Nakedness And Clothing

“Something strange was happening. They had always been naked—but now they felt naked, and wrong, and didn’t want anyone to see them. So they hid.” – Jesus Storybook Bible

“And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skin and clothed them.” – Genesis 3:21

I brought Eric’s soccer clothes for him to change into after school yesterday, and as I was wondering where I could find him a place to change, I actually thought for a second, maybe I’ll just change him outside under a tree; I saw some other mom doing that before realizing he would never be okay with that—and it hit me, wow, I’m at that stage now where all of the kids would want privacy while changing. Oddly, it seemed like a kind of milestone.

A consciousness of nakedness isn’t something we’re born with, but it’s something we all acquire, which is interesting if you think about it. I wonder if infants wonder why big people go around with pieces of fabric hanging off their bodies all the time. Reading Genesis this time, it struck me that the very last thing written before Satan appears is “and the man and his wife were both naked and not ashamed” (Gen 2:25), and the very first thing that happens after they ate the fruit was “the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths” (Gen 3:7). Quite a pointed contrast framing the fall.

What does this awareness of nakedness mean? We know from Genesis 2:25 that it had to be the opposite of “not ashamed”—shame. A feeling not only that we did something wrong, but that something is wrong with us. Perhaps there was a sense in which Adam and Eve felt ashamed not only of themselves, but unsafe before the other who had not protected them but contributed to their sin. And it’s interesting, isn’t it, that being aware of nakedness by definition means needing to cover it? 

Thus the fig leaves—and most of us around here have seen fig trees enough to know that while it wasn’t a bad first attempt, those leaves weren’t going to last very long. But the first thing God does after the curse is to clothe them with skins, presumably through the first animal sacrifice. Can you imagine that? Adam and Eve, perhaps watching blood shed for the first time, seeing the death God had warned would happen the very day they ate the fruit, but seeing God do it so that he could then take the skin from the death to cover their nakedness. Banned from the garden, but walking out smelling and seeing and feeling God’s provision, and a promise, whether they knew it then or not: one day another will die to cover your shame, because your own efforts are never enough.

I happened to be memorizing verse 35 yesterday in my way through Romans 8: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword?” Nothing, not even our nakedness, can separate us from the love of God.