Fear No Fear

(All scripture from the World English Bible, ebible.org, all rights reserved)

“Their eyes were opened, and they both knew that they were naked. They sewed fig leaves together, and made coverings for themselves.”
Genesis 3:7

Ironically, when we (human beings) open our eyes, we get blinded. Here humans ‘opened’ their eyes and became dominated by their senses. They were no longer able to see things from a SPIRITUAL point of view. Their spirits had died. They no longer had access to that sense. Now, it is only God who opens eyes – and when HE does it there is always a benefit to us ( 2 Kings 6:17; Luke 24:31). The devil through the serpent had not been completely false. They DID have knew knowledge. They DID have new wisdom. But it was human wisdom informing them of the knowledge of what they had lost. It was a negative and not a positive.

Their natural sight didn’t change. What they gave weight to did. They used to see the forest. Now they saw only trees. “they both knew“: the word for KNEW is yada (yaw-dah’) and it is used in ways that mean to discover, to have learned, to perceive, and to understand. It wasn’t that they hadn’t NOTICED they were naked. It was that the full sense meaning of naked – the carnality, the physical reaction of pleasure, the full FLESH view – hadn’t even OCCURRED to them before. Before the fruit they were looking as God looked, thinking as GOD thought. God CREATED sexuality. But Sin twisted it to lust. That is the view they now had. Now there was ‘what if they don’t like how I look’, ‘do you think I’m fat’, and even ‘that’s funny looking’. They had been robbed of their perfection and left in a cloud of half-truths, personal perception, flesh-thinking, and ordinariness. They now saw the same way that WE see. When we are infants, we run around naked. Naked time is the best time for babies. They feel free and wild and don’t know what naked even means. Later, as they grow to children, they start to see differences. They start to want clothes. They start to cover themselves. That kind of realization – but in a moment – is what these two adults were thrust into. Now they had to deal with a plethora of feelings that had never even existed before. Rashi translates this as: ‘‘ותפקחנה וגו [AND THE EYES OF BOTH OF THEM] WERE UNCLOSED — Scripture speaks here with reference to intelligence (the mind’s eye) and not with reference to actual seeing’. Also he writes: ‘וידעו כי ערומים הם AND THEY KNEW THAT THEY WERE NAKED — Even a blind person knows when he is naked! What then does “and they knew that they were naked” signify? One charge had been entrusted to them and they now knew they had stripped themselves of it’.

The Women’s Commentary on the Torah writes: ‘Possibly modesty and shame resulted from eating the fruit. At any rate, knowledge discloses to them their vulnerability, exposing them to the precariousness of life and to consequent fear.’ They were no longer protected in the same way. They had rejected the blessing. Since they were exposed to the elements and since entropy was in the world now, they had a need to protect themselves from the elements and clothing seemed to them to be the best way to do that. Also, they were perhaps trying to be like God out of their own efforts. After all, they were created to be like God and God is always mentioned as wearing garments of some kind. Was this humanity’s first attempt to WORK to be like God?

The shame they felt was separate from the nakedness issue. They chose to cover their nakedness because they now knew that as they multiplied, more people would exist and you wouldn’t want them to be looking at what was meant for you two privately. In other words, instead of perceiving genitals as parts of the body, they were now vehicles for physical pleasure in and of themselves and therefore should be covered to keep others from seeking pleasure from what was a personal and private thing. Their organs were not under their CONTROL anymore, but purely subject to their senses. They were not un-intelligent and knew how their sin could produce more sin, and so in an attempt to cover or ‘atone’ for it, they sewed leaves and made garments. As the sage Or HaChaim puts it: ‘It is characteristic of a wicked person that after he has committed an abominable act he becomes aware that what he did was an abomination.’

They felt shame because as the sage Sforno writes: ‘they compared mentally, the advantages they had gained through the pleasant sensation of eating from the fruit of the tree, and the harm they had caused themselves thereby. The expression פקח implies weighing something carefully with both heart and mind.’ They descended from the level of wisdom that they had had in the holy spirit and descended to the level of natural wisdom of human knowledge like we experience today.

I’ve heard it taught that they used fig leaves because it was a fig that was the fruit of the tree. But the tree was in the middle of the garden which was full of trees. Just because they ate the fruit of the tree, doesn’t mean they used the leaves of the tree from which they ate. In the region of Israel, a fig leaf is the broadest leaf, giving the most coverage. If that was true in the garden, it would make sense to use it. Perhaps it was a sturdier leaf. I’m not saying the tree WASN’T a fig tree, only that it doesn’t HAVE to be just because they used fig leaves.

This whole thing – the sudden perception of nakedness, the realization they were no longer like God, the shame, and the desire for clothing to protect themselves – is the evidence of the MASSIVE shift that had just taken place. In Genesis 1:26-28 humanity is given authority, dominion, and everything they would need to both preserve the world as it was created and bring it into its proper fruition. They would do that by clinging to what God had said. When they CHOSE to take the devil’s words and follow his lead, they gave up the superior position. They had been presented with an alternative path. Follow what God said, believe Him, and trust that He was telling the truth OR submit to a different voice, believe that voice, and trust that it was telling the truth. God’s way came with authority and dominion on Earth. Adam took that and passed it on to the devil, choosing to submit to his thinking and his plan. From that moment of rebellion, the Earth was the devil’s. He could use the authority and dominion to make the Earth in his image just like humanity was supposed to make it in their image, which was God’s image. Everything we see in this world from the destruction of storms to deadly earthquakes to animals eating other animals to species changing within their species to hate and fear and violence is all part of the devil’s view of the world (John 10:10). He is a petulant child seeking to destroy everything nice because they have nothing nice and have chosen a wicked path. Adam – the one given the authority – gave it to the devil. Because a human being gave it up, a human being had to get it back. That’s why Jesus came as a man. To be a man, fully human, and get it back through total submission and obedience to the Father’s will – CHOOSING to be a sacrifice WITHOUT being forced in order to BE a perfect sacrifice and PAY the price of Sin so that WE could return to the Father in purity (2 Corinthians 5:21). It is from THIS POINT ON that we see creation operating in the same ways that we see it operating today (with minor allowances for pre-flood vs post-flood). Their shame is indicative of their fall and the entrance of Sin into creation. God didn’t lie. They were now spiritually dead and beginning to deteriorate in a physical process that would end with their physical death (‘die, die’ and ‘dying they would die’, respectively – the two ways of translating the consequence of violating God’s command: Genesis 2:16-17).