Unclothed Christ to Clothe Us!
“Then the eyes of both of them opened, and they knew they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.” Genesis 3:7
In the course of time, I have realized that I never have a straightforward answer for people who inquire about my ethnicity. There is a shame somewhere in my heart of not being like the ancestors—descending from the same bloodline. There are normally two things that I do in response: either I try to prove I am alike even though my profile is not, or I hastily say that there is no such thing to deprecate the existence of ethnicity. If you weigh both my responses, you will find how strongly I struggle with the shame and want to cover up by any means. And distressingly, I am not alone! Whether you believe it or not, everyone struggles with shame and, ironically, is capable of formulating new ways to cover it up, just like me.
God never created us with shame. But, as soon as Adam and Eve violated God’s command, “You may freely eat fruit from every tree of the orchard, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will surely die.” The Bible says, “..they knew they were naked.” Their experience was not simply about seeing each other naked and saying, “Oops!” It was greatly intense and devastating, because they fell in the state where they never belonged to due to their rebellious act. (C.S. Lewis’ idea.) As a result, they started hiding from God when He visited them. They were absolutely ashamed of their poignant situation. His creation can live with dignity only with Him but now they were not with Him and so were we once.
Then what happened? They sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. Here we can see their strong desire that resulted in active action to live with dignity again, however, sadly, not the way God intended. They acted out to cover their shame as though they could do it on their own, but they never realized the gravity of the shame they had brought upon themselves.
Today, we, in fact, do the same thing they did to cover our shame. We sew fig leaves to make coverings for ourselves. We do so either by doing good works inside the church in order to feel good about ourselves and preserve our dignity or by totally denouncing the existence of God so that we may not feel shame about our lifestyle. However, the Bible makes it clear that either way is not going to help us at all! Then, is there any other way around at all?
Our God does not want us to live with shame forever and knows we cannot restore ourselves to dignity. He, therefore, sent His son to restore us back to Him so we can live with dignity. Now, we just need to put our faith in Jesus Christ, who was stripped of his robe, became nude on the cross, and whose shame was exposed to the whole world so that our shame is covered once but forever.
So the real question is: Do we want to believe in Christ and live with dignity or ever find ourselves on the shame treadmill? Choice is yours!
The author is an M.Div student at Calvin Theological Seminary. You may follow him on his Facebook page.
