Covering Our Shame
Download MP3Genesis 38 through 24. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the in the cool of the day and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord among the trees of the garden, but the Lord called to the man and said to him, where are you? And he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself. He said, who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree which I commanded you not to eat?
Speaker 1:The man said, the woman who you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree and I ate. Then the Lord God said to the woman, what is this that you have done? The woman said, the serpent deceived me and I ate. The Lord God said to the serpent, because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field. On your belly you shall go and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.
Speaker 1:I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. To the woman he said, I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing. In pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you.
Speaker 1:And to Adam he said, because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, you shall not eat of it. Cursed is the ground because of you. In pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you. You shall eat the plants of the field.
Speaker 1:By the sweat of your face, you shall eat bread till you return to the ground. For out of it you were taken, for you are dust, and to dust you shall return. The man called his name his wife's name Eve because she was the mother of all living. And the lord god made Adam made for Adam and for his wife garments of skin and clothed them. Then the Lord said, behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil.
Speaker 1:Now lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat and live forever. Therefore, the Lord God sent him out of the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man and at and at the east of the Garden of Eden, he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way of the tree of life. This is the word of the lord.
Joel Brooks:Pray with me. God, we ask that you would honor the reading of your word, that it would go forth in power. Lord, we need to hear from you. No one needs to hear from me. We we desperately need to hear your voice.
Joel Brooks:And so I ask that my words would remembered anymore. But Lord, may your words remain and may they change us. I pray this in the strong name of Jesus. Amen. A few months ago, I went to Montana, and I got to spend a few days hiking.
Joel Brooks:I was hiking in what's known as the Beartooth Mountains. And so, I was really hoping to get to see a bear, hopefully a grizzly bear. I didn't want to meet a grizzly bear, I just wanted, you know, from a distance to kind of see one. And, one of the days I'm walking along the trail, and I'm seeing signs of bears everywhere, and I I hear something around the the bend that sounds very large. In my mind, it also sounded flesh eating.
Joel Brooks:But it but it was something large there, and so I froze and I thought, okay. What, what do you do when you meet a bear? What do you do? And I went through my vast knowledge of bear encounters and I could not remember a single thing. You know, what happens if you meet a bear?
Joel Brooks:Do you run? Do you fight? Do you make yourself in a teeny little ball and have them just kind of roll you around or, all, all these thoughts are flooding through my head. And then I decide, okay, no, I'm just going to be perfectly still. I'm just going to stand here.
Joel Brooks:And then I thought, well, what happens if the bear comes? Do you look at him or do you look away? You know, are you supposed to establish eye contact or is that the worst thing that you could do? And I'm hearing this noise get louder and louder and I was like, I'm going to stare. And it was a moose.
Joel Brooks:And so I was like, okay, just a moose. But I was, I was a little nervous trying to make this decision. It's not a decision we have to make daily, you know. Am I allowed to stare somebody in the eye or not? You know, I don't know about you if you, well, we all do.
Joel Brooks:We all people watch. I'm not going to ask the question if you do. We all people watch. You know, you're you're in traffic. You're gonna look at the person next to you.
Joel Brooks:You're gonna look at the person on this side. You're gonna look at this person on this side. What happens when you're doing that and the person turns and looks at you? And you're you're the the gaze that you briefly, your eyes meet. Do you stay there and just stare?
Joel Brooks:No. I mean, immediately you turn and you look at your, you know, fiddle with the radio. You're doing something else. You never lock eye contact and you look away. What, what is it about humans that when you look a stranger in the eye, you immediately have to look away?
Joel Brooks:Why is it we can go to a park and look at a person's dog in the eye for an hour, but we can't look at them in the eye for more than just a second without feeling guilty or shame? My kids, if they want to annoy one another more than anything, all they have to do is stare at the other. I mean, we hear so many times, mom, dad, Caroline is staring at me. You go there, sure enough, Caroline's just staring. Doing nothing, just staring.
Joel Brooks:But it's awful. The biggest fights we've had in our house have just come from looking at one another. Why is that so offensive? Why is it when you, when you look at that person at the mall or in traffic, you immediately have to look away. I think what you're seeing there is actually a remnant from the fall.
Joel Brooks:It's a remnant from the fall. Look at chapter 3 verse 7. Then they, the eyes of both were opened and they knew that they were naked and they sewed fig trees together and made themselves loin cloths. So the very first thing that happened when Adam and Eve ate the fruit is they realized they did not have any clothes on. I mean, up to this point, they didn't realize it.
