Clough Genesis Lesson 15

God deals with nakedness, blame-shifting, & the serpent – Genesis 3:8-15

We have so far studied Genesis 1 down through the first part of Genesis 3:8 and we’ve dealt with the origin of evil in the world. The plan of salvation can never be understood unless evil is understood. And so we have to go back and understand the origin of evil and the different stages in the origin of evil. What you have in Genesis 3 in the first 8 verses is a very, very simple picture of a very complex thing, and that is the first sin, or the prototype sin. And as we look at this it’s so simple that a child can understand the story, but nevertheless, it has ten different stages in it. These stages we explained last time as consisting of stage one, the fact that sin, all sin, presupposes that the Word of God exists before the sin because again, you cannot have sin where there is no Scripture because by definition sin is a violation is a violation of a revealed ordinance of God.

Second, sin begins with the autonomous mental attitude and we saw how Eve, when she sinned, set herself up as the authority; she was going to pass judgment on whether or not God’s Word was true. The moment someone does this they have abrogated to themselves divine authority.

The third stage was that after she did this she began to be deceived and the reason for this was that once sin starts operating in the soul, it distorts perception so that you can no longer perceive reality the way reality is.

Then stage four proceeds to an overt challenge to the Word of God, and this is when Satan says “you will not surely die.”

Stage five is when sin develops its own framework, its human viewpoint framework to justify itself and this is when she saw that the tree was good for food, attractive to the eyes and good for making one wise.

Stage six was the passing of the mental attitude sin into an overt behavior pattern or an overt act. And the Bible always states that there is no such thing as a sudden overt act; never does sin occur this way. The so-called criminally insane are people who have thought and thought and thought and thought and thought about what they did and then it became so ingrained that it suddenly burst forth. Nobody spontaneously murders anyone, not deliberately. And even the so-called criminally insane in this situation probably have had the mental attitude sin of hatred for generations in their family, or at least for decades in their soul.

Stage seven, the gaining of social acceptance, to relieve the guilty conscience Eve tries to get Adam to join her for the social acceptance.

Stage eight, the world-consciousness and self-consciousness produce a sense of shame; we’ll get back to this this morning. The sense of shame is given as one immediate result of sin.

Stage nine is the cover-up principle; we showed you the fig leaves last week and showed you that they didn’t cover too much and no matter how many they sewed together it wasn’t a very good set of clothes. But stage nine shows that sin, when it proceeds, always pretends that no such thing is happening or there’s no such problem, and we call that cover-up.

And then the tenth stage was the fact of guilt, true guilt before God who comes to visit.

Now that’s where we left it and this morning we pick up the narrative again at Genesis 3:8. “They heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. [9] And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where are you? [10] And he said, I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself. [11] And He said, Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded you that you should not eat? [12] And the man said, The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. [13] And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that you have done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat. [14] And the LORD God said to the serpent, Because you have done this, you are cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shall thou eat all the days of thy life. [15] And I will enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.”

That last verse has been known down through the centuries of church history as the protoevangelium, that is, the first gospel, the first announcement of the Lord Jesus Christ was made right here in the garden, within minutes after the fall of man.

So let’s look carefully at this text, go back to verse 8 and watch it unfold. Notice first in verse 8, “They heard the noise,” not “the voice,” the “noise.” The word qol here should be translated as noise because it’s the idea of they can hear his footsteps on the garden floor. Apparently if we are to draw a schematic of Eden as an oval with a garden on the east end of Eden and we said that God created man and then He put man in the garden and He left man in the garden, it means that God apparently dwelt back here to the west on a height of land called the Mountain of God. And God is a theophany, that’s what this is, a theophany is the word for God-appearance, God appeared in a bodily form, though he did not have actual flesh and body until the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ, nevertheless, when God did show up in history He always showed up as a human being, contrary to all the other nations in ancient history who had falcon gods, monkey gods, hippopotamus gods and all the rest, winged-lion gods, the sphinx and so on. It was only Israel that refused ever to have her God show up as an animal; God only showed up as a man, because only man is made in God’s image.

So therefore God showed up as a man and apparently visited them periodically, perhaps for their daily visit. What did God do with Adam and Eve as they visited day by day? Well we know one thing He did, He taught them language because we know that all creatures must learn language from a prior language-speaking being, and therefore the first couple, having no parents and no language-speaking parents obviously had to learn their language from someone else that could talk. So one of the things that God did was to teach Adam and Eve how to speak. Another thing that God did, of course, was to teach them about the creation, and teach them about what He wanted them to do, and apparently this was their instruction period, their school, their college class.

