Naked and Ashamed

Genesis 3:6-13

^6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. ^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.”

This thrill ride is called the “Demon Drop.” It rises to 130 feet, dangles you in mid-air for a long second and then drops you 100 feet in a weightless fall. My sister’s family and our family went to Cedar Point in Ohio and this is one of the rides a few of us dared to attempt. After the ride was done and I walked away I noticed that my cell phone was missing. Ryan and I walked back and made a desperate attempt to look for the phone. I filled out a police report with the park and went home thinking I would never see the cell phone again. What are the chances that it would survive that frightful drop, or if it did survive not being smashed into a thousand pieces, what are the chances that one of the tens of thousands of park visitors would turn it in to the police? On Monday, I opened the mail and there it was, in full working condition. Since the ride is called Demon Drop, I consider this to be a valiant victory over Satan!

My experience, though remarkable, is hardly an example of genuine spiritual warfare. On average, Christians are not very effective at spiritual warfare, but why do we even need to be on guard against this terrible enemy? Because our first ancestors succumbed to Satan’s strategy and made an active choice to walk away from God. The last several weeks we have been examining Satan’s strategy and this week we will look at man’s response.

Genesis three presents a classic response to sin that we still repeat on a daily basis.

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Temptation—Desire—Disobedience—Deception. This is the same pattern seen in the sin of Achan in Joshua 7. When Israel entered the Promised Land, they we forbidden from taking any plunder from their enemies. Achan disobeyed this command and was discovered by lot. Achan replied, “It is true! I have sinned against the Lord, the God of Israel. This is what I have done: When I saw in the plunder a beautiful robe from Babylonia, two hundred shekels of silver and a wedge of gold weighing fifty shekels I coveted them and took them. They are hidden in the ground inside my tent, with the silver underneath.” (Joshua 7:20-21)

Added to these four responses, in chapter three we also see deflection and self-atonement. Let’s look at each of these responses.

TEMPTATION

Where did the sin first begin?[i] Much of time temptation cannot be avoided. Adam and Eve were minding their own business when the serpent invaded their home. They could not help having an encounter with him. Like Adam and Eve, temptation can come upon us at the drop of a hat. But there are two things we can to help ourselves. First, we can avoid places and situations that we know will tempt us. If you are tempted to drink, don’t enter a bar. If you are tempted to lust, avoid the beach. If you are tempted to shop, stay away from the malls. If you are tempted by pornography, shut off your computer or get an internet filter.

Ex. Kathy and donuts à

Regarding temptation, Martin Luther famously said, “You cannot help it if a bird flies you’re your head, but you can prevent it from making a nest in your hair.” Adam and Eve knew that the fruit was in the garden. They knew that it was forbidden. In this sense, seeing the fruit was inevitable, but the problem was that Eve stood there and allowed herself to be drawn in by Satan’s ploys.

Do you remember what Jesus did before he drove out the money changers from the Temple? He sat down and weaved a whip out of cords. How long did that take him—ten, twenty, thirty minutes or more? Now imagine if a dove seller saw Jesus and asked him what he was doing? Jesus would have replied, “I am carefully making a whip of cords. If you can wait around another ten minutes, I am going to whip you with this and drive you out of the temple. If we take that idea and apply it to Satan, Adam and Eve stood before Satan watching him weave a rope and tie into a hangman’s noose. If they had asked Satan what he was doing, he would have said, I am making a rope and then I plan to hang you by the neck from the fruit tree here. Eve, I’ll hang you first and Adam can have his turn.” When we allow the proverbial bird to make a nest in our hair, we are aiding and abetting the enemy. We might as well save time and give Satan the rope. We might as well load a gun and hand it to him. We may as well grab a shovel and dig our own graves. Do you see, we are doing Satan’s work for him?

DESIRE

Temptation is not like the slow fermentation of grape juice into wine, but instead it is more like adding magnesium and water—the result is an instantaneous, explosive reaction called desire. Verse six reads, When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.

The two words that are translated as “pleasing” and desirable” are from the root word meaning “to covet.” In other words, verse six is full-blown coveting. Now here is where we must be careful to understand precisely what Eve desired for herself. When the serpent claimed that they would become like God, that was one of his half-truths. They did become like God, for God himself said so in verse 22, And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. We have to understand what it means that Adam and Eve came to possess the knowledge of good and evil. This is no mere academic or theological exercise, because what happened to them has also happened to us. Whatever the knowledge of good and evil is, it is at the heart of sin and of being a sinner.

First, let’s rule out a few options. It obviously does not mean knowledge of all things as in being omniscient. Nor was it simply a matter of moral discernment. Before they ate the forbidden fruit, do you think Adam and Eve knew the difference between good and evil? We could argue that they didn’t know it in the same way as they did after they ate the fruit because they had never experienced evil, but clearly they possessed moral discernment. If they could not have discerned between good and evil, right and wrong, then God’s command not to eat from this tree would have been nonsensical to them. How could they have been expected to obey the command if they didn’t know the difference between good and evil? Also, if they didn’t know the difference, then God could not have held them accountable for their sinful choice. If they had been incapable of choosing correctly then they would have not been accountable for their choice.

