Clothed

“The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them” (Genesis 3:21, NIV).

When we last looked at the creation account in the Bible Book of Genesis, God had created the first two humans, Adam and Eve. They lived in Paradise, a garden where all was perfect. In just two short chapters, however, Adam and Eve had fallen from grace by doing the one thing God had commanded them not to do. They ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And for the first time, Adam and Eve looked at their bodies in a new way. They saw that they were naked and felt ashamed of who they were and what they had done.

Although there were consequences resulting from their sin, God still cared for Adam and Eve. God offered the couple a more permanent alternative to the fig leaf clothing they had thrown together to cover themselves. He clothed them in garments made of skin.

Have you ever wondered where those garments of skin came from? There were, after all, no outlet malls in Eden. Most likely this crude form of clothing came from one of the animals God had created. For Adam and Eve to be clothed, the first recorded death in the Bible had to occur. Something had to die to cover the sin and shame of these first humans.

We, too, have disobeyed God. Deceived by the Serpent, we reach out and grasp at the very things God tells us to stay away from. We pervert the beauty of God’s creation and taste the sweet fruit of sin, which soon turns sour to our taste buds and bitter in our gut. We feel the guilt of our disobedience and we are ashamed. God still cares for us, but something, or someone, must die for the guilt to go away.

Many years following that first sin in the Garden of Eden, God would revisit his creation, this time as a man named Jesus. He would live a perfectly obedient life and die an undeserved death. He did it to cover our sin and our shame. Jesus died to take our guilt away. The prophet Isaiah puts it this way, “…he has clothed me with garments of salvation and arrayed me in a robe of his righteousness (Isaiah 61:10, NIV). Through the blood of Jesus, we are covered. We are forgiven. We are free.