Joel Brooks:It's just how life was. But now they realize, we don't have any clothes on and we're embarrassed. Also, they felt shame. Also, they they felt like they needed to hide something. They didn't want people looking at them.
Joel Brooks:They they felt this urgent impulse to cover up immediately. Now notice here that they are not covering themselves up before God. The reason they are covering themselves up is because Adam doesn't want Eve looking at them, and Eve doesn't want Adam looking at her. It's before each other. You know, beef before the fall, they were used to total openness with one another.
Joel Brooks:There was nothing to hide, but now they've got to cover up. Now they feel shame. No longer did they want somebody staring at them. They've got to look away or have that person look away. This is one of, one of the reasons actually, and I wasn't going to talk about this.
Joel Brooks:My wife actually, she, she reads through my message and she wrote a little notation on here and said, I really think you should go into this. This is why sex within Christian marriage is redemptive. It is. God gave marriage as a gift for His relation to symbolize His relationship with us. And sex within christian marriage is the time where you can be naked and not ashamed.
Joel Brooks:You can look your partner in the eye with no barriers in between and say, I love you, you love me. It's redemptive. It gives us a taste, just a little taste of what we have waiting when we were married to Christ. It gives us a little taste of what Adam and Eve actually experienced beforehand, but it's just a taste. Adam and Eve here, they pathetically try to cover up their shame with fig leaves.
Joel Brooks:Mankind has been covering up their shame ever since using different things. I don't personally sew together little fig leaves and put them on me, but I cover up my shame in other ways. The reason that probably many of you try to work so hard, try to impress your boss so much, it's nothing more than fig leaves. You, you, you don't want them to see you as you are. You don't want them to see your insecurities.
Joel Brooks:So you're going to work these ridiculous long hours to please them or some of the reason, the reasons why some of you maybe got straight As in school, had to get straight As in school. Why? Fig leaves. That that grade was how you covered up your insecurities. How you covered up.
Joel Brooks:You didn't want people to see who you really are, but you can always say, I'm a straight a student. I'm the one with all the stars. I'm the one who always got the checks on the chart. Parents. The reason that, some of us always want our kids to be on perfect behavior before others.
Joel Brooks:It's nothing more than fig leaves because we don't want other parents to stare at us and to judge us. And so we put forth these perfect children and say, look, we're really okay. I was took my kids, to the park not long ago. And so they're playing and there's a bunch of parents, a bunch of kids there, and some kid just throws down trash on the ground. And Natalie, she runs over and she picks up the trash, and she puts it in the trash can and all the parents are watching.
Joel Brooks:I was like, that's right. That's right. My girl. I mean, I felt like I was wearing royal robes at that point, you know. I've also taken my kids to McDonald's, and you take your kids to McDonald's and they have been the winiest, most crying brats you could possibly imagine, And they're screaming and yelling because they didn't want the hot fudge sundae with nuts, daddy.
Joel Brooks:And they're making this huge scene and all these other parents are looking at me and I feel shame because I'm using my kids as fig leaves to cover up. I don't want people to see who I really am. So I put them out before me. I think people have 2 basic emotional needs. 2.
Joel Brooks:And you've heard me say this over and over, it's to be known and to be loved. I think that's innate in every person. We want to be known, and we want to be loved. The problem is we feel those things are at odds. Because if somebody really knows me, somebody really knows my dark thoughts, the evil impulses I have, they, they really know what's in here.
Joel Brooks:There's no way they can love me. And so, if we want to be known, we're thinking, well then we can never be loved. And if we want to be loved, that means we have to keep these things hidden. It means we're never known. And we have these, these two primary impulses in us that seemingly cannot be reconciled.
Joel Brooks:We'll see later that they can in Christ. My old counseling professor, doctor. Linkson Hagood. He told me something that shocked me at first, but now over the years of ministry, it, I believe he was dead on. He said that 90% of the people who came to him for counseling, 90% would never be there if they had just one friend.
Joel Brooks:1. 90% would never come to him if they had just one person who knew them. And the reason that I have come to believe this is, now over many years of counseling, one of the most common things I hear from somebody who comes into my office is this, Joel, you know, I've, I've never told anyone this, but, and then they tell me. Or, you're the first person, Joel, that I've I've ever shared this story with. Something's wrong.
Joel Brooks:If you could be in your thirties or even in your forties, and you've never told anybody these things, this has always been hidden. But they've felt that tension. If if people know me, they won't love me. So I can never be known. I've got to hide.