And so “they heard the voice of the LORD God walking,” and the idea there in the Hebrew is that… this is a participle, long continual process of walking, the imagery is that they have time to decide what they’re going to do. God is omniscient, God is omnipresent, but His theophany is located in time and space and the theophany comes walking into the garden, step by step. And Adam and Eve know this is the appointed time and Adam and Eve are now going to decide what to do. And the answer is, in verse 8, that “Adam and his isha hid themselves,” they “hid themselves,” there is the central picture of this whole story. Out of their God-consciousness comes the sense of a violated conscience, comes a sense of negative volition, the sense of sin and therefore the sense of guilt, and this sense of guilt is what causes them to hide themselves. You notice now, 180 degrees removed from the role of man, where man is to come to God, now he flees.

Now it’s interesting, that they can’t hide themselves from omniscience. Let’s go back to the essence of God a moment and look. God is sovereign, God is righteous, God is just, God is love, God is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, immutable and eternal. These are the various attributes of God, plus some more if you want to add them. But one of those attributes of God, the fact that God is omniscient, means that no matter what Adam and his wife do they cannot hide themselves from omniscience. But nevertheless they try, and here pathetically narrated you have man’s first activity as a fallen creature, busy trying to do the impossible. He started trying to do the impossible with the autonomous attitude that he, not God, would be the final authority. Eve, before the tree, she would decide whether or not God or Satan was the correct one; she wouldn’t accept implicitly, because God says, therefore, “Yes sir,” it is true by definition.

Instead of that, Eve, like most modern people, chose to set up a standard of truth prior to the truth and was going to evaluate all statements and propositions by this prior standard. And what modern men don’t realize and what Eve didn’t realize is that when you pick your standard the ball game has already been decided. Whatever the standard is that you pick, that’s where the game is decided. If you pick that you’re only going to accept that which you can see, touch, handle and believe, then you are a materialist and then that is your game, that is your ballgame and everything else is reconstructed after that axiom that you chose. Well, Eve, at this point shows an axiom that she would decide and the ultimate standard of truth would not be God, it would be man.

Now here you have the result of this; now trapped with this silly standard of truth, man now hides from the truth. The truth is now walking into the garden and man tries to hide himself from the truth, and this has been repeated down through the ages until today we refer to the fallen man, the Bible says, as one who is blind; not that man can’t see physical objects around him but no man who is unregenerate and rejects the criterion of truth, the Scripture, can properly interpret history; he can’t interpret where history is going, he can’t properly interpret life, he can’t properly diagnose what his problem is, less so can he provide the solution to his problem, and so therefore man is said in the Scriptures to be blind. The evidence is there but the interpretation is wrong and this is why Bible-believing Christians do not accept humanist presuppositions in education, because we say that the Bible must be the final standard of criteria; they say that man will be the final standard and between us there can be no compromise. Both of us form two religions in holy war against each other, and there can never, never be a SALT talk, or a disarmament talk, or a truce between the humanist and the Bible-believing Christians. It is eternal war until one triumphs over the other.

And so in this man, then, falls away and he hides himself. And something happens; at this point man’s orientation, if we can express it as a compass, man’s orientation is toward the Creator, this is before the fall. At the point of the fall, when men sin, when Adam and Eve violate the Creator, then their orientation swings around in the opposite direction and they are now oriented to themselves and this is self-orientation and that’s the great shift that has occurred in verse 8. And so they try to hide themselves from the presence of God among the trees of the garden.

And notice this again, “among the trees of the garden.” The very things that God had given them to nourish them, they use those to hide themselves. But the interesting thing is that though this self-orientation was in the middle attitude stage before the Lord Jesus Christ who as the second member of the Trinity walked into the garden, it took His walking into the garden to turn the mental attitude into an overt act. Now notice something about this and it’ll show you something about yourself, about all of us in our sin, and that is that when the Word of God comes, when there is any revelation of God what it will do is take the mental attitude sin and force them into an overt pattern. Apart from God’s restraining grace the Word of God and exposures thereto will always drive a sinner to be more consistently sinful; always.

This is what is happening in our own generation as the humanist becomes more consistently autonomous, as men more consistently express their anti-Christianity. In the 1920s and the 1930s when it all started people laughed at Dr. J. Gresham Machen, who was that great Presbyterian scholar, when he warned them the way of liberalism is this way, and he pointed out what would happen… no, no, Dr. Machen, you’re all wrong, we don’t believe that way, we’re not that extreme, and yet within forty years, just one generation, what Machen predicted in his book, Liberalism and Christianity, has come to pass. Why? Machen saw what so many men of the 20s and 30s didn’t see, that when you forsake the absolute standard of Scripture everything is ordained to flow in the humanist direction. And so therefore the light always causes sin to become more consistent.

Let’s look what happened; God, the light, walked into the garden, sin became overt in that they deliberately hid themselves. Now Genesis 3:9 we have God’s action toward the sinner, and this is the first stage in the Bible where you see good news to sin. “And the LORD God called unto Adam,” you notice who initiated the conversation. Always remember this simple picture; visualize it in your minds so you’ll never forget it, of Adam and his wife crouching under the trees and the bushes, and visualize the Lord Jesus Christ walking down the garden path, and visualize Him stopping for a moment to look for them, and looking straight at the bush where they are, He calls to them. Actually the intent of this isn’t “where are you?” He knows where they are; at this point God is probably looking directly at the very bush they’re hiding behind. The force of the question is “why are you where you are,” what are you doing there, of all the places in the garden.

