The Naked Truth
What was broken by sin is being restored in Jesus Christ. Amen. That’s good news, isn’t it? Our relationship with God, our relationship with each other, and our relationship with this world have been, are being, and will be restored in Jesus Christ. That’s good news.
Part Five: From the Beginning
We’re looking at the first three chapters of Genesis, and along the way we’ve been asking ourselves some big questions. Not the how and the when of creation, but questions like: What is this all about? Who created this world we live in? And what is our purpose in it? As we’ve moved through these chapters, we keep coming back to those same questions — who created all this, what kind of God would create it and why, and what is our place in it.
A Chiasm
A few weeks ago we talked about a writing pattern used often in the Old Testament called a chiasm. Think of a hamburger. On the top and bottom you have the buns — important, but not really the point of the burger. Then you have your lettuce, tomatoes, and onions, a couple of layers that matter more to some people than others (I don’t understand people who skip the lettuce and tomato, but that’s just how some people are). But in the middle is the meat and the cheese. That’s the whole point of the burger.
Sometimes writers in Scripture work the same way. They lay out a few things, land on a really important lesson in the middle, and then circle back and repeat those earlier elements, often in reverse.
We see this pattern here in Genesis. At the beginning of chapter 2, humanity is alone. By the end of chapter 3, humanity is alone again, exiled from the garden. At the beginning, God gives Adam and Eve freedom, except for one thing: don’t eat from that tree. By the end, they are living with the consequences of having eaten from it. At the beginning, God creates the woman as an ezer kenegdo, a perfect and equal partner. At the end, we read the words, “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” Not exactly equal anymore. Before they ate the fruit, they were naked and felt no shame. After they ate it, they covered themselves and were ashamed.
Then we come to the middle: the meat and cheese, the point of the hamburger. It happens the moment they saw the fruit, desired it, ate it, and realized they were naked. That’s when everything changes. Everything in the first half gets reversed in the second half, because they disobeyed. They ate the fruit, and we see the consequences unfold from there.
A Bad Choice
Last week we talked about how all the goodness of creation, everything God had made that was good and right and according to his purpose, came undone with one bad choice. Adam and Eve decided to listen to the wrong voice. They listened to the serpent instead of their Creator.
Here’s the strange thing: in reality, they were already like God in some ways. They were made in his image. It seems they had a pattern of walking with God in the cool of the afternoon, which is pretty remarkable if you think about it. But they wanted more. It wasn’t enough for them to reflect God or be somewhat like him. They wanted autonomy. They wanted to define right and wrong for themselves. They wanted to see what the serpent was talking about. So they ate the fruit. If you’ve ever raised teenagers, you understand exactly what Adam and Eve were doing.
They wanted to do it their way. They wanted to see what would happen. They listened to the wrong voice, and we see the consequences.
C.S. Lewis wrote that the moment you have any self at all, there is the possibility of putting yourself first. You can see it in kids and teenagers. Wanting to be the center, wanting to be God, Lewis says, was the sin of Satan, and it’s the sin he taught the human race: to put yourself in the center, to put yourself first, to do what you want to do.
Last week we looked at how sin entered the picture: original sin and personal sin. Today I want to go further and look at three big consequences of this disobedience, three consequences of what we call sin. These are things every one of us has dealt with, continues to deal with, and will keep dealing with. But they are also things Jesus has come to restore. He has already lived, ministered, died, and risen again to restore each one.
Sin Damages Our Relationship with God
The first consequence of sin is that it breaks our relationship with God.
Genesis 3:8-10 tells us that 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 him among the trees. But the Lord called out, “Where are you?” Not because he didn’t know where they were, but because he wanted them to come out and answer. They said, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.”
Before sin, they walked with God face to face, in daily companionship. Afterward, they ran and hid. They hear his footsteps, and there’s dread.
I remember, a couple of times as a kid, getting in trouble during the day, and my mom would say, “Just go to your room until your dad gets home.” Has anyone else been there? You’re in your room, and then you hear the car pull up, the car door shut, the front door open, and what’s your reaction? It’s not, “Yay, Dad’s home!” It’s more like hiding under the bed, hoping he won’t find you. It doesn’t work, but it’s that same instinct: I have to hide. I’m ashamed. I feel vulnerable, so I have to hide, because I know what I did was wrong, and Dad is home now.