Joel Brooks:I've got to put on fig leaves. I gotta put on a mask. The first thing that people need to admit when they come to counseling is that they're a sinner, and they just need to take a nice, honest look at themselves, and say, I'm in absolute need of mercy and grace. Much of what I do is just remove fig leaves When people come to me, the story here actually is full of grace. It's full of mercy.
Joel Brooks:After Adam and Eve sinned, they covered themselves. They hid from the presence of God. The word for presence of God is literally face. They hid from God's face. They could not stand to look at his face.
Joel Brooks:They didn't want him staring at them. So they hid. And here's the amazing thing. God obviously knows where they are, much like when my kids play hide and seek. It's not really hard to, you know, they're all giggling in the closet.
Joel Brooks:I know where they are. God is not out there trying to find them. He knows where they are. But he does not yell, why? Why did he do this?
Joel Brooks:He doesn't yell, why? He yells, where? Where are you? Where are you? He he seeks them out.
Joel Brooks:He's calling to them. If God had wanted it, he certainly had the right to destroy them on the spot. And I think if God can just speak and he can have billions and billions of stars just explode into existence, I cannot imagine what a God like that, what his wrath would look like poured out on somebody. And these people deserved his wrath because he had given them everything. Absolutely everything.
Joel Brooks:Life, the garden, every good gift, his presence, and yet they would not obey his one command. They just, they deserved wrath, but he didn't ask, why did you do this? He just said, where are you? And he sought after them. He pursues them and when he finally finds them, for the first time, we hear man speak to God.
Joel Brooks:This is man's first prayer, if you will. Up to this point, Adam, he's only talked to his wife. Here's the first time he actually talks to God. In verse 10, and he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself. So Adam's first words to God is this, I was scared of you.
Joel Brooks:I was afraid. And all of us have inherited that fear. All of us are scared of God's face. Scared of his gaze. Scared of his presence.
Joel Brooks:There's a fear innate in us because of this. To stand before a righteous God is a terrifying thing. And do you know that the most repeated command in the rest of the Bible is actually a response to Adam's first prayer. Do not be afraid. You will find that commandment more than any other in scripture.
Joel Brooks:And it's a response to this right here. Man's initial response to God is, I'm scared. And throughout the rest of the pages God says, do not be afraid. Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid.
Joel Brooks:And when God finds them, one of the things I think it's somewhat humorous, I guess it's not, but Adam and Eve pick up this sin thing really quick, really quick. I mean, the first thing Adam does, God confronts him. He's like, woah, no, woah, woah, woah. The woman, the woman that you gave, gave me the fruit. And so first he blames the woman, and then he blames God.
Joel Brooks:The woman that you gave is the one who gave me the fruit. And so he plays the blame game. It's not until the end where he finally says, and yes, I ate. So then God goes to the woman and says, what is this you have done? In Hebrew, it's pretty strong.
Joel Brooks:It's, it's like, you did what? You did what? Do you have any idea what in the world you've done? It comes across like that. To which she says, the serpent.
Joel Brooks:This is a serpent. So she shifts blame. And shifting blame is just another way of fig leaves. Don't look at me, look at them. Don't look at me, look at them.
Joel Brooks:And we we do it all the time. We always shift blame. You know, your spouse tells you that you need to be more kind. Your first response is, you're right dear, I repent. Now your first response is, well, yeah, you started it.
Joel Brooks:Blame. Shift right there. Or perhaps it's, I'm just so tired. Or I I didn't eat breakfast this morning. We give these excuses or we shift blame.
Joel Brooks:Rarely, when confronted with sin, do we say, yep. Nailed that one. It was me. You're right. We learn quickly.
Joel Brooks:Now, the result of this sin is God's curse and God's punishment, which is a radical shift in Genesis because up to this point, he is only blessed. Everything from him has been blessing and blessing, and now it's curse. Verse 17 says in pain, he's saying this to the woman in pain or sorry, in verse 16. Yes. He says this, let me read it.
Joel Brooks:I was in chapter 2. That's why I couldn't find it. So the woman, he said, I will surely multiply your pain and childbearing and pain. You shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you.
Joel Brooks:So the woman's now going to have pain when she gives childbirth. And she's now going to want to dominate her husband. Derek Kidner, which is outstanding commentary on Genesis, his commentary. He says this, the words to love and to cherish now become to desire and dominate. And certainly while pagan marriage can rise far above this, the pull of sin is always towards this.
Joel Brooks:And so certainly not every marriage is, you know, to desire and to, to dominate over your husband. But the pull is, it's there. God then curses the ground and tells man, in verse 17, he says, in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles that shall bring forth for you. So from this point on, work now becomes toilsome.
