Weekly Dose Of Lloyd-Jones (Man's Sinful Condition)

There is a tendency to regard man’s essential trouble as being a sickness. I do not mean physical sickness only. That comes in; but I mean a kind of mental and moral and spiritual sickness. It is not that; that is not man’s real need, not his real trouble! I would say the same about his misery and his unhappiness, and also about his being a victim of circumstances.

These are the things that are given prominence today. There are so many people trying to diagnose the human situation; and they come to the conclusion that man is sick, man is unhappy, man is the victim of circumstances. They believe therefore that his primary need is to have these things dealt with, that he must be delivered from them. But I suggest that that is too superficial a diagnosis of the condition of man, and that man’s real trouble is that he is a rebel against God and consequently under the wrath of God.

Now this is the biblical statement concerning him, this is the biblical view of man as he is by nature. He is ‘dead in trespasses and sins’, that means, spiritually dead. He is dead to the life of God, to the spiritual realm and to all the beneficent influences of that realm upon him. We are also told that he is ‘blind’. ‘If our gospel be hid,’ says Paul in 2 Corinthians 4: 3– 4, ‘it is hid to them that are lost: In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not’. Or as Paul puts it again in Ephesians 4: 17ff., man’s trouble is that ‘his understanding is darkened, because he is alienated from the life of God through the sin that is in him.’ Another very common biblical term to describe this condition of man is the term ‘darkness’. You have it in John 3: 19: ‘This is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, but men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.’ And in the First Epistle of John you find the same idea worked out. Writing to Christians he says that ‘the darkness is past and the true light now shineth.’ The Apostle Paul uses the same idea exactly in Ephesians 5. He says, ‘Ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord.’ These are the terms that express the biblical diagnosis of man’s essential trouble. In other words we can sum it up in one word by saying that it is ignorance. All the terms such as ‘blindness’ and ‘darkness’ are indicative of ignorance. And according to this biblical view of man all these other things, such as unhappiness and misery, even physical illness, and all the other things which torment and trouble us so much are the results and the consequences of original sin and the Fall of Adam. They are not the main problem, they are consequences, or symptoms if you like, and manifestations of this primary, this ultimate disease.*

*Lloyd-Jones, D. Martyn (2012-01-17). Preaching and Preachers (Kindle Locations 496-517). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.