The word naked shows up a lot in these chapters, and that might seem a little odd. I think it’s important to realize this isn’t just about a physical lack of clothing. When Scripture describes them as naked, it’s describing transparency and vulnerability, being open, trusting, and secure, fully known and fully loved. There’s nothing to hide. There’s innocence, openness, trust, security.
After they eat the fruit, there’s shame instead, a desire to hide. That transparency and vulnerability with God and with each other is gone. Everything has changed, because sin turns intimacy into hiding, love into fear, and relationship into separation.
Isaiah 59:2 says, “Your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you so that he will not hear.” It’s a similar picture. When you tell a child to go play but stay where you can see them, the child inevitably wanders around the corner where neither of you can see the other. That’s not because the parent went and hid. It’s because the child wandered off. In the same way, God hasn’t hidden from us because he decided to leave. His presence feels clouded because the one who sins hides themselves. God hasn’t left; we’re the ones who turned the corner and walked away.
If you think about it, hiding from God is absurd, about as pointless as me hiding under my bed when my dad got home. But we try anyway. And yet God comes looking. Some of you probably have your own story about trying to run and hide, and God coming after you. In fact, that’s what we pray for every Sunday here, for the people in our lives who aren’t walking with the Lord. We pray, “Lord, don’t give up on them. Keep coming after them. Keep searching for them.”
God doesn’t turn around and hide. He keeps looking and keeps asking, “Where are you?” But God won’t force our belief. He won’t coerce us into loving him. It’s our choice, and sometimes we choose not to, and that’s what we’re talking about when we talk about sin.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the theologian and martyr, said that sin wants to remain unknown. Sin likes to stay in the darkness. It shuns the light. But in the darkness, sin becomes poison to the person.
Adam and Eve disobeyed. They tried to hide. Their relationship with God was broken, not the way it was before, because of their choice, because of what they had done.
But here’s the good news. John reminds us in his letter that if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. Confession is coming out of the bushes. It’s saying, “Here I am, Lord. I don’t want to hide anymore.” It’s making ourselves vulnerable again, open and trusting before the Lord and with each other, desiring to make things right, desiring to repair what’s broken.
To each of us today, God continues to call, “Where are you?” Not because he doesn’t know, but because he wants us to respond and come out of hiding. Here I am, Lord. That’s the gospel message right there: what was broken by sin is restored in Jesus Christ. What was broken by sin is restored, made new, repaired, and fixed in Jesus Christ. Amen. That’s good news.
Sin Damages Our Relationships with Each Other
The second big consequence, and this one we deal with constantly, is that sin breaks relationships between people.
Before Adam and Eve ate the fruit, theirs was an ezer kenegdo, an equal partnership, the kind where they could lean on each other and support one another. Afterward, Scripture says the man will rule over the woman. N.T. Wright explains it this way: what we see in that verse is not God’s ideal design but the tragic consequence of human rebellion. God is describing the fractured world sin created, not prescribing how things ought to be. When Scripture says the man will rule over the woman, that’s the consequence of sin, not how God created things to be. It’s the result of no longer being open, transparent, and vulnerable with each other.
And it’s not just a marriage issue or a male-female issue. We can look all over the place at the many ways we divide people, by the color of their skin, by economic status, by political party, or whatever else. We really like to divide people into “my people” and “those other people.” But division, in whatever form, is a consequence of sin.
Every one of us is created in the image of God, even the people where that image is hard to see, including, sometimes, the people closest to us. We are all created in his image. Instead of seeing each other as co-image-bearers, equally loved, equally valued, equally created by God, we often see people as competitors. I don’t mean the good kind of competition, like the Olympics. I mean looking at the people around us and thinking, “I have to be better. I have to outdo them.” We see people as threats, to us or to whatever group we identify with. We see people as objects to be used to get what we want. We see people as opponents to be defeated.
My friends, as God’s people, holy and dearly loved, that ought not be. We shouldn’t see people as competitors, threats, objects, or opponents. I’m grateful to be part of a church that recognizes the value of every person as an image-bearer of God. It’s unfortunate that we even need a statement like this, but the Church of the Nazarene’s manual, which lays out what we believe and teach, includes language I think is important for us today.
