Have ever had a moment when you realized you arrived to the wrong conclusion. Maybe concerning your child or a friend. This is where we find Herod the tetrarch when he hears about the works of Jesus.
The difference between a conclusion and an assumption is the work in the middle. A conclusion has a process that allows us to take in data, weigh it against truth and experience to bring us to a stated outcome. An assumption usually has minimal to no work to back up a chosen “conclusion” or outcome.
Herod had heard of the miraculous works of Jesus, but jumped to the assumption that John the Baptist, who he had beheaded, had risen from the dead and this is how he defined Jesus. But Herod was assuming this and didn’t do the work to see who Jesus really is.
Matthew 14:1-12
In verse 9 we see that Herod was sorry for the position he was in, having to commit John the baptist to being beheaded. Clearly Herod had a lingering conscience that he never worked on, but continued to live a self-centered life. Because he skipped the work he could not conclude the meanings of the actions of Jesus. This caused him to covered up the Jesus with a false assumption.
The term conscience is used only 29 times in scripture, one time in the Old Testament, in 1 Samuel 24:5 and twenty eight times in the New Testament, mainly all them from Paul, who had good reason to have a heavy conscience. But despite Paul’s life of killing followers of Jesus, he becomes quite the encourager of living a life with faith and a good conscience (1 Timothy 1:19).
Paul goes so far to say that “I have lived my life before God in all good conscience up to this day” (Acts 23:1). He can say this because he did the work to find out and believed that “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” (2 Corinthians 5:17).
Pray for the work that you need to do, in order to come to clear and truthful conclusions that allows you to identify Jesus in your life as well as leading your life.