Your Fig Leaves Won’t Do

They knew they weren’t sup­posed to eat from the tree. Even when the ser­pent was tempt­ing them, Eve could recall that God had said not to eat of it. Now every­thing had changed; they had knowl­edge of good and evil. They always had a sense of what evil was: it was eat­ing from the tree (at least). But now they really knew evil; they were acquainted.

Some­thing was wrong with them. They weren’t cre­ated to be like this. They were dirty, ashamed, and afraid. Some­thing had to be done to rem­edy the sit­u­a­tion. Maybe it was Adam who thought up the fig leaves idea; men love to fix things. They made their fig-leave cov­er­ings to hide their shame. This seemed to be work­ing pretty well, until…

That sound! They’d heard him walk­ing in the gar­den before. They knew who it was; they rec­og­nized him. Yahweh, the Cre­ator was near. Before it was prob­a­bly a won­der­ful sound. Their rela­tion­ship was—in some ways—like that of a father and his chil­dren.¹ Now, though, that sound was ter­ri­fy­ing. They had their cov­er­ings but—while fig leaves might have been enough to cover their shame from just each other—when Some­one this holy came by, it was time to head for the hills. God would see straight through their cov­er­ings; he would not be fooled.

That’s exactly what hap­pened. God was not fooled. Adam admitted—even while wear­ing his covering—that they were naked; their cov­er­ing was insuf­fi­cient. God dealt with their sin, curs­ing the ground and promis­ing that life and rela­tion­ships would be very dif­fi­cult for Adam and Eve. But in an unex­pected act of favor, God didn’t pun­ish Adam and Eve.² Instead he promised a deliv­erer. Then he dealt with the prob­lem of their sin himself.

God him­self killed ani­mals and made coats for Adam and Eve, a divinely approved cov­er­ing. Often, peo­ple will point out that this was done to indi­cate that—although Adam and Eve would not die for their own sin—someone else (some­one unde­serv­ing) would die. I think that’s a legit­i­mate point, but I want to address an oft-neglected point that this pas­sage makes. That is, you can­not cover your sin.

We’ve all got our meth­ods for try­ing to cover our sin. Some of us will try to do good things to make up for all the awful things we’ve done. That won’t do because good deeds don’t nul­lify evil ones; our sin remains. Some of us will lie about our sin to keep oth­ers from see­ing it. That won’t do because God can see straight through our lies; our sin remains. Some of us will try to arrange cir­cum­stances in our life so that we suf­fer for our sin; we’ll try to pun­ish our­selves for our sin. That won’t do because our sin deserves far greater pun­ish­ment than we could ever give; our sin remains.

Fig leaves will never do. When God shows up, our attempts at right­eous­ness are shown to be what they truly are, woe­fully insuf­fi­cient. Blood must be shed and God him­self must do it. The good news is that Jesus, the Son of God, did the good works we should have done.³ Jesus makes us right­eous and takes away our sin.⁴ Jesus, who never did any­thing wrong, took the pun­ish­ment for our sin.⁵

Your fig leaves will never do. Give them up and run to Jesus. There is no other way to deal with your sin.