Genesis Framework

GF 27 Genesis 3.7-13
February 28, 2016
Part 27

 

Genesis 3:7-13
7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings.
8 And they heard the sound 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 Then the LORD God called to Adam and said to him, "Where are you?"
10 So 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 from the tree of which I commanded you that you should not eat?"
12 Then the man said, "The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate."
13 And the LORD God said to the woman, "What is this you have done?" The woman said, "The serpent deceived me, and I ate."

Let’s talk about exposure.

to expose – to be in an unprotected place or state, laid open to (verb transitive, to an influence or action) various sorts of dangerous or unwanted conditions.to posit: to set in a place or position, to set down as fact + ex: to traverse from the inside to the outside.

“To expose” literally means, to be placed outside of someplace, with a connotation that is negative; as in the idea of being cast out from within the confines or protective covering of a safe-place.

We can now apply this idea to the situation immediately following man’s utter failure to fulfill his messianic mission, when God arrived onto the scene in judgment-mode. Adam and Eve had declared good to be evil and evil to be good, broken the covenant with God, and placed their own destiny into the lordship hands of the devil himself.

There were two reasons that Adam tried to find a place for them to hide.One, is the obviously the sense of exposure to the danger of possible harm of that affects all who sense the possibility of physical threat. The second factor is the sense of Spirit conviction from being exposed to the pure light of God’s holiness.

Meredith Kline puts it succinctly, “Even before the judicial disclosures made in formal pronouncements of the Lord, a process of self-exposure and self-judgment on the part of Adam and Eve had already occurred.”

Adam tried to find a place for them to hide to cover their flesh and to cover their conscience, but there was no place to flee from the Spirit.Remember, “the cool of the day” is better translated, “the Spirit of the day”, so that even the darkness is flooded with light.

Psalm 139:7-12
7 Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence?
8 If I ascend into heaven, You are there; If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there.
9 If I take the wings of the morning, And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
10 Even there Your hand shall lead me, And Your right hand shall hold me.
11 If I say, "Surely the darkness shall fall on me," Even the night shall be light about me;
12 Indeed, the darkness shall not hide from You, But the night shines as the day; The darkness and the light are both alike to You.

NKJ James 1:17
Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning.

…neither is there any variation in the intensity of light emanating from Him, …nor is there a casting of a shadow resulting from His turning of direction.This statement further implies that God is the only original source of light, and that there does not exist any greater source of light that could shine upon Him and cause His presence to cast a shadow to reveal any change in the direction of His movements.

While recognizing the distinctive character of the voice( sound) of God from within the tumultuous noise associated with the arrival of the Glory-Spirit, mankind’s conscience had already began the conviction process, and his sense of guilt affected in them a sense of exposure.

The conscience either accuses or excuses.

At the terrifying arrival of God, confirmed by the sound of His voice, wind and light penetrated the trees with an intensity so great that there was no place for a shadow of darkness to exist; there was no place to hide.

The bubble of self-delusion that the devil helped them construct about themselves, immediately burst open; and the walls that had been erected through a the process of building a false sense of security in the devil’s lordship, crashed down in an instant, at the sound of God’s voice.

The first indication of guilt-sense of shame and a condition of alienation and confusion was in the altered relationship between Adam and Eve, compelling them to hide their physical nakedness( exposure) from one another’s eyes and from God.

Gen 3.7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made
themselves coverings.

Notice the irony, that the act of attempting to cover themselves actually betrayed their guilty awareness of having broken the covenant with God.

Their own reactions were self-incriminating.

NKJ Revelation 6:15f
And the kings of the earth, the great men, the rich men, the commanders, the mighty men, every slave and every free man, hid themselves in the caves and in the rocks of the mountains, and said to the mountains and rocks, "Fall on us and hide us from the face of Him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb!

The principle here is, that the taking of action to attempt to conceal sin, an opposite effect is realized, the result is that the sin is actually revealed.

Why do perps generally take off running from police?

What they felt was a spiritual nakedness before God’s eyes.

They had lost the covering of righteousness, the garment of the beauty of holiness.

They had lost the ethical glory of God-likeness which is required to stand as priest before the Face of God and to reflect the Glory of God.

They had despised their original endowment of the image of God, and traded their inheritance for a likeness of the devil.

Satan had become their newly adopted covenant-father.

Here is a strange but true observation to come out of this.

The Scripture in Genesis has a subtle way of signifying man’s nakedness as in a likeness to the serpent-Satan by means of a word-play based on the similarity of the sound of (1) the Hebrew word for “naked” and (2) that with the word for “subtle”, used for the serpent in

Genesis 2:24-25
Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.

Meaning: naked, bare
adjective masculine singular used substantively

NKJ Genesis 3:1
Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, "Has God indeed said, 'You shall not eat of every tree of the garden'?"