The knowledge of good and evil was the knowledge that they could make their own rules. They had become self-autonomous. They were now morally autonomous individuals. Before, they had been 100% subservient to God. God had been the perfect Creator and everything he said was right and good. Their lives were lived in complete conformity to the will of God, something that we can only dream about one day experiencing. Before they ate they possessed moral discernment. They knew good and evil, right and wrong. They had a choice either to choose good or to choose evil. After they ate they possessed the “curse” of moral autonomy, that is, they now possessed the knowledge not just to know good and evil, but to determine what is right and wrong. Truth would no longer be sole domain of God. Now the creature would have an equal say in “good and evil” along with the Creator. Do you see, it’s not just choosing to disobey God but it’s choosing to change the rules about how the game is played. If I am playing baseball and three strikes is going to call me out at the plate, there is nothing I can do about it, but if have the power to determine that it takes six strikes to be called out, then I have become master of my own world.

This makes sense when you consider Satan’s strategy aimed at the first family.

·         Doubted God’s Word

·         Questioned God’s character

·         Usurped God’s authority

·         Attacked God’s moral standards

The overall thrust of this strategy was not just to disobey God but to replace God. The temptation was to be like God in the sense of determining good and evil, making your own rules. Adam and Eve “dethroned” God—they effectively removed him from his lofty throne and threw his commands into the sea of opinions. He may have been their Creator but he was no longer their King.

This was a violation of the First Commandment: You shall have no other gods before me.

They had dethroned God and placed themselves on the throne. Only God can make his own rules and they wanted the opportunity to do so.

It was a violation of the Second Commandment: You shall not make for yourself an idol.

If the first commandment falls then the second is always close behind. The object of their worship was no longer God. In fact, they hid from God.

It was a violation of the tenth Commandment: You shall not covet.

We usually think of coveting as wanting something that we do not have. If I am a tech geek, then I might covet the latest and greatest computer. A friend showed me his little tiny laptop he had bought recently and a USB drive that was a wireless internet device. I thought to myself, “Wow, that is sweet.” A statement like that is usually one-half complement, one-half coveting. Some people covet cars. Some people covet tractors and tools. Others covet clothes and decorations for their home. Still others covet cell phones and video games. All of these are examples of coveting, but if you dig a little deeper you realize that coveting is not wanting something more than you have but it is dethroning God. In order to break the tenth commandment you first have to break the first and second commandments.

Think for a moment what we do with our coveting, how do we resolve it? We usually have one of two responses. The first response is to decide not to buy the item we are coveting or not to have an affair with the man or woman we are coveting. Since we chose not to acquire said item or said person, we feel justified and free from sin. If I was tempted to buy something but did not, that is a victory, right? No, it probably is not, because you probably spent a great deal of time coveting. We have to remember how quickly temptation turns into desire. If the bird sits on your head for more than a moment or two, it will begin to build a nest. Temptation that lingers almost instantaneously becomes desire.

The second response is to purchase the item we had been coveting or have the affair with the man or woman we had been coveting. This moves us into the realm of disobedience, but in order to do this, we have to change the rules. Most of us cannot live with the fact that we are breaking an absolute standard. We cannot handle the shame that comes with knowingly breaking God’s law, so in order to deal with the accompanying guilt, we have to change the rules. Adam and Eve did not reject this one small command given by God, they rejected God’s right to make the rules. If we repeatedly and knowingly break God’s laws, every instance of disobedience requires a great deal of justification and squirming around the rules. But if we can change the rules by which the game is played, we don’t have to fight with every single one of God’s laws—we can simply reject his right to make the laws. When this happens, obtaining the thing that we had coveted suddenly becomes acceptable in our eyes. If you knowingly break a rule, you will naturally feel guilty, but if we can change the rules we believe that the guilt will not haunt us or hunt us down.

How did this strategy work out for Adam and Eve? Verse seven gives the result. 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. The guilt from which they had tried to escape was still firmly shackled to their leg. They instantly went from naked and unashamed to naked and ashamed. Why did that happen? Adam and Eve changed the rules, did they not? Shouldn’t God’s guilt have disappeared when they did away with hi rules? That’s just it, isn’t it? They didn’t actually change the rules they just thought they were changing the rules. You cannot change absolute truth. You can enter an alternate reality where you think that truth is malleable and flexible, but it really isn’t.

How did they respond to this unavoidable guilt? They made coverings for themselves. It would be a mistake to think they were only covering their nakedness. They were covering their shame and their guilt. They were attempting to cover their sin, what the Bible calls atonement. God’s laws are unavoidable and God’s guilt is unbearable to everyone tries to undo it. We all have a mental picture of Adam & Eve wearing a small covering of fig leaves, whether it’s a cartoonish picture or a renaissance painting. Any way you picture it, it is really rather silly. We cannot cover our guilt. We cannot atone for our sin. What are the “fig leaves” that the world uses to cover their sins? Drugs and alcohol. Pornography. Addictions. Success. Self-loathing. Moving from one relationship to another. There are endless ways to escape the pain of the guilt of sin. Many times we say that unbelievers do these things in order to fill the void in their lives. I have no doubt that they have an enormous, God-shaped hole in their lives, but they aren’t merely trying to fill up a hole, they are trying to block the floodwaters of guilt.

We all remember the pictures from recent floods where communities would gather together in sand brigades to build walls to keep out the rising flood waters. Often these sandbags were successful, but sometimes the flood waters flowed faster than the sand bags could be filled. This is a good picture of the futility of self-atonement—trying to cover up the pain of guilt. No matter how hard a person tries, the flood of guilt simply rises faster than their sinful coping mechanisms can build a wall.

Self-atonement is futile. What was needed was a blood atonement. First were the animals killed to cover Adam and Eve, but this was only temporary. From eternity past God ordained that his one and only Son would be sacrificed in order to atone for our sins. If you have been covered by the blood of Jesus you are safe, but without his blood you are lost in the futility of atoning for your own sins.

Rich Maurer

August 9, 2008