I am reading through Bridges’ verse-by-verse commentary on Psalm 119, a verse a day. It is a good way to start the day. His comments are thought-provoking, warm and edifying. His comment on verse 66 is surpassingly good – and twice as long as most of the others. The verse reads, ‘Teach me good judgment and knowledge; for I have believed thy commandments.’ (He uses the KJV.)
Bridges’ concern here is the conscience. We don’t spend enough time in the West these days thinking or talking about the conscience. The Bible has a great deal to say on the topic, but we are largely ignorant of the function of the conscience and how Scripture would have us deal with it.
Bridges identifies two problems which believers often face in relation to the conscience. In both, the believer becomes full of a sense of guilt and does not enjoy the peace and delight that a believer should enjoy in Christ.
The first is a ‘scrupulous conscience’, by which he means a conscience which is wrongly concerned about little things. Bridges is not suggesting that little sins don’t matter. He is concerned about our tendency to make wrong judgments about the situations we face. In deciding on the right path to choose, we often trust too much in how we feel; we give more weight to factors that press themselves upon us immediately rather than those that are more remote but may in fact be more important; we confuse non-essentials with fundamentals, ‘things indifferent with things unlawful’; we become morbidly fascinated with the wrong issues. These are all signs of a scrupulous conscience. Bridges says that its influence ‘is strenuously to be resisted’.
The problem is made worse by the fact that it is sinful to go against conscience. So, argues Bridges, if your conscience is making bad decisions about what is right and wrong for you, you are in a doubly bind: you think that what is right is actually sinful, but because of that, to do what is right is in fact sinful, because we must never act against conscience: ‘The dictates of conscience, even when grounded upon misconception, are authoritative.’ (Bridges here cites Rom. 14:14.)
Bridges suggests various causes of a scrupulous conscience: it may be traced, he says, ‘to a diseased temperament of body, to a naturally weak or perverted understanding, to the unfavourable influence of early prejudice – to a want of simple exercise of faith, or perception of the matters of faith’. What is needed in such cases is an ‘enlightened conscience’ – to inform our consciences from God’s Word and so supply them with more light and understanding. Hence the prayer of verse 66, ‘Teach me good judgment and knowledge.’
The same remedy is required for the second type of diseased conscience with which Bridges deals, the ‘imperfectly enlightened conscience’. This will make us feel guilty when the real cause is ‘those incessant variations of feelings, which originate in bodily indisposition, or accidental influence of temptation’. We make judgments based on only a part of the situation; or we apply a wrong remedy – ‘the exercise of contrition, faith, love, and watchfulness, is passed by unnoticed’. Again, what is needed is ‘good judgment and knowledge’ – more light from God’s word, to inform and instruct the conscience more accurately and correctly.
Bridges here deals with a vital question of Christian living which we, in the 21st century West, horribly neglect. We have so little concern for doing what is right in God’s sight and living a godly and holy life that our consciences rarely trouble us. Yet when they do, we often draw the wrong conclusions, because of our ignorance of the teachings of God’s Word in this area. How we need to rediscover a true, biblical fear of the Lord, which causes us to tremble at God’s Word and be far more careful about how we live, speak and act and the motives and desires that drive us to live as we do. So, as Bridges says in closing, ‘we need to cry for these valuable blessings with deeper earnestness, and more diligent and patient waiting upon God’.
Through the wilds of the desert 