The Affliction of Conscience in the Unbeliever

The Apostle Paul tells us in Romans 2:15, "They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them." He is talking about Gentiles (verse 14), who have not had the advantage that Jews had in having a written copy of the Law. The Gentiles were not then freed to live as they wished, as if they were autonomous while Israel was subject to the rule of God. The Gentile, or the unbeliever today, has the moral law recorded in his heart, which is the basis for conscience. This is an aspect of what Paul had told us in the previous chapter that all men have a knowledge of God and our accountability to Him. That awareness in the unbeliever afflicts his conscience with guilt and the knowledge that he deserves judgment. 

Then one of two reactions occurs. 

In Romans 1, Paul tells us of the first, the hardened unbeliever, who finds some means to suppress his conscience, so that he can continue in his sin. The other is the person who is driven by his conscience to find absolution in the only place that it can be found, by grace alone through faith alone in the shed blood of Jesus alone. "Thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life" (II Corinthians 2:14-16).

"This obligation to punishment, this righteousness of condemnation, must cease to press, or the need which guilt creates cannot be relieved. The sinner feels, in other words, that the justice which calls for his blood must be satisfied, or that blood be yielded to its demand. It is, accordingly, the glory of the Gospel that the blood of Christ who, through the eternal Spirit, offered Himself without spot to God, purges the conscience, dispels all its distracting fears, and imparts peace and serenity where despair and guilt had held their troubled reign" (James Henley Thornwell, "The Necessity and Nature of Christianity," emphasis in the original).