“7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as He was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.
9 But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”
10 He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”
11 And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”
12 The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.” 13 Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
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“What if there was a place so safe that the worst of me could be known, and I would discover that I would not be loved less, but more in the telling of it?” That’s a question put forth by a 2016 book called The Cure. “What if there was a place so safe that the worst of me could be known, and I would discover that I would not be loved less, but more in the telling of it?”
Do you have a relationship that is so safe that the worst of you can be known, and you are loved not less, but more as you share it? Do you have a relationship with anyone within this church that is like that? If not, why not? Does this describe your relationship with God—“What if there was a place so safe that the worst of me could be known, and I would discover that I would not be loved less, but more in the telling of it”?
What if Adam and Eve saw God as that safe after they sinned? What if you saw God as that safe in your sin? That’s what we are going to consider this morning. We will see that grace invites you to expose your shame God. That’s the claim of this sermon: grace invites you to expose your shame to God.
We will study this in two points. First: hiding from God. Second: answering God. First, in verses 7-8 we see Adam and Eve hiding from God. In verses 9-13 we see them answering God.
First: hiding from God. Last week we studied what led to the shame of the fallen human condition. We studied the serpent’s craftiness. We studied the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We studied a bit of the shame of nakedness we see in Genesis 3, but now we give it our full attention; verse 7, “Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.”
Adam and Eve enjoyed shame about as much as you do. That’s why they desperately tried to cover it. Those fig leaves were an act of desperation. Fig trees produce the largest leaves of any tree in Palestine, so Adam and Eve probably chose those leaves because they provided the most coverage. Those coverings, however, were still pathetically insufficient. You see their inadequacy in the fact that those coverings are often translated as loincloths or aprons. How well would a loincloth or apron cover your nakedness?
You and I have our own ways of covering our shame. Maybe you physically hide in your room. Maybe you binge-watch Netflix to try to distract your mind from whatever shame is strangling you. Maybe you do your best to avoid doing anything at which might you fail in order to minimize your risk of shame. Maybe you avoid intimacy with people because that would entail you being known, and you fear that will bring even more shame. You’ve got your ways of hiding. I’ve got mine. Adam and Eve had theirs.
Adam and Eve tried to hide their shame, but this only revealed that they now felt shame about their nakedness. These coverings were reminders that they had lost their innocence. As psychologist Curt Thompson puts it, “this dance between hiding and feeling shame itself becomes a tightening of the noose. We feel shame, and then feel shame for feeling shame. It begets itself.” Think about your own life story. It’s all written in these pages.
Rather than going to God with their shame, Adam and Eve tried to hide it from themselves. We still do that. That’s why John felt compelled to tell the churches, “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.”
By trying to cover over their shame under their own power, Adam and Eve demonstrated that they didn’t understand its depths. They felt its weight and so tried to alleviate its effects, but a fig-leaf loincloth wasn’t enough—just like addictions aren’t enough today; just like trying to cover your shame with your own righteousness isn’t enough today. Your problem, just like Adam and Eve’s, runs far deeper than your own solutions, and yet you and I—like Adam and Eve—are so quick to try our own solutions. As Victor Hamilton put it, “rather than driving them back to God, their guilt leads them into a self-atoning, self-protecting procedure; they must cover themselves.”
How do self-atone? How do you self-protect? How do you try to cover your shame? Please know that your attempts are only fig leaves that will not stand up. Adam and Eve’s fig leaves didn’t stand up. That’s why they hid when they heard God. As Calvin put it, “As soon as the voice of God sounds, Adam and Eve perceive that the leaves by which they thought themselves well protected are of no avail.” We see that in verse 8, “then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as He was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.”
Satan had avoided using the personal name of God with Eve because he wanted her to think of God as remote. Now we see His personal name return—“the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God.” We are no longer merely talking about God; now we are dealing with God, which means that matters are about to get quite real.
Adam and Eve heard sound of the Lord and they hid. What did they hear? We tend to think they heard footsteps; we take that from the words of the song In the Garden, “I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses, and the voice I hear falling on my ear, the Son of God discloses. And He walks with me, and He talks with me.” That’s the common understanding, and it might be the case, but it seems more likely that something else entirely is going on here. This phrase “cool of the day” can also be translated as “wind of the storm.”
The appearance of God was often accompanied by a storm. You see that in Psalm 77:18, “Your thunder was heard in the whirlwind; Your lightning lit up the world; the earth trembled and quaked.” You see that when the Lord finally spoke to Job, “Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the storm.” Now both of those are outside the Pentateuch and remember when you read Genesis you need to be thinking about the rest of the Pentateuch—Genesis through Deuteronomy.
Can anyone think of a place in the Pentateuch—and I’ll give you a hint; it is in Exodus—when God spoke to His people in the midst of a storm? There was lightning. There was thunder. God spoke. The people were terrified. Can anyone name the mountain where this happened—‘When the people saw the thunder and lightning and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled with fear. They stayed at a distance and said to Moses, “Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die.”’ Sinai.
It’s likely that Moses was thinking about Sinai when he wrote about Adam and Eve hiding from God, and so we can translate verse 8 as, “the man and his wife heard the thunder of Lord God as He was going back and forth in the garden in the wind of the storm.” The people were terrified at Sinai. Adam and Eve were terrified in Eden. They were terrified for the same reason: the dread of God had fallen upon them because they were sinners, and He was holy.
Now we will see that God did not come in order to intimidate Adam Eve, but that is simply the fallen human response to God. As CS Lewis put it in one of his books, “the divine nature wounds and perhaps destroys us by simply being what it is.” Adam and Eve feared God and yet they needed God. They needed to run into the storm that terrified them. That’s the human condition.
