In Genesis 3:7-13 we see God pursuing the sinner. In speaking about God’s “pursuit” of us, I must say more than the typical Evangelical meaning. While the grace of God animates, the law of God still goes before. It is fitting to say here that God is out to confront Adam. The parent knocking on the rebellious teenage son’s door must not be out only to show that he cares, but also to bring blame, to expose darkness, to warn and to turn him away from the path of destruction. After all, what does it mean to be convicted of our sin?

“And when he [the Holy Spirit] comes, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment” (Jn. 16:8).

If this is what the Spirit does as a gift of Jesus in the New Covenant, there is no good reason to see it as less loving when God appears in this way at the beginning. Having said that, there are two things from the position of we human beings that will be in view here.

• The absurdity of hiding shame.

• The audacity of blaming God.

Doctrine. In spite of the absurdity of hiding our shame and the audacity of bringing our blame, God pursues us still.

The Absurdity of Hiding Shame

It is not absurd to be ashamed. In fact, shame is a lost virtue. There is an important place for shame, and not only on some rare occasion. Shame is natural now because sin is natural now. The prophet Jeremiah says to the Lord, “all who forsake you shall be put to shame” (Jer. 17:13). We couldn’t just use a bit more shame—we could use a whole universe more shame! It is not shame that is out of place, it is the attempt to hide our shame from God: “You know my reproach, and my shame and my dishonor” (Ps. 69:19).

The first specific thing this passage teaches us is that we all already know this, or, at least, at one moment, did know it. ‘Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked’ (v. 7a). This is the terrible irony of sin, as Kinder commented,

“The serpent’s promise of eyes … opened came true in its fashion (and cf. 22), but it was a grotesque anticlimax to the dream of enlightenment.”1

In Romans 1, the Apostle Paul tells us what we do with this awakening. We suppress it. We deflect it to the worship of other things. We drown the sound of conviction by a perverse crusade to normalize all of the world’s worst crimes. We know that we have been exposed. But each new sin does this. We take the bait, and we take a bite. It fails to satisfy and reality sets in. It is this awakening of conscience that sinners by nature snuff out. That is what is represented in their next action.

‘And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths’ (v. 7b). This is what prompts newcomers to the Bible, and those merely passing through its pages to give their two cents, to suppose that nakedness per se was the problem. No—not that nakedness. The author of Hebrews brings us to a very different invasion of privacy when he says that “no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account” (Heb. 4:13). Might these fig leaves be partly to hide from each other? That is the opinion of some commentators.2 Whatever the case may be, we can at least say that sin destroys our relationships to each other as well.

We now come to a concept that must be introduced and will be helpful to know in several other passages we come to in Genesis. One big word will make many things simpler. That word is ANTHROPOMORPHISM. This refers to those times in the Bible where God depicts Himself in the form (morphe) of a man (anthropos). In fact there are two elements of it in verses 8 and 9. The first depict God, who we know “is spirit” (Jn. 4:23), as if He had legs to walk; and it should be noted that our English “in the cool” is a smoothing over of “in the wind” or “in the spirit” (לְר֣וּחַ)—so it is not unlikely that Moses is describing the agency of the Holy Spirit as the more literal means of divine communion.

“And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden” (v. 8).

If God’s activity toward us is a spiritual reality, then what do “sound” and “walking” and “in the cool of the day” all signify? Belcher remarks that these words imply “that God’s coming to the garden for fellowship with Adam and Eve was a regular occurrence.”3 In other words, this original, daily “walk in the park” is meant to signify the sweetness of everything being at peace so that sorrow can intensify for having thrown it away. The Psalmist said about his old friend that had betrayed him,

“We used to take sweet counsel together; within God’s house we walked in the throng” (Ps. 55:14).

As I said, there is a second element of this anthropomorphism, and that comes in the form of a question: ‘But the LORD God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?’” (v. 9)4

Calvin says of this and the questioning which follows, “God asks, in the language of doubt, not as if he were searching into some disputable matter, but for the purpose of piercing more acutely the stupid man, who, laboring under fatal disease, is yet unconscious of his malady.”5

The Audacity of Blaming God

Naturally I have to justify my heading here. It is not the most obvious reading. But first, we have a hint of what is to come when Adam answers the Lord’s searching question: ‘And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself” (v. 10). This is already a shifting of blame to God. Nakedness was how God made them to begin with. How does this make any sense? Hence the reply,

“Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” (v. 11)

Again, God is not asking questions because He “needs” answers, just as Jesus’ threefold question to Peter prompted that disciple to say, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you” (Jn. 21:17). Here Adam would have to admit the first part, but could not of the second.

Notice that unlike the serpent, God goes first to the man. He knows perfectly well that Adam had abdicated his ground and Eve stepped to the front; but He will put the man right back.