And so here you have God initiating the conversation. Notice something, the sin nature by itself apart from grace, the old sin nature does not trigger any getting-back-to-God-ness. All of the initiative in this chapter lies with God, not with Adam. If the Lord Jesus Christ had walked into the garden, had decided that they weren’t going to show for their appointment, and walked back to the mountain west of the garden, Adam and Eve would still be under the bushes because God hadn’t taken the in initiative.

Now here you start one of the most profound things in history because here we have an added revelation of God. We just got through saying we have an added revelation of man’s sin nature, what the sin nature’s (quote) “natural,” natural result to God and the Word is simply to hide itself from it. Now this shouldn’t sound too theoretical, after all, view your own attitude to the Word of God. None of us as Christians are unfamiliar with that sensation in our heart that says oh well, the Word of God is nice but I’ve got more important details to handle right now. Now of course, there is a scheduling situation of emphasis, I’m not talking about that, I’m talking about the fact that when you know darn well that the Word of God applies to this particular problem and applies very directly, you very directly rebel against the Word. I do, you do, because we are, as sinners, constructed to do just that. We are continuing like Adam and his wife, to hide ourselves in the bushes. And what has to happen? God has to do what He did in the garden, call to us, what are you doing that for, that’s My Word, what are you doing with it, and why are you acting the way you act in response to the Word.

So God calls and when He calls something happens to one of His attributes. God is sovereign, God is righteous, God is just, God is love, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, immutable and eternal, and this attribute of love is now expressed toward creatures who no longer deserve His love. Adam and Eve no longer deserve love and so from this point on that attribute of love is called grace because grace is the fact that God does the initiating and God initiates toward the rebellious sinner, even while the sinner continues to rebuff God. And that’s what we’re going to look at next; after God goes to the trouble of initiating, watch Adam’s response, watch Eve’s response and you’ll see that the behavior pattern of the sin nature is unchanged down to this day. Every sin that the human race has ever done is all tied up with Adam and Eve. In their soul the potential for every variation, permutation, and combination was present.

And so God says, “Why are you where you are?” What’s the purpose of this? [Genesis 3:10, “And he said, I heard Your voice,” you see, you can tell by the answer that it’s not a question of location, it’s a question of purpose. Adam doesn’t say, for example in verse 10, hi God, I’m over here. So obviously God hasn’t asked the question of location. He says “I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because,” so number one, he gives his reaction; his reaction is fear, they hide because of fear. Now the modern philosopher does exactly the same thing, he hides from the authoritative Word of God, not because he’s too intellectual; that’s not the real reason, that’s the reason they think; the real reason according to the Scripture is that they are afraid of the Word of God. If the Word of God is the final authority then they can’t be the final authority. And this is a fearful situation, it involves total surrender, a raising of the white flag of the intellect, and no man who is a sinner likes to raise the white flag of surrender to the Word of God as the absolute. And so men fear.

And so Adam fears, and in this delightfully simple picture it’s easy, God has given us all the picture we need for our imagination because we can all put ourselves in exactly this position, a small child can put himself in this kind of a position and understand exactly; we don’t have to go into the advanced theology, all we need do is come to this very simple picture: Adam and his wife fearful. Why? Because he says, “I was naked.” Now why is Adam and Eve, why are they fearful because they’re naked. Notice they were naked before the fall and it didn’t bother them. The nakedness hasn’t changed; something else has and now their nakedness is the source of shame.

We want to look back through because there’s a whole theology of clothes in the Bible, of why there is something in the human race different from all animals and that is something we call modesty, and it’s tied in with clothing. And wherever you go on the face of the earth you will always find this present. It used to be thought, well, the old primitive tribes out in the bush that go around with a loin cloth, that’s no problem. And yet missionary after missionary after missionary, after they work with the cultural patterns of the tribe, always report the same thing, that associated with the total nakedness in some of these tribes, associated with this was a deep sense of abiding shame and guilt. Now why should that be, no white man ever came out there and told them they ought to have clothes on. Where did this sense of guilt come from? It preexisted the white missionary who went to the tribe, that can be shown in scholarly circles; papers have been written to prove that. So therefore where did this sense of shame come from? The sense of shame must have come from something residual in the human soul. And we say yes it did, residual since father Adam here.

Now we want to go along and see if we can summarize the Scriptural teaching in this area and why the human race has this sense of modesty when animals don’t. Animals have their fur coats, your dog doesn’t worry about the fact that he doesn’t have a pair of pants on. Well, why is it he doesn’t bother with it and we do. Obviously we’re constructed differently; so the Bible speaks to this.

