The folly of humanity — Martyn Lloyd-Jones

"The Bible has many ways of defining sin. It says that sin is missing the mark. It is like a man aiming at a target and missing it. It also says that sin is a transgression and that it is disobedience. But the ultimate fact about sinners, the men and women who disobey God, is that they are fools. “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God” (Ps. 14:1). Our Lord told a parable about a rich fool. The man, who was a farmer, was congratulating himself. His harvest was so great that his barns had become too small, and he was planning to pull them down and build larger ones. He was pleased with himself, and he said, “Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.” But that night God spoke to him and said, “Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?” (Luke 12:16–20). The fool! And this is the most common charge that is brought in the Bible against men and women in sin and in rebellion against God…

In Romans 1:22 Paul makes the most devastating statement that has ever been made about the human race, and it has never been seen more clearly than at this moment: “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.” If that is not the most perfect description that you have ever heard of men and women in this modern day, then you know very little about life.

“Professing themselves to be wise”—in what sense? In their self-confidence. The self-confidence of men and women is endless. They think there is nothing they cannot do. After all, they have split the atom, they have beaten the law of gravity, they sent men into space … can anything stand before them? They think they are the center of the universe. The greatest thing in the universe is the human brain. There seems to be no limit to its capacity, and the first claim men put forward is that they can make God. But there is nothing new about modern man—his forefathers did exactly the same thing. At the foot of Mount Sinai, they turned to Aaron and said, “Make us gods to go before us…”…

But, second, let me prove to you that men and women are fools. The Bible does not stop at assertions—it goes on to give us demonstrations. I know of nothing more devastating—in a kind of literary sense—than the way in which Stephen did it here…

If you are in any doubt about this, let me demonstrate to you the folly of human beings, let me prove it beyond the possibility of contradiction. First, men and women show that they are fools when you look at what they produce in contradistinction to what they reject. Stephen brought that out at this point by quoting from the thirty-second chapter of the book of Exodus. The children of Israel had rejected, and they had made. What had they rejected? God! What had they made? A calf! Could anything be plainer? They rejected God: “To whom our fathers would not obey, but thrust him from them, and in their hearts turned back again into Egypt, saying unto Aaron, Make us gods to go before us: for as for this Moses, which brought us out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him. And they made”—they were going to make a god; they were rejecting the true God—“a calf in those days, and offered sacrifice unto the idol.”
What else needs to be said! That is humanity at this very moment. In the second half of the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, the apostle Paul says:

  "Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things."
—Rom. 1:19–23

That is what people did, and that is what they are still doing. They reject God—God the Creator, God the sustainer of the whole universe, God the orderer of all things, the God of providence, the God of history, the holy God, the glorious God. I will tell you about the God whom the children of Israel had rejected. He gave a description of Himself to Moses soon after the incident of the golden calf:

  "And the LORD descended in the cloud, and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the LORD. And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation."
—Exod. 34:5–7

That is God! The everlasting and eternal God!…

Paul wrote to Timothy, “[God] only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto” (1 Tim. 6:16). No man has seen God or ever can see the everlasting God, the God of glory, who is beyond description. And yet He is a God to whom we can pray, a God who is ready to listen to us. He is the living God, the powerful God, the acting God.

      "God in three persons, blessed Trinity."
             Reginald Heber

That is the God from whom people turn away.

And what do people turn to? What do they make? A calf! Have you noticed, they always do something like this. Of course, they make it of gold, and this is where they show their folly still further. They think that making a calf of gold will be different from making a calf of wood. They do not see that in all cases it is still a calf. But because it is gold, it looks marvelous and is costly, and they think, “This is it—a calf made of gold!” And they bow down before it. And as Paul says in Romans 1, it does not stop with calves—they make “creeping things” (v. 23) and so on.

The people of this country [England], over 90 percent of them, are much too intelligent, they tell us, to believe in God any longer. What do they believe in? They believe in the British lion! He has recently had his tail twisted a bit, has he not? A lion. It is always an animal. The Russian bear! The German eagle! It is always the same. How we give ourselves away! What utter fools we are. We do not believe in God, but we believe in our country. Many people worship their country. Nationalism is ultimately worship of country, worshiping the blood that is in you, worshiping yourself writ large.

Then look at the worship of money! Oh, we are much too intelligent to believe in God, so we go in for sports pools to win money. Or perhaps our god is food, drink, travel, or pleasure. People say, “We can’t possibly believe in God,” but they literally worship money. I have known people who have worshiped houses—there is no question about it—and cars. I have known many people who have worshiped their own children. They have sacrificed God without a moment’s thought for the sake of their children. They will discourage their children from being religious so that they might get on in the world. In all this, as Paul reminds us, man has been worshiping himself. Not only “four-footed beasts, and creeping things” (Rom. 1:23) but man himself. Great man! Scientific man! Man come of age. What is man but a fool! He turns from God and worships a beast."

— Martyn Lloyd-Jones, M. (2006). Triumphant Christianity. Studies in the Book of Acts (Vol. 5). The folly of humanity.