Setting Up Forgiveness in the Garden
God came to the couple in the Garden in the cool of the day as He always did. Yes, they had changed because now they were disobedient — aka sinful.
Just think how heartbroken God was stepping foot into that Garden. Where before He had always looked forward to being with them, I wonder if this time He would have rather skipped it.
How many times have we heard that God can’t be in the proximity of sin? Then we said that, even if God did not create sin, He create the opportunity for us to choose not to obey Him — which is a sin.
Doesn’t that kind of bear out that He can? God was standing next to the couple, talking with them. He hadn’t banished them from the Garden yet. If God can’t be in the proximity of sin, why is He in it here? Was this the first and last time?
Take that a step further. If God can’t be in the presence of sin, how then does He send the Holy Spirit to convict us? The Holy Spirit is part of the Trinity – meaning God and the Holy Spirit are One – just as God and Jesus are one (Jn. 10: 30).
So, it isn’t that God can’t be in the proximity of sin. It is He doesn’t want to be.
When God came to the couple, He called them as He was walking. It was His way of approaching them as He always did.
God didn’t come running for the couple. He walked as He called them.
- God wasn’t coming quickly to punish them, though He was coming to judge them.
- He didn’t wait until the dead of the night to come when it might have been more terrifying, especially after more time for the couple to worry over what they had done.
- He didn’t come immediately with a passionate response.
The couple didn’t go to God to repent and ask for forgiveness. They should have been running through the Garden, crying to God, “Where are You? Forgive us.” Maybe they didn’t know they had to do so.
But they didn’t.
God was going to find the couple even if they hid. He was going to have them acknowledge and face their sin.
The Couple Hiding
When the couple heard God coming, they hid because they knew they had disobeyed Him.
Instead of going to God, they hid. That didn’t do them any good.
The couple surely were terrified of facing God once they had broken the one law He had established. They knew they had become separated from God. The shame and fear drove them away from Him as we want to ignore what we know will be bad.
It is logical that they felt the same shame and fear when they came back into His presence. The man and the woman had reason to fear God. They had disobeyed His direct order – His only law.
The couple knew fear, but did they feel remorse? They knew guilt, but did they feel repentance?
If we are true children of God, we have no need to fear Him. If we aren’t, there should be a whole lot of shaking going on. Anyone who isn’t God’s child – who is godless – will not survive the fire (Rev. 20: 15).
If we stay stuck in terror fear and never get to reverence fear, we will never confess Jesus as our Savior and Redeemer.
They could have run. They could have made the decision to leave the Garden, but they didn’t. They stayed and hid.
It is easy to assume that, when their eyes were opened (Gen. 3: 7), the couple just focused on their physical nakedness. They may or may not have looked at their spiritual nakedness.
But then, wouldn’t God have made it so that their disobedience would immediately showcase the loss of their righteousness? Our spiritual condition has always been more important to Him than our physical condition.
Who needed fig leaves when you were clothed in innocence, light, and glory. You were made in God’s image. Didn’t you glory in that? Didn’t you value your gifts from God?
Sin brings a sad consciousness, which is fertile ground for the fear.
The problem was hiding in the trees wasn’t going to cut it. Making clothes out of fig leaves really wasn’t going to give them the coverage they would need.
Concealment is a characteristic of sin. It piggy backs on the hiding theme.
We can’t conceal our sin.
How can we think our measly little efforts are going to pull the wool over the Omnipotent, Omniscient Sovereign God?
True, part of the reason for this subterfuge is because we are trying to vindicate ourselves. We want to either clear ourselves of blame or prove ourselves to be right.
They had to get to the point where they would ask for forgiveness. The root of asking forgiveness is confession of the sin. We will not confess what we do not acknowledge our wrongdoing.
So, the confession also gives honor to God. It acknowledges His justice.
God forgives our sins when we confess them to Him and ask for forgiveness.
God was patient with the couple – as He is with us. Having patience – His mercy – doesn’t mean He doesn’t punish us.
God’s mercy was He didn’t kill us. Mercy is when God’s response is something we don’t expect.
The bottom line is we have sinned.
God Confronts Them
God didn’t have to ask the couple why they were hiding or who had told them they were naked. He already knew they had sinned.
We shouldn’t look at God’s question as one searching for knowledge. God already knew what had happened, and He knew why they found out they were naked.
God was more concerned that the man had found out that he was naked than that he was naked.
This question was just emphasizing the loss of communication.
God gave them a chance to admit they had disobeyed Him. He wanted them to tell Him why.
God would much rather we come to Him than make Him come to us. He would rather we choose to submit to Him.
God didn’t address the man’s fear, but then the man didn’t answer the first question either. He didn’t address how he knew he was naked. It should have been a given that the God of Love doesn’t cause us abject terror.
But there are times when we need the shake-in-our-boots fear. The fear acknowledges our understanding that we did wrong.
When we disobey, we need to be concerned about what our punishment will be. We should expect God to punish us for our sins.
But what is the motivation? Was the man afraid because he know he had disobeyed God, or was the man afraid of the punishment he would deserve because of being disobedient?
What was the man’s response to God’s question of where are you? I heard, I was afraid, I was naked, and I hid. That is a lot of I statements. This is especially true when we said that the couple should have been running to God.