Psalm 104:2, Adam and Eve were created as mortal beings; as mortal beings they could go either way, they could sin or they could obey, one or the other. We’re going to show you four or five verses to show you how clothes, clothing, shows up in the Scriptures, then we’ll draw some conclusions. Psalm 104 talks about God’s clothing, and that’s interesting, God is always pictured as having clothes on. Now maybe that didn’t strike you as odd, but it ought to raise a question: why is it that God is never naked in any of the theophanies? He always has clothes on. If we are to believe Rousseau and The Noble Savage idea, all of our problems in civilization are due to the fact that we have gotten away from that noble savage, we have gotten away from life in the primitive wild, where no one had clothes, where there was no civilized patterns of lifestyle, etc. etc. etc. And if we would just but shed the trappings of civilization and get back to the wild then all would be well. Now isn’t it interesting the Bible rejects Rousseau’s position; it says no, that’s not the problem. Rousseau saw a problem and his diagnosis was wrong.

Psalm 104:2 says that God clothes himself “with light as with a garment,” so even God, when He shows up, has clothes, and the clothes are a particular quality: light. Light in the Bible always stands for something and we’ll get to what it stands for and I think you’ll see it as we look at some of these passages on clothing.

Turn to the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 22. It may strike you as odd to speak on nudity at Christmas but this is the way it is when you follow verse by verse. Three or four Christmases ago we were on latrines in the book of Deuteronomy on Christmas so this is an improvement. Matthew 22:11, this is the parable of the wedding feast. “And when the king came in to see the guests, he saw there was man who did not have a wedding garment. [12] And he said to him, Friend, how did you come in here without having a wedding garment? And he was speechless. [13] Then the king said to the servants, Bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. [14] For many are called, only a few are chosen.” Clothing alone would qualify for this wedding feast.

Turn to 2 Corinthians 3:7, another observation, this one more about the human body itself. This is the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai. Moses went up to the tope of the mountain, he spent time with God, and when he came walking down the mountain something was different about Moses’ face and the two and half to three million people down at the bottom on the west side of Mount Sinai, and they looked up at Moses and his face shone, his body, in other words, showed differently. And so in 2 Corinthians 3:7, we won’t get into the argument in context, we’re just looking at the observation now, verse 7, “If the ministration of death, written and engraved in stones,” that’s the Ten Commandments, “was glorious, so that the children of Israel could not steadfastly behold the face of Moses for the glory,” or the light shining, “of his face, which glory was to be done away.” It didn’t last long. But Moses, abiding in the presence of God caused his face to physically glow.

Now lest this seems strange, out of place, do your memories recall something about a particular miracle that occurred in one of about three of the four Gospels; the Mount of Transfiguration. You remember what happened there, not only did Jesus Christ change on the mountain, as Peter and John watched, but they also saw Elijah and Moses dressed in white shimmering garments talking with the Lord, and this apparition or this theophany just appeared to them and they watched it; something had changed in the bodies of Moses and Elijah, or they souls, they were not resurrected yet. But in this situation, 3 Corinthians 3:7, we have something that breaks forth from the human spirit and glows.

Turn to Revelation 6:11, talking about people after they have died, and it’s interesting in the Bible that when those who have died appear they too have clothes. When Samuel is called from the grave by the witch of Endor he is wearing the prophetic garb and that’s how he’s noticed; he too wears clothes. “And the white robes were given unto every one of them; and it was said unto them that they should rest yet for a little season, until their fellow servants also and their brethren should be killed as they were, and should be fulfilled.” It’s talking about the saints in the presence of God and they too wear garments.

Now let’s see if we can pull this together. What is going on with all these passages that talk about clothes, all the way from Adam to the book of Revelation? It talks about God having a clothing of light and light always shows His absolute righteousness in the Bible. It’s interesting that in the plan of salvation we are clothed with righteousness due to Jesus Christ, again the imagery of clothing. It’s as though the human body, as it was on the very second of its creation, was not yet complete, something yet was to be added. And so therefore we make this inference; that Adam and Eve were created naked and their nakedness shows their mortality; by mortality we mean they can die, not that they will but that they can. And Adam and Eve were not clothed at the point of creation because they were to make their clothing by their obedience. If Adam and Eve had obeyed, we infer, not dogmatically, but we infer that they would have generated a clothing of righteousness, light, by their perfect obedience. But we know that Adam and Eve didn’t and so therefore we know that because they sinned that the clothing that had to be given to them had to be credited to them, it couldn’t come forth from their own obedience; they couldn’t gradually clothe their bodies with this shimmering glory. So therefore Christ had to give them the clothes; He has to give us our clothes.

So the word “clothing” in this simple picture in Genesis forms a basis that is appealed to again and again and again and again and again and again and again, all the way down through Scripture.

