UNBELIEF: by Martyn Lloyd Jones

2 Corinthians 4:3–4 And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.

Let us consider what our Lord has to say about the terrible condition of unbelief. The first thing He tells us is that it is a definite mentality, a definite spirit. Unbelief is not a negative but an active thing. Of course, our tendency is to think of unbelief as just a negative condition in which a man does not believe, but according to the Bible that is an utter fallacy. Unbelief is terribly positive and active, a state and condition of the soul, with a very definite mentality. The Bible, indeed, does not hesitate to put it essentially like this: “Unbelief is one of the manifestations of sin; it is one of the symptoms of that foul disease.” Or as the apostle Paul puts it in:

2 Corinthians 4:3–4 And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.

It is a terrible state and condition. Let me put it like this. It is not just a refusal to believe. That is how the devil foils us. He persuades modern unbelievers into thinking that they are unbelievers because of their great intelligence, their wonderful intellect and understanding. They think that people who are Christians are fools who have either not read or have not understood what they have read. The unbeliever thinks that he is in that state because of his scientific knowledge, and that it is in the light of these things that he refuses to believe. They rejoice in their great emancipation, that they have been delivered from the shackles of the Bible, and that they have been emancipated from this drug, this dope of the people that we call the Gospel. Poor things! They are unconscious slaves, and they do not know that they are victims.