God and Nakedness

Diversity other animals running around the department stores, buying suits and thought we see dogs with scarves and shirts and all that but only because humans put them there. Why is it of all of the species.

We are the only one who use artificial forms of claim word close come from in the first place you think about it the minute you played the first game of hide and seek for good from God because they realized they were naked and they were ashamed today on Renewing Your Mind, Dr. RC Sproul continues a series. The intimate marriage with a message on why marriage is meant to be a safe haven games are played and trained doesn't exist like to welcome you into our series of studies on Christian marriage and in this session today were going to be considering the same God and nakedness God and nakedness. I like to direct your attention first ball to a somewhat strange story that we find in the Old Testament that concerns the patriarch Noah everybody's heard of Noah. Noah and the flood of Noah with the boat the 2 x 2 and all that. But what happened to Noah after the flood. What happened after the waters receded and they came safely to dry land.

Will we read in the ninth chapter of the book of Genesis.

This very brief but I think strange story it says in verse 20 and no began to be a husbandman and he planted a vineyard, and he drank of the line and was drunken and he was uncovered within his tent now hand, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brothers outside. And Simon J path took a garment and laid it upon both their shoulders and went backward and covered the nakedness of their father and their faces were backwards so that they did not see their father's nakedness is a strange account. Here's Noah.

He begins to cultivate a vineyard and then a harvest as the grapes and makes wine and drinks too much and goes into his tent and he's in a drunken stupor and in his drunkenness. He's rolling around and he is exposed to these new and then we read how his one son comes into the tent and it says he looked upon his father's nakedness.

Notice it doesn't say that hand came in and looked at his father's drunkenness as he runs outside and he tells his brothers. We have to reconstruct this but obviously hand is amused at finding his father in this compromising an embarrassing situation so he makes a oddity goes out and he says to his brothers. You want to go in there and see the old me. He's drunk as a skunk and he start naked in will the other two brothers instead of exploiting their father. They take a cover and they stretch it between themselves, lying it over each other's shoulders and they walked backwards into the tent and as they were moving.

They draped this cover across their father. They covered his nakedness of you read what follows in the texts when Noah grows old and it's time for him to pass along the patriarchal blessing. He pronounces his blessing upon Chin and J path, but he pronounces a curse upon hand because he looked upon his father's nakedness of what's going on here is it that the ancient Israelite people were so uptight about nakedness that they could stand to be seen without close even in the context of the family. An interesting study is to go through the whole Scriptures and see what the Bible says about nakedness about nudity we see for example that in warfare in the Old Testament. If you were to defeat your enemy in war and in battle, the consummate insult to the dignity of your enemy was not simply to strip him of his arms and of his booty, but to strip him naked and parade the enemy in chains without any close that was to reduce the enemy to total humiliation is not by accident. The part of the penalty that the executed criminal had to undergo in antiquity was to be executed virtually naked even as Christ was exposed to that kind of humiliation on the cross order those ideas and images come from. I think to get a handle on it. We have to go even earlier in the Old Testament back again to the Garden of Eden back to the creation account which we considered briefly in our first session you remember we went over the story of how God had made man and then made woman as a special act of creation how excited Adam was when he first beheld his wife and said this is Fletcher my flesh and bone of my bone and someone will. The second chapter of Genesis ends in a very strange manner. We read and Adam said, this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh, she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh know when somebody is writing something like that you come to the climax of the statement you put up. There and then you have a transition into your next thought. But here we have like a dangling participle like a concluding unscientific postscript, sort of hatched the end of chapter 2 of Genesis.

These strains were and they were both naked, the man and his wife, and they were not ashamed. What does that mean they were both naked and they were not ashamed. Why does the author include that in the text. I'm not sure, except that the author of Genesis picks up on that in the next chapter where we read how God to give us a prohibition to Adam and Eve and puts rules and regulations around how the Garden of Eden is to be used and we now see the entrance of the serpent that it says now the serpent was more subtle than any of the beasts of the field and we read of that primordial temptation where the serpent comes up and entices Eve and Adam and saying you shall be as God's, knowing good and evil and how our first parents then succumbed to the temptation and eight of the fruit of the tree and now suddenly there's a radical change in the whole atmosphere of Eden, formerly when God would walk in the cool of the day in the garden as he would come into the garden we could see Adam and Eve rushing to be in the presence of God. They were basking in the glory of God, they experienced intimacy and communion with their creator there in the garden but then they disobey, and now when God comes into the garden. When they do they consider as soon as they sinned, behold, their eyes were opened and they knew that they were naked owner with the psychological significance of that is that the first experience of human guilt was not expressed in terms of saying their eyes were opened and they knew that they were sinners. Their eyes were opened and they knew that they were guilty.

Their eyes were opened and they knew that their wicked that's not what it says it says that their eyes were opened and they became aware of their nakedness and so their first impulse is to run into high to cover themselves.

No longer could be said that they were man and woman naked and unashamed. Now they are naked and ashamed.

