousness, conscience is notoriously a misleading guide for determining right from wrong, and/or showing the way to proceed rightly, for culturally established norms, for instance, affect conscience to such a degree that what those of one culture might assume to be acceptable or even highly desirable, might for another, be repugnant and abhorrent. Imagine a person knocking on my front door who has come to America from a culture where dogs, at times, are killed to be eaten, and their meat highly prized. Imagine that person introducing himself and saying he's been admiring Samson, our German Shepherd, and would like to buy him to feature him as the main dish for an upcoming family affair. I certainly would need, at that moment, to remember what I know about the influence of culture upon one's values.

A parishioner who didn't like what he'd heard from the Sunday morning sermon about the evil of chewing snuff, said to the preacher as they shook hands at the close of the service, "preacher, you just quit preachin' and got to meddlin.' I'm going to get to meddlin' at this point in our article: When you see a video of, or actually be present viewing, U.S. fighter jets flying over a sports stadium in a way to evoke feelings of patriotism as the display is meant to represent the U.S.'s might in the service of right, and you get the same kind of shivers up your spine that you do at some point singing one of your favorite hymns, you should realize, dear brother or sister, that your conscience has been enculturated to respond to deception as if it was the truth.

We are, soulishly, a people whose hearts have defiled consciences. The prophet was right declaring, "the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked." As I've pointed out in other writings, the Hebrew there is better rendered, "the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick." From sick cultures (and our own is one of those at the head of the pack), come sick hearts with their inherent sick consciences. The former feeds the latter, and vise versa.

This becomes a very even practical matter concerning our over-all well-being. Our culture...and we hear it over and over again... tells us with seductive repetitiveness, that anytime we think something might be not right with our bodies, or whether we should be taking this or that drug, or upon being exposed to one of big pharma's TV ads for its latest drug, "ask your doctor." And suckered by such enculturation of your conscience, believing you should do right by your body as the temple of God, you hurry off to your doctor who, chances are, may do you more harm than good. Is it not conscience-enculturation that causes us to ask our doctor before we ask the Holy Spirit?

Something's not right, brethren. The saints of God ought to have better discernment than that. Beware of where-the-rubber-meets-the-road application of the (Greek) "kosmos," the dominant system's distorting of your consciousness to make it a defiled conscience. The world has played with our consciousness in such a way that we become ashamed of what we ought not to, and feel good about becoming idiotic cash cows for the system.

Along with "ask your doctor," belongs the insistence that to be a responsible saint and citizen, you should make sure to vote. Well, maybe you shouldn't because chances are, you'll simply be adding your ignorance to that of the masses who actually prefer one party of sociopaths over the other party's. We are a holy nation, a peculiar people unto God who ought not to be being destroyed for lack of knowledge.

Years ago, when I was co-pastoring a charismatic church, during a more than usual time of idiotic prophetic prognostication from leading evangelical "lights," I was strongly pressed to take a stand against strange predictions of supposed signs of the Lord's soon return to rapture His church (gag). One of those predictions was sold (and being a salesman for so many years, I recognized "the pitch") based upon the soon occurrence of the alignment of 9 planets. I got up one Sunday morning, and dared to say, "I'm telling you, Jesus is not going to return for His church as those 9 planets come into alignment, because, for one, the church at large knows very little about victory over death. The presence of death more often causes us to back off, rather than we making it back off." [note please: now I know Jesus' won't be returning because He never left. See my article series by the same title: He Never Left.]