It reads, in part:
We urge our churches everywhere to continue to strengthen programs of education that provoke understanding and harmony among all people. We urge each member of the Church of the Nazarene to examine humbly his or her personal attitudes and actions towards others. Such an examination is a first step in achieving the Christian goal of full participation in the life of the church and in the community. We re-emphasize our belief that holiness of heart and life is the basis for right living. We believe that Christian harmony between races or genders will come when complete submission to Jesus Christ has changed the hearts of people. That is to say, the essence of true Christianity consists in loving God with one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength and loving our neighbors as ourselves. Therefore, we renounce any form of racial or ethnic division. We renounce indifference, exclusion, subjugation, and oppression as a grave sin against God and against our fellow human beings.
That’s hard to do, isn’t it? But those things break relationships with people, and things that break relationships with people are sin, just as things that break our relationship with God are sin. The statement ends this way:
We lament the legacy of every form of racism and discrimination throughout the world. We seek to confront that legacy through repentance, reconciliation, and biblical justice. We seek to repent of every behavior in which we have been overtly or covertly complicit in these sins, both past and present. And in confession and sorrow, we seek forgiveness and reconciliation.
“Biblical justice” simply means working to make things right again.
When we look at the life and ministry of Jesus, people always came before programs, policies, and procedures. People came first. In a world full of voices that divide, dehumanize, and discriminate, we have to remember that we are people of reconciliation. We are people of restoration. We are people of resurrection. We’ve been called to restore these broken relationships, to do the work of making things right in our own lives, our communities, our society, our world.
Galatians 3:28 says, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female” — and we could add a whole list of other things we like to divide over — “for all are one in Christ Jesus.” Every single one. Jesus came to tear down those walls. Jesus came to restore the partnerships and relationships that have been broken. Jesus came to make enemies into family. That’s hard to imagine, isn’t it?
But when the church gets this right, when we truly learn to love one another and love the people in our communities, even the ones hardest to love, when we learn to serve one another, honor one another, and see people as human beings created in God’s image, the world takes notice. Our witness is heard, and the world is changed. Amen.
What was broken by sin, Jesus Christ came to restore: the human relationships in our own lives and in the world around us. Those broken relationships between people and groups of people are the result of sin, not the way God created things to be. But what was broken by sin is being restored in Jesus Christ. And as disciples of Jesus, we get to be part of the work of restoring those relationships. It’s a big call. It’s a big mission. But it’s what God has called us to do.
Sin Damages Our Relationship with Creation
The third big consequence is that sin breaks the relationship between humanity and the created world.
Timothy Keller writes that the essence of sin is that human beings substituted ourselves for God at the center of the world. We put ourselves where only God deserves to be. This third consequence is that sin destroys the relationship between humanity and the world around us.
God says to the woman, “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth.” To Adam, he says, “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you... By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground.”
It’s hard to imagine what the garden was like before this. Adam and Eve had work to do there too, but the curse means they now have to labor hard just to make the ground produce anything, sweating and working the land to make the earth do what it was made to do.
I love what Paul writes in Romans 8 — creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. Creation itself is damaged by sin! It’s a frustrated world we live in, subjected to frustration not by its own choice but by the will of the one who subjected it. Yet creation waits in hope that it too will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time, as if creation itself is asking, “How long, Lord? How long until you fix all this?”
It’s not just Adam and Eve, and not just you and me. Creation itself groans under the weight of sin. Creation itself suffers the consequences of our sin, and our relationship with it is broken. We still pull weeds. We still sweat. We still groan.. We work too much and rest too little. We deal with economic disparity, where those who work the hardest often seem to earn the least, and jobs that carry the least real value often pay the most. We deal with pollution, air quality problems, disease, and disaster, none of it the way God intended.
And yet we’ve been given the task of stewarding this creation, cultivating it, caring for it, developing it, drawing out its potential.
N.T. Wright says that God intends to renew the whole creation. The point of it all is that God intends to do for the whole world, the whole cosmos, what he did for Jesus at Easter. Jesus rose from the dead, overcoming death and sin, and we have the opportunity for that same kind of restoration and resurrection. Even the world around us will be restored, resurrected, and made new again, back to what it was meant to be. Resurrection isn’t just for people; it’s for this whole world we live in.
What was broken by sin is being restored in Jesus Christ. Amen. That’s good news, isn’t it? Our relationship with God, our relationship with each other, and our relationship with this world have been, are being, and will be restored in Jesus Christ. That’s good news.
Reflection Questions
- Which of the three broken relationships — with God, with others, or with creation — do you find yourself most aware of in your own life right now, and why?
- In what ways have you tried to “hide” from God rather than run to him? What would it look like this week to step out of hiding?
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Steven E Fairbanks
Steven E Fairbanks