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The final step in considering the use and presentation of a religious exemption in the face of mandates is the sanctity of the conscience. The conscience is that inner voice or guide you at times “hear” telling you the rightness or wrongness of a decision or action. It is at times illustrated as the picture of the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other shoulder. Your conscience resides in your spirit (note the uncapitalized “s”), which is the place where God’s Spirit communes and resides in you (Romans 8:16). So, when a person says, “Let your conscience be your guide”, that can be good advice IF His Spirit resides in your spirit. (If your conscience is broken, defiled, or weak, then we have problems.)

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I wasn’t long after my decision to receive and follow Christ that I was confronted with the reality that people really will attempt to control what you ingest into your body. The story begins staying after work one late afternoon to work on my car. The owner of the company to which I was employed, was gracious to allow me to stay and use their tools to finish installing a radio. The business shared a parking lot with a fence company which would work later into the day. It was on this particular Friday, that the employees of the fence company came speeding into the parking lot in the back of a large truck shouting and laughing as they had obviously stopped by the bar to down a few (or more) beers before calling it a day. They were obviously drunk and generally happy. So happy, that one of the fence company employees made his way across the parking lot to invite me to their celebration. I politely declined, as the Holy Spirit had been dealing with me about my former life’s destructive habits, which included drinking.

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I have suggested that Daniel 1:3-20, might be a good template for requesting an exemption to a state mandate. There can be no question that the mandate Nebuchadnezzar (The State) wanted to enforce upon the three Hebrew boys is eerily analogous to many of the state mandates we are facing today. To suggest that the king’s order to Daniel and his friends was simply a “request” is to minimize the fear Nebuchadnezzar’s servants experienced when the boys were refusing the mandate. To say, “No”, to a king is not without lethal repercussions.

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To many people’s surprise, the Bible touches and sometimes addresses explicitly every arena of life. The Bible is God’s handbook for a successful life (as God defines success). Whether it be for an individual or a nation, the Scriptures are the final authority in the believer’s life. So, we should not marvel that the Lord does have something to say about the State mandating things to be ingested into one’s body. One of the best examples of this is found in Daniel 1: 3-20,

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