That’s also what makes church terrifying. We deal with a holy God and we deal with Him as sinners. We are in the business of progressively opening ourselves up more and more to the One who’s rejection we fear the most. We can avoid all of that, sweep sin under the rug, turn grace into a way of avoiding repentance and transformation, and live by each other’s meaningless approval and affirmation rather than in the presence of God; all that is just another way of hiding from God, and church can all to easily become that. That’s just one of the ways it become intolerably boring. Hiding from God didn’t go well for Adam and Eve and it won’t go well for us.
God called Adam and Eve out of their hiding. We see that in our second point: answering God. We see the gentleness of God even in the midst of the storm; verse 9, ‘But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?” Now God knew they were hiding, but to ask them, “why are you hiding,” would needlessly increase their shame. He wanted to them to expose their own shame and so He asked, “Where are you?”
We could learn a lot from Him here, as, of course, we could learn a lot from Him everywhere and anywhere. He didn’t come charging in with accusations even though He knew the entire truth. We tend to do that even though we only know the partial truth. He didn’t start with statements. He started with questions. Isn’t that how you want to be treated? We humans are so strange. We fear God even though He is exactly what we want and need.
Adam’s answer to God’s question was a mixture of nonsense and unintentional truth; verse 10, ‘He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”’
This was no confession. Adam didn’t say, “God, I sinned. You told me not to eat from that tree and I did. I was hiding from you because I was afraid of what You would do to me. I was afraid of losing Your love. I am still afraid of losing Your love.” He said he hid because he heard God—as if everything was completely fine until God showed up. He said he was afraid because he felt exposed by the presence of God as if God was intruding. That’s what’s going on with, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”’ This was another way of saying, “God you made me feel uncomfortable,” which we all say in a thousand different ways with our own nonsense.
Adam’s words were nonsense, and as I said, they were also full of unintentional truth. Adam told God that he was now afraid of the presence of God. No innocent person is afraid of the presence of God. Jesus never was. Adam told God that he knew he was naked—not the innocent naked of 2:25, “Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame”, but the guilty naked of 3:7, “the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked.” We sinners reveal far more than we intend. That’s the case with guilty children before their parents. That’s the case with the proud and arrogant in our cultures today, and that’s the case with each of us before God. When we try to hide our shame, we expose ourselves.
Now again, God knew what happened, but he asked more questions to give Adam an opportunity to confess; verse 11, ‘and He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”
The nakedness God had in mind was not the nudity of 2:25, “Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame”, but the nudity of 3:7, “the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked.” God wasn’t asking Adam who told him that he wasn’t wearing any clothes. He was asking Adam who introduced this shame. He was giving Adam a chance to explain himself. He made it even easier by bringing up the tree, “Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” These questions invited confession and healing. As Curt Thompson put it, “Those parts of us that feel most broken and that we keep most hidden are the parts that most desperately need to be known by God, so as to be loved and healed…God came to find Eve and Adam to provide them the opportunity to be known as he knows anything else. For only in those instances when our shamed parts are known do they stand a chance to be redeemed.”
God asked Adam questions to open the man up. Adam shot God down; verse 12, ‘The man said, “The woman You put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”’ Adam blamed Eve. Before he sinned, Adam saw Eve as his greatest earthly blessing. He sang, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” They were one. Now he pushed her away to try to lessen his shame. This was not and is not the route to healing.
Adam not only blamed Eve, but he also blamed God. He called Eve, “The woman You put here with me.” Note the irony here because you, like me, live it in a hundred different ways every month. Adam was attacking the God who had only helped him. We do that. The only alternative is to pray with the Puritans, “God, Your providence has set the bounds of my habitation, and wisely administers all my affairs.” Remember, Adam and Eve ate from that tree because they didn’t think that God was wisely administering all their affairs. Do you trust that God is wisely administering your affairs? If not, you are primed for something like what you are reading about here.
Talking to Adam didn’t bring confession, and so God spoke to Eve; verse 13, ‘Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
God’s tone with Eve was a bit different. It displays more shock than anything else—“What is this you have done?” God wanted Eve to own the gravity of her sin and to own the gravity of the fact that she had chosen to commit it. Ten thousand friendship, marriage, family, and church conversations would go far better if we all owned the gravity of our sin and the gravity of the fact that we chose to commit these sins. So many of our relationships are muddled because one party, or all parties, won’t. Eve didn’t. She responded saying, “the serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
Is what Eve said true—did the serpent deceive her? Yes. Did she eat? Yes. So, “the serpent deceived me, and I ate,” is, in one way, true. Now is that owning the gravity of her sin? Not at all. Is that owning the gravity of the fact that she chose to sin? Not at all. So Eve told God the truth without telling him the truth. That’s the power of shame. You start to tell half-truths; in other words, your own voice starts to sound like that of the serpent.
So what’s the path forward here? Adam won’t expose his shame. Eve won’t expose her shame. They continue to hide from God, who, and I hope you will agree with this, has been remarkably patient and gentle. What is the path forward?
What if God came again not in a storm but as a baby? What if He became just like Adam and Eve? What if He became just like us? “For he is our childhood's pattern; day by day, like us he grew; he was little, weak and helpless, tears and smiles like us he knew; and he feels for our sadness, and he shares in our gladness.” What if he took our shame on himself? It’s no mistake that Jesus died naked.
“What if there was a place so safe that the worst of me could be known, and I would discover that I would not be loved less, but more in the telling of it?” That’s the cross. That’s Jesus. That’s the same God we see here in the garden. It’s the same God as the gospels. He calls to the shamed. He calls to you. Amen.