Mark 1:11, Job 2:3

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Do you remember the account in the Bible of Jesus’ baptism? Where God, the Father spoke from heaven. I like the version in the Gospel of Mark, where God, the Father from Heaven actually speaks directly to Jesus. And there he says,

“You are my son. In you I am well pleased.” (Mark 1:11)

This wasn’t the first time that God, the Father, spoke to his Son that we can read about in the Bible. But in the Old Testament, there are these beautiful conversations that we will find being spoken between the members of the Holy Trinity, between the divine persons of the Trinity, between the Father and his Son. One of these is in the beginning of Isaiah, chapter 42, where God, the Father says, I will hold your hand and give you as a light to the Gentiles. (Isaiah 42:6) And even as he is speaking tenderly and intimately with his Son about what he will do, it is also speaking about us because it is about what Jesus the Christ would do for all people. And in a sense, He’s speaking to us, to let us know.

This is what we call the heavenly council, the triune God, and how the persons of the Trinity converse and are in a beautiful harmony together, where there’s great love and caring that’s modeled for us in the Trinity itself. We see the heavenly council in another way in Job chapter one and chapter two. There we see that Satan appears before the Lord. He comes before the heavenly council and we heard God speak to him, to Satan, actually, and say,

Have you considered my servant job? A man who is blameless and upright? (Job 2:3)

And what does the devil do at that point? He begins to accuse, for that is who he is. Revelation Chapter 12 (verse 10) says that he is the accuser who accuses the children of God night and day. And so he accuses Job. And the rest of the Book of Job we see that Job is on trial. Satan presses him hard. And the question is, is God right about Job?

Now, Job isn’t perfect, and he does complain at various times being in confusion about his afflictions and wanting to understand what God is doing. But at the end of the Book of Job God says, My servant Job has spoken what is right. And it says these words. God had accepted Job. (Job 42:8-9) Again, not because Job is perfect in his thoughts, words and actions, but it is by faith that God accepted Job.

Now we see this scene that I’ve just described taking place in our own life. Where does Satan come to accuse? He comes in our conscience. That’s the battleground now, where Satan accuses. He comes into your conscience and he accuses you and Satan presses you hard. And the question that you may find sometimes in your own mind is, does God accept me? Am I acceptable to God? And how can I be? Well, the good news is he defends you. Jesus speaks up for you to the Heavenly Father. He pleads for you with his blood that he shed for you, that you would be considered forgiven and holy and blameless in God’s sight. And God does accept you, for Jesus sake. And even more, He speaks this to you and He speaks this about you. But more importantly, I think for us, he speaks it to you in your conscience.

He says that you are his child. Don’t miss where he says this in the forgiveness of sins, that he speaks to you in multiple ways in the church service and in his word, he says, just as God, the Father said at Jesus baptism, You’re my Son. You’re my daughter. He says it to you. In you I’m well pleased. The heavenly council stands behind us. Against Satan. Fighting for you. This victory is yours in Jesus name.

Hebrews 9:14

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What is the conscience? The conscience you can think of as being like a referee. And you know how a referee calls things inbounds or out of bounds, or it can be like an umpire and you know that an umpire will call the pitch high or low or outside, but sometimes straight down the middle. The conscience is like that. It’s like a judge. It judges whether something is right or wrong. It judges what’s right or wrong in what we do so that we can think about it and say, was that right or was that wrong? And we might feel guilt or we might feel okay about what we did.

The conscience judges and what we see around us in what people are doing around us and the conscience also judges on what’s on the inside of us. Is that good? Is that bad? And so the conscience needs to be formed in the right way because we can be misled and we can start to think of what we already know as being right or wrong in a different way. And this simply underscores the importance of having a Christian home, having good Christian friends who won’t lead you astray in your thinking because that’s the safest place for the conscience. But most important for us is the role of God’s Word in forming our conscience. God’s Word in faithful law and gospel teaching will tell us what God says is right and wrong.

A rightly formed conscience, then, is sensitive so that when you do something wrong, when you have a sin, it should hurt a little like a pin pricking your skin when the conscience is working in the right way. So that we feel shame or we feel regret for something we’ve done and we don’t want people to know about that. This is how we can have a bad conscience or a guilty conscience, a troubled conscience. And the Bible has another term for it, and that is an unclean conscience. Hebrews nine, verse 14 speaks to this. It’s a great promise.

The blood of Christ will cleanse our conscience from dead works so that we serve God. (Hebrews 9:14)

And this is a great promise. And it’s good news for us because it tells us first that God wants you to have a clean conscience. He doesn’t want you to go along struggling with this guilty and troubled conscience, but he wants to do something about it. And so he sent his son, Jesus, to die on the cross, to take away your sins. First, to live a perfect life, to count for you and to win your salvation and your cleansing for your conscience by the blood that he shed.

And then Jesus comes to you. He comes to you in his word and in the sacraments of baptism in the Lord’s Supper. And do you know the reason he comes? It’s to cleanse you, to give you a clean conscience. Baptism washes away your sin. In the Lord’s Supper, we think of the forgiveness of sins that it brings. But also we can think of it in terms of cleansing. It cleanses you from the inside out, so it cleanses you not only from the sins that you’ve done, but also the effects of all the sins that have been done to you. In the Lord’s Supper he cleanses you so that you don’t have to struggle for your clean conscience. But God gives you a clean conscience.

And in fact, that’s what the church service is for. It’s for God to give you a clean conscience. Do you have a troubled conscience? Do you feel unclean, perhaps? Call your pastor. Find a church of our fellowship in the Evangelical Lutheran Synod. The pastors of our churches are there for one reason, really, and that is to deliver you the clean conscience that God wants to give you. They are there to care for the conscience because that’s what God wants for you.