Conscience should not be coerced

As you’re reading your Bible, note the instances in which people try to coerce, bribe, or threaten others into complying with their will. I think you’ll see a pattern emerge rather quickly.

First, the ones employing coercive means are the bad guys. Forcing people to comply with your will if you can is the work of a dastardly villain. This is true even if the villain has convinced himself that his own will is the best course for everybody. You might find the odd instance where an otherwise good guy resorts to these tactics, but they represent the good guy slipping up and doing bad things.

Second, coercing people to act contrary to their own desires, conscience, or best interest through bribery and threatening goes one way. It’s the powerful doing it to the powerless. And, for those new to the Bible, God takes a pretty strong stance on the side of the weaker folks in this kind of scenario.

Third, when these things happen, when bad guys get their way by blatantly coercive tactics, no one is ever shocked about it. It’s apparently normal. It’s the course of the fallen world, from Genesis onward. Sure, all the prophets complain about it, especially Amos, if you’re up for a short read on the topic. But nobody really does anything effective to reverse or counter this worldwide trend. Nobody, that is, until we come to the blank fly-leaf in the book that announces the beginning of the New Testament.

Fourth, the long-awaited Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, comes along and it seems like the expectation is that he’s going to turn things around by a righteous use of the tactics everyone is used to, like violence and compelled obedience, or promises of bribes and positions of power. However, to the dismay of some guys who enjoyed listening to him, that wasn’t his strategy. Instead, he taught people patiently.

Words of life and grace spilled from his lips, creating streams in the desert. He went around doing good and healing all those who were oppressed by the devil. Rather than compel folks to follow him, he warned them to take a moment of sober reflection to count the cost of what it would really mean for them to be his disciples.

Fifth, this Jesus-pattern of counter-culture leadership, where all coercive means are outlawed, continues on after his resurrection and ascension, in the rest of the New Testament record. The apostles spend whole chapters instructing Christians on the importance of respecting individual conscience, rather than simply demand that they do what they’re told. People are urged to act because they are fully convinced in their own minds, not because a powerful man ordered them to. And, within the church, there are no such powerful ones, whose job is to compel conformity.

Since this is such a radical program, so unlike what the world has historically done, there are some tough questions to answer, like how the legal system could function as a reaction against illegal, coercive force, and not as a proactive purveyor of it. (Businesses can become agents of coercion as well.)

But, hopefully this gives you a sense of how upside-down the message of Christ should turn the world.

Gordan Runyan is the pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church in Tucumcari. Contact him at:

[email protected]