Meaning: subtle, shrewd, crafty

adjective masculine singular used substantively

Remember, the devil had urged man to adopt his ways in the name of advancing human knowledge, but the consequence of his disobedience was to obscure and suppress the truth. Since they were unsuccessful at hiding from God’s Presence, they still persisted in thwarting the discovery of the truth, even when subjected to judicial interrogation.

The tricks they tried were right out of the devil’s tool-box.

In order to hide the facts about their apostasy, they resorted to evasion, distortion, deception, re-definition, focus-shifting, petty-fogging, red-herring, smoke-screen, and similar tactics associated with the wiles of the serpent.

Part of the spiritual glory of being in the image of God is to possess a love of the truth.

Fallen man, in defense of himself, instead of seeking to confess the truth, defend the truth, and be obedient to God’s Word, is characterized in his apostasy by his doubt of its truth, questioning God’s word, resenting it, ignoring it, distorting, suppressing, and evading His truth.

These are the reasons for allowing rigorous cross-examination in legitimate courts of law; as a means of obtaining full disclosure of the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Let me illustrate a common type of fallacy whenever we fail to take into account some important factor or omit some important part of the truth, that can so easily lead us to a totally false conclusion.

In a trial, following a disastrous wreck at a railway crossing one night, a trainman testified that he had signaled vigorously by waving a lantern. And he demonstrated dramatically to the jury the exact manner in which he had waved it. After the trial, the railway’s attorney commended him
for the effectiveness of his testimony. The trainman wiped the perspiration from his face and said,… “I was awfully afraid that other lawyer was going to ask me if I had the lantern lighted.”

God first interrogated the man, in keeping with him as the one with primary responsibility.

He had to account for his self-concealment.

Adam explained it, not as an act of disobedience, but instead referred only to its consequence, his nakedness; with the implication that his nakedness was the fault of God, since God had created him in this condition.

10 So he said, "I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; and I hid myself."

Then, when forced by God to deal with his act of disobedience, he ignored his responsibility and doubled-down more explicitly laying the blame on God by shifting the blame to his wife Eve, insinuating that the ultimate source of the problem had been God for having given him this woman in the first place.

12 Then the man said, "The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate."

When the focus turned to her, Eve also avoided confession of the truth.

Then we see a most amazing thing take place, Eve switched dramatically from being the devil’s advocate to becoming his accuser, and in the process try to dissolve her own responsibility by placing it on the guile of the serpent.

13 And the LORD God said to the woman, "What is this you have done?" The woman said, "The serpent deceived me, and I ate."

This too probably was rooted in a perverse suggestion that it was God’s fault for having created the beasts of the field of which the serpent was one.

In her testimony she, like Adam, reveals the image of their new god, the great accuser and the father of lies.

NKJ John 8:44
"You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it.

In the Lord’s Prayer, I believe Jesus makes an obvious identity distinction by using an clarification phrase that is explicit in this wording;

"In this manner, therefore, pray: Our Father which one is in the heavens, Hallowed be Your name”.

This is a reference which not only serves to contrast the Father with our biological earthly-father, but it also implies a separate distinction of the Father to the spirit-father of those whose citizenship is in the fallen world, those under present parental-lordship of the devil.

So, through the process of judicial interrogation full exposure revealed the fallen state of the man and the woman by means of their self-incriminating words, lying evasions, and even gross incriminations against God.

Through their own testimony they exposed the truth of the newly assumed image of their adopted god, the father of lies.

The naked truth of their apostasy had been fully exposed.

Many will be surprised on the Day of Judgment when they discover that it was just as the Word of God says; only the righteousness of Christ is able to save you.All men are sinners and no one can save himself. God is just, so He must punish sin; but He is also merciful, moreover gracious, and offers His Son as the perfect sacrifice in order to purchase a place for you in heaven, which He offers to you as the free gift of eternal life. As we continue to examine man’s earliest duties with regard to the covenant of works, although they can be categorically divided into two distinct types of classes; one in relationship with God, and the other in relationship with fellow man, all covenant stipulations are expressions of the will of the Lord. The law of the covenant is the law of man’s imzage-sonship.

Jesus is God Incarnate

In order to pay the debt of our sins, He came from Heaven, having been sent by the Father, where He lived a life of perfect obedience to the Father even unto the shameful death upon the cross in order to pay the debt of your sins.This gift must be received by faith, believing that Jesus’ perfect life and Cross Work was His complete and necessary Atonement for your sins, in your behalf.Faith is a gift that comes by the Power of God the Holy Spirit working in a person’s innermost being. The Holy Spirit has the authority and power to quicken your dead spirit, to make it come to life. If you have not done so before this moment, ask Jesus to forgive you your sins, tell Him you’ve stop trying to be your own savior, and ask Him to come into your life right now, and to give you eternal life. Then, in faith believing, thank Him for the gift that He is giving you, the one He paid for in full in your place, in Jesus’ name, AMEN

 

Copyright February, 2016
Rev. Jim Craig
All Rights Reserve