Adam and Eve were naked but they were made in ‘the image of God’ so I wondered what it meant. Mostly when God as God is pictured in Scripture, he is described as light, or cloud or fire. He is never pictured as a naked being, and when he appears as a man, as when he appeared to Abraham under the oaks of Mamre, he appeared as dressed for a journey.
It is when we are given a description of Jesus, Moses and Elijah on the Mount of Transfiguration that we are told they were clothed in white, so white it was dazzling.
Moses and Elijah are two of the only three human beings described in the Old Testament as being in heaven. The other was Enoch and he, like Elijah, was taken to heaven without having died. Moses, on the other hand, was resurrected as Jesus would be after his death.
The revelation of their appearance leads me to believe that Adam and Eve ‘glowed’ like that when they were made ‘in the image of God.’ They must have shone with light as Moses did on the Mount with Jesus. So when they are described as being naked, before they sinned and then after they sinned, I see two different pictures.
In the first picture they are naked in the sense that they have no need of clothing as we know it because they shone with the inner light of God. Then I see them when that light went out because they had believed a different voice and lost their inner light of God’s perfection.
God lets us know that eventually he writes his law on the hearts of his people in his kingdom. As he said, ‘I will put my laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts,’ Hebrews 8:10, so that ‘Blessed are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and enter in through the gates into the city,’ Revelation 22:14.
If we break that law, we have no right to enter the kingdom of God.
God had told Adam and Eve they were not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If they did, they would die.
Their sin was that they believed and were seduced by advice above God’s. They put another ‘god’ above God. ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me,’ and the law of God which was inscribed on their hearts, was smashed.
It was as smashed then, the same as it was smashed when the Children of Israel worshipped an idol in the desert, and Moses smashed the two tablets of the law God had given him. (Exodus 32.)
The inner light of Adam and Eve being perfectly made ‘in the image of God’ went out. They were naked. They were dead men walking.
Hurriedly they made covering for themselves of leaves.
When God found them, naked, ashamed, and full of excuses, he demonstrated that sin causes death. God slew a creature he had created to provide their covering. The covering they had made for themselves was discarded.
The full horror of the death of Jesus, the second man ‘made in the image of God,’ (2nd Corinthians 4:4), begins to emerge. Looking back to that moment, John describes him as ‘the Lamb, slain from the foundation of the world.’
So when his people are restored fully to the kingdom of God, the inner light is restored also, ‘the Lord God giveth them light,’ (Revelation 22:5).
Elizabeth Price
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