Now let’s to back to Genesis 3 and ask why does God respond to this remark about nakedness the way He does. Genesis 3:10, “I was afraid, because I was naked,” that’s not a real answer, is it, “I was afraid, because I was naked.” Wasn’t he naked before? He wasn’t afraid before. Well, then what did the sin do? The problem isn’t the nakedness, the problem is the fact that he has no means now, no means for getting that absolute righteousness, he just cut himself off. Something physiologically has happened, he has become aware… remember what we said, his orientation and Eve’s orientation before was to God the Creator, now their orientation is to themselves, they become introspective, following a lot of the modern schools of psychotherapy they concentrate first: know thyself and then know everything else, the self becomes the starting point for health. Precisely opposite, it’s a perverse thing, these kinds of modern psychotherapy; it’s absolutely wrong in exactly the opposite way. Health begins by starting with God; all psychological problems are ultimately theological problems.

And therefore turning away and looking at themselves they realize their nakedness and their lack of assets; they’ve got nothing to hide and they know that they are liable, vulnerable to the processes of death that began immediately with the first bite; the processes of death began in their body. And they became physiologically aware, as we said earlier, physiologists who have studied this passage point to several things; they point, for example, to verse 8, and they say isn’t it interesting that the first verb, adjective and noun for temperature occurs here. Now in the Hebrew it doesn’t, it’s the wind but it’s a proper translation of the meaning of it. They feel the breeze against their bodies, somehow they have a chill, there’s a chill in the air after they’ve fallen. And then after they’ve fallen, as we’ll get into next time, perspiration, “in the sweat of your brow you will eat your bread; before they were eating bread but not in the sweat of their brow; something has happened to the body’s metabolism. Physically something has happened and so it’s this physical thing that has happened to their bodies that makes them aware that now they lack all assets and therefore they are left and they look around for a covering.

So Adam says, “I was naked, and I tried to hide myself,” literally, it says “I hid myself,” it’s a niphil reflexive, the proper translation, the King James, but the emphasis is on he tried to hide himself; he didn’t, he wasn’t successful, it was hopeless to do this, but he tried.

Now let’s see if we can draw some conclusions about nudity in the Scriptures, and why the obvious counterbalance to the passages on clothing. This is elevated in our own society. Let’s see if the Bible has some insights into why, all of a sudden at certain times and places in history there is a rise of the emphasis of nudity. It’s not accidental; it’s deeply related to the premises on which the whole social community operates; it has to happen, there has to be a display of nudity to express the faith of human viewpoint. Let’s watch the connection.

Turn to Genesis 9:23, watch in the Scriptures how nudity is treated. We’ll just show you a sampling of some of the verses. “And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness.”

Turn to Exodus 32:25, here at the base of Sinai, while Moses was getting the Law, Aaron had a little orgy going, “And when Moses saw that the people were naked (for Aaron had made them naked unto their shame among their enemies),” notice the word “shame,” there’s a definite predisposition in the Bible against this.

Turn to the Minor Prophets, all the way over to Hosea 2:9, again a consistent theme that occurs book after book after book of the Bible, by different authors in different centuries but teaching the same truth. “Therefore I will return,” it’s talking about God returning to Israel and coping with Israel’s idolatry; “Therefore I will return, and take away My grain in its time, and My wine in its season,” the problem in verses 7-8 is that Israel was involved with Baalism and she was ascribing agriculture success to nature forces, and God says all right, you’re going to ascribe your agricultural success to nature forces, I will manipulate the nature forces and then we will see who is in charge. So, “I will return, and I will take away My grain in the harvest season,” literally, “and My wine in the season thereof, and I will recover My wool and My flax given to cover her nakedness. [10] And now I will discover her lewdness in the sight of her lovers, and none shall deliver out of My hand. [11] And I will cause all her mirth to cease, her feast days, her new moons…” and so on and so on. [12] I will destroy her vines and her fig trees,” and so it’s a picture again of shame; God will strip Israel.

Finally turn to Revelation 3:18, we just pick these verses out to give you a sampling of a from cover to cover verse chain, you can fill these in if you want to with your concordance. This is Jesus Christ’s words to a local church in the last days, Laodicea. Í counsel thee to buy of me gold tested in the fire, that thou might be rich; and white raiment, that thou may be clothed, and that the shame of thy nakedness does not appear; and anoint thine eyes with eyesalve, that you may see.” See the two things of the fallen being: lack of clothes and its shame, and blindness that can’t see. Again, there is a bias in the Scripture against this, and I think it’s interesting that if you have a small child along about ages 4-6 small children develop a tremendous adversity to nakedness, and they do it all by themselves, you don’t have to do it, they develop their own modesty. What is this but the same thing that we noticed happening in the natives in the jungles; it’s part of the human soul that says something theological is being expressed in this issue of clothes.