Joel Brooks:Work used to be enjoyable. I would say work was even liberating for the man. How many of you tomorrow when you go to work are going to feel liberated? Monday morning. Great.
Joel Brooks:Another work day. I mean, we we usually feel enslaved to work. Because work has changed. It's so much harder for work to be gardening, which is what work is supposed to be when you could bring something life giving and something beautiful out of the elements that God gives you. That's good, godly work and it's so hard.
Joel Brooks:You know, when you go to your job now to see that into fruition. We can identify with Paul in Romans 3 when he's talking about this He says, There's no one who seeks for God, meaning we're all hiding. Says, All have turned aside. Together they have become useless or worthless. God looks at you as gardeners, and after the fall he says, you're now useless.
Joel Brooks:You're worthless. Your job was to lead all of creation into praise. Was to take all of my creation and work it and fashion it into something beautiful and life giving giving. And you fail. And we feel that we feel this toil.
Joel Brooks:Now it's interesting that after Adam and Eve sin, God doesn't just punish them. He doesn't just punish them. He actually curses the earth. The earth, for the moral sin of man, he curses physical earth. It would be like if one of you did something wrong to me and I said, great.
Joel Brooks:I am going to punish you projector. You know, it just doesn't really make sense. How does the moral sin that you did to me, how does it result in a curse here? What's going on? Why is he cursing the earth?
Joel Brooks:And from this point on, and we're going to see this fleshed out through the rest of Genesis, the world becomes a hostile place to live. You're going to have droughts. You're going to have famines, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, Katrina's. The tsunami hit Indonesia. Those are, those are a result of the fall.
Joel Brooks:But why did God do this? Or why, you know, in Romans 8, did he subject creation to futility? Because of our sin. The answer is this. It's that, so that every time we see these physical horrors, we would be reminded of the horror of sin every time.
Joel Brooks:They are, think of them as signposts signposts, reminding us in our fallen world signposts reminding us that sin is wretched. Sin is ghastly. Sin is horrible. And if we think, and it's tempting to think that this is slightly an overreaction by God. You know, I mean, come on.
Joel Brooks:They just kind of ate a fruit and you're cursing the entire world here. It's if we think it's an overreaction, for 1, we don't understand the glory of God, and, and 2, we don't understand how far we've fallen. We don't know what it was like to be Adam and Eve and to be naked and unashamed. To walk with God in the cool of the evening, to have enjoyable fruitful work. We can't relate to paradise.
Joel Brooks:We do not know how far we have fallen. And so God has to put up these signposts to remind us that sin is costly. Sin is horrible. And so he might bring something like a tsunami or a hurricane, and we look at it, what we should be thinking is, for one, that should be me who died. It should be me who died in that, because I have sinned.
Joel Brooks:And when we see something of that magnitude, that horrible, we need to be reminded that sin is horrible. Just this past week, I'll confess. My office is downtown, which means I'm approached a lot by people asking for money. I never carry cash on me. Always just, just my credit card.
Joel Brooks:And, you know, sometimes I'll take somebody to a Chick Fil A or something like that and buy them something to eat. But one time last week, a man came up to me and he asked for money, and this time I did have money in my wallet. It was a rare time I knew I did, and I said, I never carry cash. And I went past them. And it was an outright lie.
Joel Brooks:No way around it. An outright lie. And the scary thing is nothing happened. There was no thunderbolt that went with no lightning, you know, just destroyed. I, I, I just walked past them.
Joel Brooks:Nothing happened. The sun was still shining. It was still beautiful. I felt deeply convicted. I did.
Joel Brooks:I mean, I I I just prayed over that. I had the Lord forgive me of that. But I didn't feel the horror that I should have felt. The absolute horror of what I had just done. And how I had spit in the face of my creator, and not obeyed him, is what I what I did.
Joel Brooks:I don't see that. And the only way that I will see that is when God, from time to time, brings some natural tragedy, something like that, to shape me up and remind me like, that's terrible. Oh my gosh. Wait, that's because of me. My sin.
Joel Brooks:All of humanity's sin that the world is cursed. And it reminds me of the horror of sin in me. That the sin against such a glorious God is beyond terrible. It should make you weep. So often it doesn't.
Joel Brooks:So that's why God cursed the earth. It's their, their signpost for us when these terrible things happen. And so this text is full of, well, it's downright depressing, actually at first. A lot of tragedy, but but you do see hope. You do see hope.
Joel Brooks:Look at verse 20. The man called his wife's name Eve. Sorry. Go back to verse 15. No.