But since their focus was off God and on themselves, what they had done, and what transpired, their human nature kicked in.
The man did answer the second question. “Have you eaten that which I forbid you to eat?” Well, the second question is the question of greatest importance.
The main thing is God wants us back. As many times as the Hebrews/Wilderness Wanderers/Israelites/Jews walked away from Him, He wanted them back.
God Provides Salvation
We can deal with our spiritual death. God designed the Plan of Salvation so that we can be regenerated to spiritual life.
Before we were even created, God knew our relationship with Him would break, and He set a path to lead us back. It looks like two seconds after God confronted the couple about their sin, the Plan of Salvation was unveiled.
No, God did not come up with the Plan of Salvation on the fly. It was designed long before it was needed.
The Plan of Salvation cuts off the spiritual separation and restores our relationship with God through the Messiah. Only belief in the Messiah was the way to the path of restoration. Jesus was the only one to stand firm against Satan.
Isn’t it amazing that God gave the solution two verses before He gave the curse?
Not long after Satan succeeded in unleashing sin on the world, he got a sentence of losing to the Son of God. I don’t think he knew about the lake of fire yet (Rev. 20: 10).
The loss would be a crushing defeat. Satan’s head was going to get smashed. I bet knowing that was a blow to Satan. He thought humans were worse than second-class citizens – and One of them was going to defeat him!
Salvation came through a curse. God cursed Satan by telling him that he would lose through our turning back toward good.
The Gospel had to come through a curse because, even today, there are those who feel a good works salvation is enough. It isn’t. We can’t earn our way back into Heaven. It doesn’t address our disobedience to God.
We have to commit to being obedient to God and His laws and Will.
God, when He had to have been upset and hurt because the couple had sinned, immediately became the first Preacher. God is not going to sit idly by and just let sin take over. He has always been in the business of forgiving us when we ask for forgiveness.
When the Messiah was promised here, there is no mention of Him being a military Messiah. It is clearly – and only – about spiritual freedom from sin.
Jesus came as our substitute. He stands between God and us to take God’s wrath for our sin.
Not only did Jesus have to suffer the pain and humiliation of the cross — not just spill His blood — but He also had to experience normal human trials. He had to be one of us.
I don’t think this means only the way the battles between good and evil will occur. I believe it means the battles will be continuous.
Satan striking out at a human’s heel isn’t too life threatening to the human on its own. Jesus striking Satan’s head is fatal.
The outcome, however, was always secure. The Prince of Life would defeat the devil of death.
Not only would Jesus be victorious over Satan, but also all humans who accept Him as our Savior and Redeemer also kick him in the head. Not bad for mere humans!
So, the very first promise God ever gave to us was that He had a way to restore our relationship with Him. Even though we had rebelled and been disobedient, He had a way to love us back into His fold.
God went from Adam’s covenant to Christ’s covenant.
God does come to restore us when we sin. He sends the Holy Spirit to convict us so that we may repent and restore our relationships with God.
When we sin, our relationship with Him is patched with a confession. We have no need to hide.
Once we repent of our sins, God forgets them. That means all of our sin is gone after repentance – the stain of sin, the guilt, the shame. God totally forgets it once we have asked His forgiveness.
It is only through a genuine repentance that we can be blessed with this forgiveness. We have to be truly sorry for the sin and vow to turn away from it.
Only God can deal with our sin. God made the covering for Adam and Eve’s nakedness. Nothing we can do is enough to cover our sins. Only God can do that.
Jesus had to come and shed His blood for an eternal covering of our sins. God’s goal at this point was to restore blessedness.
God still does not accept disobedience from His children. He still demands obedience.
Adam acknowledged the promise and promised to do his part. In other words, he would complete his end of the covenant.
The garments were made of animal skins. This is said to be the first sacrifice.
Sin can’t be covered by taking something that would be easily replaced – the leaves would grow back on the plant the next year.
Yet, they are not living, breathing beings in terms that they have the organs we do, certainly not the ability to think, speak, and reason. The plant’s death is not the same as our death.
Animals — one had to die for each of them — had to be sacrificed so that blood could be shed. Sin is only covered by blood.
This is what the sacrifices are all about in Leviticus. The sacrifices, which constitutes a the loss of life, provide a substitute for as payment of sins, foreshadowing the sacrifice of Jesus. The sins of the one doing the sacrifice is transferred onto the animal.
Adam – and Eve when she was created – had no concept of what death was when God made the covenant with Adam. They bit (Gen. 3: 6), but they didn’t die a physical death. They now knew what disobedience was, but they may or may not have equated that to spiritual death – and certainly not physical death.
The animals had to die to show then what physical death was – what was in store for them. It had to suffer for them. Suffering plays a big role in punishment for sin.
Every time a sacrifice was made – all the way from Abel’s sacrifice to those offered until the temple was destroyed – it reminded them that death was a result of sin.
Our sins must be covered by blood of a pure sacrifice. That sacrifice was Jesus.
We cannot be the sacrifice as our blood is not pure. Face it, not many people would calmly go to their death to atone for their sin.
It would be useless if we did. We would be dead and not reap the benefits of the forgiveness of our sins.
Enter Jesus. He died spilling His blood and rose again so that we may have a perfected life in Him. He is the only way.
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Devotions in the The Influence of Sin series