It’s not a simple question of clothes or no clothes; it’s a question of religious faith that you are either acting out or not. So we want to see if we can point this out. A tip-off in the whole thing is the fact in the Bible the only place where nudity is commended is in marriage, the Song of Songs. Now we ask a question; why is it that there’s only one place, in all of the human life, where nakedness is commended in the Scripture. Let’s look, what is marriage a type of? Theologically we have a handle on this because we can go to Ephesians 5, we know what the institution of marriage is pointing toward; it’s pointing toward redemption, the issue between Christ and His Church as between the groom and the bride. And so therefore what is marriage a type of? Redemption, and therefore it is the only, of the three productive divine institutions, it’s the only one that looks forward to active redemption, and where there’s redemption there is acceptance of the fallen person. And God works with the fallen person; we’ll see more about that in the Song of Songs. So apart from marriage nudity is always castigated in the Scriptures as a pagan idolatry.

What is…can we put our hands on exactly what nudity says? Yes. Nudity is a confession that I am not a sinner, that my body is normal and therefore I refuse to put myself in a position of accepting grace. Nudity is an expression of the salvation by works that basically I do not merit and I do not need grace, I do not need God’s ordained clothes of glory, I am glorious in my own naked self. This is a deep confession of faith according to the Scriptures. It’s an apostate one and it’s man with his autonomous spirit declaring himself not needing salvation. So it’s the heart of a satanic faith; this is why in generations that turn from the Word of God you must have a confession of nudity; it’s the only way man can forcibly say umph! to God, thumb his nose at Him; it’s that what it is all about.

Let’s turn back and see how God deals with the situation. In Genesis 3:11 He asks Adam, “Who told you,” isn’t it interesting, He doesn’t say how did you find out, but “Who told you,” He doesn’t say “you became naked,” but “Who told you,” who made you aware that you needed garments. Satan did; well, not exactly. What does God then ask him? “Have you eaten of the tree,” notice He doesn’t refer to Satan at all in verse 11, He says “Have you eaten of the tree,” and what was the tree? The tree was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and what was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil an expression, discernment, exercise of the conscience, and the conscience was now exercised on both sides. The conscience was now exercised against man in negative volition and so there’s a sensation of evil and that’s where his awareness came about of his nakedness, his lack of glory when Jesus Christ walked into the garden.

It’s such a simple story but loaded with such power. Visualize yourself… yourself behind the bush, and God walks into the garden and you have nowhere to flee and you are locked in disobedience. What do you do? So He says, “Have you eaten of the tree,” and notice verse 11 brings up Genesis 2:16-17, notice how the Word of God has been discussed seven times so far as we’ve studied chapter 3. The Word of God is Genesis 2:15-16 and that verse was mentioned in Genesis 3:1, verse 2, verse 3, verse 4, verse 5, verse 6 and now verse 11. You see how the sin and rebellion centered upon a particular command of God. Notice something else in verse 11, this teaches us as Christians how God works with our conscience. God never condemns us vaguely; God never browbeats; God’s only way of working with us are in particulars with respect to Scriptures. It’s not a shotgun approach. God, when He convicts, uses a rifle that hits the target bulls eye every time. And that’s how you can distinguish healthy guilt from unhealthy guilt.

Healthy guilt is when you know of a particular, a particular thing in the Scriptures that was done at a particular time on a particular day; if you can pin it down to that then it’s a simple question of confessing our sin, getting back in fellowship and moving on. However, if in your guilty you can’t narrow it to a particular, a particular act, a particular thought done on a particular day at a particular time, we’ve got a problem and it’s not a healthy spiritual situation at the end; it may be that for months, weeks, days, you have turned your ear against your conscience and therefore you’ve blurred… remember what happens, the more we sin the more blurry our vision gets and the more blurry our vision gets we can’t focus on what the thing is out there, and so a lot of people have blurred vision in their conviction process and it’s because they’ve turned from their conscience so much. What happens if this is the case? Go back and read the Scriptures, just start anywhere, take a translation, go to any book of the Bible that appeals to you and start reading, eyeball, word after word after word after word after word after word, and trust the Holy Spirit will use whatever text it is that you’re reading to convict. Some good passages of Scripture to search on this would be the Psalms; other good passages would be Proverbs, the prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, they’re all good for this kind of thing.

So God, then, in Genesis 3:11 convicts of particulars. And notice something else, He doesn’t come in and slam them. He doesn’t say oh, you’re a bad man; nothing like that, there’s none of that smearing and that maligning and just crushing the humanity out of somebody. It’s particular, what did you do? Because God isn’t interested in smearing our guts all over the floor; that’s not His objective. His objective is to convict so we can get on with the ballgame, so we can confess, get back in fellowship and move, not to sit there and whine and cry and bellyache and moan and groan and go through four years of psychotherapy over some idiot thing that could be taken care of in five minutes. That’s what God wants and so this is the model of conviction of sin in verse 11; no smearing, no mashing somebody down, just getting to the problem, solving it and moving on.