Legalistic churches are not like God in this. They are like the devil. When the man fails to lead, the legalistic church’s answer is to put him in the penalty box or solitary confinement until he earns his right to lead back. God does the opposite.

Even when He is bringing the law to our conscience, grace is His operative principle. The very fact that He pursues, that He never waits for us to “get it,” shows us that He is looking forward. He is out to restore. All of that to come to the text:

The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate” (v. 12).

Shrinking back at Eve’s side was not Adam’s shining moment, but he manages a new low point. He passes the buck. And in so doing, he unwittingly validates his previous mistake of putting her in the lead. “She did it first” really admits “She was first.” “She was in charge.” “She outmanned me.” But it’s worse than that. Focus now only on the words WHOM YOU GAVE. You. Not, “The devil made me do it.” No—“God, you made me do it.” “You set this trap for me.” “You hemmed me in with these people and this job and this body and this brain and this DNA and this time. You did this thing!”

Now what does Eve have to say for herself? Well, not much more than Adam.

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” (v. 13).

She too is blaming God. Where did this serpent come from? The fact of the matter is that Eve knew enough to know that this serpent ultimately owed its existence to God.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I answer back to God with words like, “I didn’t know. If I would have only known!” And the words always come back faster than I can get my excuses out—You knew. You knew enough to know.

PRACTICAL

Use 1. Exhortation. What will you do with your shame? You have done shameful things; and we will all do more. We will even look back at things already done—our sinful part in it realized, or the depth of our sin made more clear—like a new tide of shame, wave after wave, crashing down on us. Adam used the word AFRAID (v. 10). The student of Scripture knows that there is a good kind and a bad kind of fear when it comes to man before God. If we take Adam’s words at face value, this fear caused him to hide from God, and not to reverence or adore God. This teaches us that it is not enough to become afraid when the shame sets in, or be filled with terror, or even to shudder at the thought of divine judgment—but, with this, must come a desire to turn to God.

The other thing Adam’s being afraid shows us is its most immediate cause. He says, ‘I was afraid, because I was naked’ (v. 10). This too is not enough, since it really means that the feeling of discomfort or being put to flight only in this world—these are his grounds for confessing what little he is confessing. This is not repentance unto life.

We must have not merely the initial look of Adam’s awakening, but that coming to our senses as the Gospel describes of the Prodigal Son: “But when he came to himself … I will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you’” (Lk. 15:17, 18).

Use 2. Correction. Many people do not even believe that shame is coming for them. They are asleep in sin, and their eyes are nowhere near being opened. But shame is coming, one way or the other—either on a day of God’s confronting in time, or on the Last Day, which is not where you want your eyes to finally be opened. Today we even try to put shame to open shame. Going back to Romans 1, that is part of what Paul had in mind by saying “they not only do [these things] but give approval to those who practice them” (v. 32).

C. S. Lewis saw this trend, long before the full effects of psychiatry came to the surface:

“We have labored to overcome that sense of shrinking, that desire to conceal, which either Nature herself or the tradition of almost all mankind has attached to cowardice, unchastity, falsehood, and envy. We are told to ‘get things out into the open,’ not for the sake of self-humiliation, but on the ground that these ‘things’ are very natural and we need not be ashamed of them.”6

All of this false kind of “openness” is meant to keep the eyes from really open, or to staple them open that we can hardly blink at all of the debauchery.

Adding to our shame is when those that grow up in the dark wilderness of paganism repent, eyes opened harder and faster than those that grow up in the bright garden of a Christian home, as when,

“the LORD opened the eyes of Balaam, and he saw the angel of the LORD standing in the way, with his drawn sword in his hand. And he bowed down and fell on his face” (Num. 22:31).

There will be an eye-opening. Whether we literally hide away from the Christian community, or whether we hide in the crowd of a sin-promoting community, all of this is delusion that will be exposed.

Use 3. Consolation. God’s word says that, “Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy” (Prov. 28:13). While Adam’s eyes were opened, the one thing he could not see that we can is that the One who bears our sin also bears our shame.

“Fear not, for you will not be ashamed; be not confounded, for you will not be disgraced; for you will forget the shame of your youth” (Isa. 54:4).

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1. Kidner, Genesis, 74.

2. Belcher, Genesis, 73.

3. Belcher, Genesis, 73.

4. Waltke offers a different angle: “God models justice. The just King will not pass sentence without careful investigation (cf. 4:9-10; 18:21). Although omniscient, God questions them, inducing them to confess their guilt” (Genesis: A Commentary, 92). I think this is an important angle, yet it would open up a line of inquiry exceeding the basic doctrinal unity of this sermon.

5. Calvin, Commentaries, I:163.

6. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1940), 44.