The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.
Do you remember the first lie you ever heard? Probably not. We hear so many lies today from so many people. Some are advertisements with implied lies. If you buy their product, you’ll be cool or thinner or happier. Advertisers sometimes take a fact and dress it up so they can use it to their advantage. “Fat-free” and “No Sugar Added” are terms dieting people look for. They are not guarantees that you will not gain weight while eating that product. Those terms might be the truth, but they’re not the whole truth.
This reminds me of Adam and Eve in the garden in the book of Genesis. I think Eve was such an easy target because she’d never heard a lie before. Adam had no reason to lie to her. God didn’t lie to her. She never needed to be cautious about believing what she’d been told. So the serpent took a fact and twisted it to cause a change in her life. He might as well have said, “Once you eat this fruit, you’ll never be the same again. Your whole life will change.”
Sounds good, doesn’t it? But shouldn't that kind of advertising make us skeptical?
Adam should’ve sat her down and said, “Let’s think this through. Something doesn’t sound right about it.” Instead, Adam and Eve made the mistake of their lives. They were duped. They were ashamed. They hid from God, worried about his reaction to their fruit-tasting experiment.
They sewed leaves together. You probably didn’t know that camouflage clothes were thousands of years old. Knowing God would eventually find them, they hid in the bushes and waited.
When they heard the question they dreaded, “What is this you have done?”, they responded, and then they heard the judgments and curses that came about because of their sin. When God finished warning them about the aftereffects, he made clothes for Adam and Eve.
This reminds me of when my kids were little. If they made a mess, they tried to fix it or hide it. I can imagine God looking down on Adam and Eve and thinking of them like I thought of my kids. The first thing I had to do was talk to my kids about what they had done, and then reassure them. Next, I had to take off their filthy clothes, clean up the kids, and put new clothes on them.
That’s just what God did. He spoke to them, pulled them out of their leaves and put them in better clothes. God made leather clothes for them – or animal skin clothes.
He did whatever was necessary to give Adam and Eve freedom to discover new things and make decisions, but he also wanted to protect them. Now that they had to deal with thorns and thistles, they had to wear leather for protection.
God loved Adam – before, during, and after he sinned. Giving him clothes was a part of that love.
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