Now you see, here’s where your legalism gets in trouble. Because we have, all of us have such an inbred legalism we say that’s too simple, we have to sit here and agonize about something. Why, if we’ve done something in violation of the Word of God that’s not right that we can confess in a moment of time, that we can confess it and be forgiven in a moment of time and move on, that’s not the way it ought to be. Oh really now, in other words, your judgment is superior to God’s judgment. Now God says that is the way it is. Have you ever noticed how the Lord Jesus Christ dealt with people in the Gospels; ever see where he smeared them all over the place? No, the only people He smeared were the people that refused to get with the program. But when you had people who had the depths of problems and they came to the Lord there wasn’t any of that snotty, running down, maligning. The woman taken in adultery in John 8 wasn’t told to confess her sins to the whole east side of Jerusalem. What was it: “Your sins are forgiven, go and sin no more.” That’s all I want to hear about, just move on, you’ve got life to live, you can’t sit here and cry about it, move on, that’s the biblical admonition. But we have this legalism that we love to just kind of toy with it and goo around with it, smear it all over the place, and all it is is anti-grace legalism. But watch it, all of our souls have the tendency to relish it, play with it, goo it all over the place, when God just wants to simply get rid of it. So verse 11 ought to prick our consciences; it’s gentle, yet it’s firm. It’s particular, it’s specific not general: did you violate Genesis 2:15; that’s what he’s saying.

Now Genesis 3:12-13, we get added insight into the way we are as fallen beings. Well, “The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me” now what’s that? Blame-shifting. See, the first thing was operation fig leaf; oh I don’t have a problem, no problem. Oh come on… no problem, don’t have one. Well obviously God short circuited that one, He went right to the bush and said you don’t have any problem what are you doing under there? Gardening no doubt! And then after He raised the discussion then the problem came up over pointing out the awareness of the wrong act. Well then what? Well, yeah, I know I did it but it wasn’t my fault, it’s her fault. And then verse 13, the woman takes her cue from her husband and when the Lord passes down the line, okay, Eve, what’s your problem, or isha. “Well, the serpent beguiled me and I ate.” See, buck-passing.

Now the thing to look about Genesis 3:12-13 is the spirit of it. Notice that no conviction has been rendered here at all. See, in order to be convicted of our sin there actually has to be two things happen. We have to become aware of the particular, whether it’s in the mental attitude, whether it’s overt or whatever, we have to have a particular act, some particular point violation; that we have to be made aware of. But that alone isn’t sufficient, because as long as there’s this mental attitude of verse 12-13, well yeah, I know I did it but it really wasn’t my fault… that’s not conviction of sin. That is NOT a conviction of sin, it’s a conviction that something was done but it’s not a conviction that what was done was in fact my responsible act, and that has to take place. And this is where God has to work with us so He has to work through this and then He has to change the spirit because this Spirit is our old sin nature and our old sin nature by definition rejects spiritual responsibility, absolutely emphatically rejects it, always will shift it to something else, circumstances. Adam and Eve could say well gee, I came from a deprived environment, why don’t you have busing and take us over to the west side; why don’t you do something else to solve this problem. It’s really not our fault; it’s the environment that you put us in. Sorry, that still is not adequate conviction.

Then God proceeds, as he always does, and this gives us further insight how He copes with our sin. Genesis 3:13-15 He goes directly to the ultimate cause of sin, and here, thank God, He doesn’t listen to all the garbage and the static we crank out and he goes into the background, into forces we know not much of; even with the added revelation of the Scriptures we do not understand all the forces of evil. It’s as though God has put a cloth or a curtain down over the stage and you can kind of see halfway through it and you can see the vague outlines of Satan and his schemes, but you can never really see him; God has it partially veiled. And in these next three verses God Himself says wait a minute, I’m going back here to deal with a little problem, and He Himself walks back and makes an announcement.

Genesis 3:10-12 deal with the subjective nature of man; that deals with what we are conscious of in our hearts, but Genesis 3:13-15 go further on and deal with things we are not conscious of. There are forces involved in sin that you know not of, I know not of, and most of the Bible writers know not of. It’s just that God consistently tells us they are there and we have to trust Him that He’s going to take care of those forces.

Genesis 3:14, “And the LORD God said to the serpent, Because you have done this, you are cursed above all cattle,” now he begins to curse the animal creation. Now animals were never given to hurt man, and therefore in the Bible whenever an animal hurts a man that animal is punished by capital punishment, Genesis 9:5 is a good example. When capital punishment is instituted, it is instituted against both man and animals. Now we have all the bleeding hearts against capital punishment and we have the humane society to be against capital punishment of animals. But God’s Word says that animals and I can’t explain it but animals are somehow held accountable for attack against man. Now this is not if you go out and beat your dog up and he bites your ankle, this is talking about animals who just turn vicious and turn against man. Man-killing beasts must be slaughtered in the name of God, and that is a commission given in Genesis 9:5, it’s repeated in Exodus 21:28.