Joel Brooks:No. Sorry. I'm right. 20. A little confused.
Joel Brooks:The man called his wife's name Eve because she was the mother of all the living, and the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothe them. So the first thing that God does here, the first ray of hope, is he takes away their pathetic little skin, you know, fig leaves, and he gives them real clothes. And what he's doing is he's actually meeting 2 needs here. 1 is spiritual, 1 is physical. The first thing he's doing is, Hey, you know what?
Joel Brooks:Leaves cannot cover your shame. Something's got to die. There's going to have to be the shedding of blood and God himself apparently makes the first sacrifice because then he clothes them with animal skins. So God shows them apparently how to make sacrifices. Points towards a future atonement.
Joel Brooks:And the next thing he does is he meets very real physical needs. He gives them clothes. I mean, these were poor people in a hostile situation by their own doing. They deserve what they're getting, yet God still meets their physical needs. And so you could say that God is the 1st social activist.
Joel Brooks:He is. And when she sees people and he doesn't just say, hey, you're getting what you deserve. He actually meets their needs. But the greatest hope is found in verse 15. In what is called the protoevangel or the first gospel.
Joel Brooks:This is god speaking to the serpent. Says, I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. Here's where we get the first hint of Jesus, and what Jesus will come to do. God says that the serpent, there's gonna be a war between the serpent and this woman's seed.
Joel Brooks:Someday, the serpent is going to strike this person's heel. But then, this person is gonna turn around and crush the head. That's the imagery that's used there. And to understand what this means, you've got to fast forward from this 1000 of years, to the second Adam, to Jesus, to a man who never sinned. Jesus did not sin, yet Jesus was cursed.
Joel Brooks:Yet a curse fell on Jesus. For Jesus, obedience did not mean life. Obedience meant death. It meant taking on the curse and you so vividly see this in the gospels as they tell this, when they talk about the crown of thorns being put on his head. Thorns.
Joel Brooks:Thorns, the symbol of the curse. The result of the curse. Thorns. That curse of the world, the curse of creation being placed on Jesus. And him bearing it, even though he was perfect.
Joel Brooks:And so what happens is Jesus receives this blow. He's, he's bitten. The venom apparently is in him and he, he is dying, but in his death he gives the crushing blow to Satan and he destroys that curse. Jesus gives us back Eden. You could say, you know, at the end of the passage we read, there's that Cherubim with a flaming sword.
Joel Brooks:So the only way to go back into Eden is to fall under the sword. Jesus falls under the sword. Jesus dies in order to let us go back into Eden. We see this, in the gospels where it talks about the veil of the curtain or the veil of the temple, that curtain being torn in 2, that curtain was about as thick as your hand. Very thick.
Joel Brooks:You can't just tear this thing. And the curtain was embroidered with Cherubim because it was protecting the Holy place of God. Remember I told you a tabernacle was like a mini, mini garden of Eden and the temple was, was set up similarly. So there's this veil with the cherubim protecting the presence of God. And scripture tells us that when Jesus died, this veil was torn from top to bottom.
Joel Brooks:No longer is there a need for protection. No longer is there a need for the Cherubim. Now we have this free access. We can we can freely enter into relationship with God because of his atoning work. And so there's no longer a need to be scared.
Joel Brooks:There's no longer a need to to cover it with fig leaves. We don't have to hide from him anymore. God knows us and all our sin, and he has shown how much he loves us through the death of his son. And he has pursued us when we have been unlovable, pursued us at great cost to himself. So there is hope here.
Joel Brooks:We no longer have to be afraid. Instead, we can trust Jesus for our righteousness and our salvation. This is what we're going to celebrate now through this meal. And we're gonna take an extended time of worship, as we partake in this. On the night that Jesus was betrayed, he took bread and he broke it.
Joel Brooks:He said, this broken bread is my body broken for you. The same way he took the wine. He poured it in a cup and he held it and he said, this wine is my blood poured out for your forgiveness. This is the wine of the new covenant. He said, as often as you eat of this bread and you drink of this wine, you proclaim my death until I come.
Joel Brooks:When Eve took the fruit, She says, the the the phrase here is take and eat. Take and eat. Jesus says the same thing here. Take and eat. But the only way we can do that in this fellowship mule is because of the great cost and sacrifice to himself.
Joel Brooks:Y'all would pray with me. Lord, we give you thanks and praise right now. Jesus, thank you for your sacrifice. Thank you that we no longer have to be afraid. You know us and you love us.
Joel Brooks:We celebrate that now. We pray this in the name of Jesus, our savior. Amen.
