Fig Leaves

Genesis 3:8-13
8And 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. 9But the LORD God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” 10And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.” 11He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” 12The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.” 13Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said,”The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

We see just how like our first parents we are when we see how they reacted after they sinned.

1) They try to fix it up themselves (the fig leaves). There are only two religions in the world – grace and works. Grace comes through Jesus Christ and all other religions will have some sort of system whereby they teach that people work their way to a right standing with God. This is the natural human response to wrong doing. “We can overcome this ourselves”.

2) They hide from God. All our lives we are hiding from God and that is demonstrated in a host of things from creating gods like us to denying that He exists at all.

3) They tried to justify themselves. “We had to hide. We were naked”. And God is supposed to fall for that? But it is what we do. We try to make our sin look like it is OK in our case. God does not fall for it.

4) They blamed others. Adam blamed God for making the woman in the first place and thereby blamed her too. Eve blamed the snake. Whenever we sin we can always make it sound like it was someone else’s fault. We even believe our own lies sometimes.

Of course the solution for sin is found in this account as well. God Himself covers Adam and Eve with skins from animals (verse 21). The covering this gives them is far better than the fig leaves they had made, just as the work of Christ is far better than all our attempts to cover over our sins. This is a picture of the work of Christ. A death must occur for us to be covered and our sin atoned for. And there is only one death that will do it. The Son of God Himself. All the rest of the Bible points us to this work of Christ.

Today, rejoice that God has done all that can be done to make you right with Him. Contemplate what you would say to God if He should ask you why you should spend eternity with Him. If the answer you come up with is anything other than trusting in Christ and all that He has done for you, you may be trusting in fig leaves that you have sewn for yourself.