This one, the most clever of all animals, receives the curse, and it’s the one through whom the animal kingdom is damned. And the serpent, we know him as the snake, the reptile, part of the reptile family. What did the serpent look like before the damnation? We have no idea, all we know is that from this time forward the serpent is always crawling in the dust, limbless, and there’s always an aversion to the serpent, and you can know that this comes out of the human soul because in the mythology and the arts you will usually have a fertility goddess here and down underneath in the drawing somewhere you’ll have the serpent. The serpent was pictured hundreds and hundreds of time in the ancient Near Eastern art, a reminder of man’s adversity, there’s something peculiar about the snake, and so the Lord said “you are cursed above”, that is “you are cursed more than the cattle,” they’re cursed too, but the serpent is cursed more than they, above every beast. “…upon your belly you will go,” the condemnation to go upon your belly if you look this up in a concordance means degradation; it means that he is cut down to size.

And the prophecy, finally, Genesis 3:15, “I will enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.” There are several things to notice about this. Verse 15 has to be interpreted in the first regard like you would interpret it, straightforward text you would tell a child. What is verse 15 talking about very simply? There’s going to be animosity between snakes and people; the liberals say that’s the only thing verse 15 says. No, we say that the seed of the woman is the human race, that’s the broad interpretation, and the seed of the serpent is the progeny of the serpent that was in the garden. And there’s going to be this animosity, there’s a deep soulish antagonism and aversion to this sort of thing. It can be proven by the world’s art.

Well, then we have to go to a deeper thing and the key to the deeper interpretation, verse 15, is it’s not symmetrical. If you read verse 15 carefully you’ll notice the battle doesn’t terminate between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman. Look at it carefully. If you read it fast you think oh yeah, there’s the woman, there’s the serpent, there’s the woman’s seed, there’s the serpent’s seed, and there’s a battle between those two. Huh-un, you misread it. What it says is, “it,” what is “it?” The seed of the woman, “shall bruise thy,” it doesn’t say it shall bruise thy seed’s head, “it shall bruise thy head, and you will bruise his heel.” So we’ve got this sort of a battle going on and that’s the prophecy of the virgin birth; the battle is not between the woman and the serpent; the battle is between what the woman bears and the serpent. The battle is not between what the woman bears and what the serpent bears. The battle is between that serpent, and obviously the serpent, as we said last week, is the incarnate Satan; Satan hates the woman and tries to cut off her seed.

And it’s interesting that in all of the Scriptures there’s only about three places I’ve ever found where this word is used of the woman. In all other cases in the Bible it is Abraham and his seed, Moses and his seed. Why? The word seed means sperm. Now why do you have the strange juxtaposition here in Genesis 3:15, the woman and her sperm? Yes, there’s a deliberate strange medical juxtaposition here and that’s why scholars from time… all the way before Christ in the Jewish days of Judaism, biblical Judaism, believed that this referred to a future virgin birth, a birth prophesied in Isaiah 7:14 “a virgin,” “the virgin will conceive” and it’s interesting that in that Isaiah prophecy, “the virgin” is spoken of, now that’s an article in there and that’s important that’s the key to Isaiah 7:14, what virgin? It doesn’t say “behold a virgin shall conceive,” but “a particular one shall conceive.” What was the particular one? The one forecast here in Genesis 3:15, the protoevangelium, the announcement of the first Christmas.

Genesis 3:15 teaches that God’s plan is going to go on and look how it goes on. The final answer to all this is to go back to creation and notice, in the creation mandate what was the role of the woman? The role of the woman was to be the helper. What’s her role in salvation? Helper! She’s the one who helps by bringing salvation into the world, and so the woman’s role after the fall has not changed, she still helps, she still is needed. It is still not good for man to be alone, he still needs a helper. And the second thing that you notice about the continuity is how is the earth going to be subdued after the fall? How was it subdued before the fall; what were those words? “Be fruitful and multiply,” and then “subdue the earth.” So how must the earth be subdued? If there’s children, and in particular one particular child, and it would be through Him that the earth is subdued.

To show you in conclusion that this isn’t just something out of the Old Testament, let’s finish by turning to Romans 16:20. Isn’t it interesting that the Genesis 3 narrative is picked up and used here. “And the God of peace shall bruise Satan under our feet shortly.” Where’d that come from? Prophecy of Genesis 3:15, it’s addressed to the Church; in Jesus Christ Satan will be smashed. So behind all of the conviction of sins and all the particulars, Genesis 3 is telling us something more serious, it’s announcing to us that the program of sin is so big, it’s so cosmotic, so rooted into the flow of history, there’s only one answer: there’s got to be a super sovereign over all of history that envelops even history and brings history to its consummation, the sovereign plan of God. Therefore we’ll sing……