Before we explore that too much further in terms of its significance for marriage. Let's see how God responds to that when God comes into the guard. He calls first greeted Adam where are you there hiding and God said why are you hiding what did they say were hiding because were naked. Not were hiding because were sin were hiding. The review would make it all. You are naked the damage. If you are like every time I fellowship to God. Why should being naked because you tied did you eat of the tree to their confession of their awareness of nakedness. God understood as a confession of an awareness of sin.

So we see this strange connection here between nakedness and guilt have you noticed how our culture responds to human nakedness may we've gone through the sexual revolution we've seen the advent of Playboy magazine and penthouse and all the rest of them and we've seen the censorship standards be changed on television and in the movie so that now nudity is commonplace in the film industry in magazines and sauna seems like as a people were almost preoccupied with nudity not only female nudity mail nudity were famous people will pose in the bath and women will scramble to go by them so they look at pictures of men who were negatively men of always done that. But now women are doing. We saw the phenomenon a few years ago of streaking people take their clothes off and run down the street but notice that there was something interesting to me about streaking that it wasn't called strolling we sort of have ambivalent feelings about nakedness. Everybody I think knows what it feels like to be able to take off your tie and say hello. I just want to relax and step into the shower and I don't have to worry about whether my ties crooked or my shirts breasts are so one there still is a sense friends were. We are looking for place where we can be negative and unashamed, but with all of our sophistication. All of our boldness and all of our so-called adult maturity nakedness still makes us nervous as skimpy as the bathing suits may be you can still rely on the fact that staple items in the stores include shower curtains and window blinds and drapes.

People do not walk around naked in ordinary life member Desmond Morris. The study of man from an anthropological perspective, and he titled his study man, the naked ape so that we were just one of 70 or 80 different primates in this world all different kinds of monkeys and apes and gorillas in the thing that distinguishes our eight nests from the rhesus monkey or the orangutan or the gorilla is that we're the only one who's not totally covered on our body with body here and so we have to go and buy clothes. Nature adorns the rest of the animals ever see other animals running around the department stores, buying suits and talk. We see dogs with scarves and shirts and all that but only because humans put them there. But we worry about clothes, why is it of all of the species of life on this planet. We are the only one who use artificial forms of claim word close come from in the first place. I'm impressed by the fact that when God came into that garden and he found Adam and Eve hiding they were scared they were nervous they were embarrassed when you doing there were hiding because were naked. God could've said all right you disobeyed me tough luck. You spend the rest of your days running around shivering and embarrassed being totally naked.

Let all creation laugh at you. But even when God speaks in judgment for their sin. He tempers that judgment with grace and with mercy and the very first act of redemption in human history was when God made close this for his naked creatures and God said here and he covered their nakedness trace that throughout biblical history how the prophet Isaiah.

For example, speaks of us in our human sinful condition saying that our righteousness is as filthy rights.

The whole concept of the atonement in the Old Testament and in the New Testament centers on this idea covering the Christ is a covering for our sin. There's a sense in which the earliest symbol or image of the ultimate redemption was that tender act when God came down and closed is naked children also learn from what I think one thing we can learn is that God allows us to where close God allows us to work close. We in our society hear from her by saying you gotta be open. You gotta let it all hang out will go to therapy sessions, group discussions, where people are encouraged to take their clothes off because the psychiatrist understands the symbolic link between physical nakedness and spiritual and emotional nakedness as so in order to encourage us to let down our barriers so that we can be open and honest they will encourage us to take our clothes off, and God says wait a minute. You don't have to take your clothes off.

I don't have to reveal my innermost being to everybody who comes along and wants to have a piece of my mind were of my soul. God gives us the right to privacy. We have learned a long time ago that we can't indiscriminately bear our souls to everybody because everybody here has experienced this problem in your life.

Maybe when you were little girls or when you were little boy.

You did something bad and you embarrassed about it and the guilt was weighing on you, so you one of your best friend and he said, gotta tell you something but promise me that you won't tell, then you tell your friend what you did and then the next day. It's all over the school you journey one for whom, that never happened. We've all experienced that. And so we learn that way to be careful. I told somebody a secret. They jumped on my soul. So I will be careful next I'm going hi. I will stay concealed.

I'm not to let everybody know what I'm thinking I might let everybody know how I'm feeling. We become masters of hiding ourselves, and we need that we don't have to expose ourselves to everybody. God gave us close, but in spite of that, we still yearn for paradise restore we still long for something nice were we can again be naked and unashamed. And guess what, there are two places that God has provided for us or we can be naked and on the same the first is in his presence. There is no place on this planet where I am more comfortable than I am in the presence of God, partly because I know I can't fake them up, partly because I know all of my subtle games of concealment and being the artful dodger directing his attention away cannot full them something that is total hopelessness about it. He knows me knows when I sit down. He knows where I stand up before words even formed on my lips. He knows that, so this is what I can escape his vision. I can escape his gaze.

I am laid bare to God whether I want to be or not.

A lot of people made nervous by that most people do not want God to look at them mostly want God to overlook that unless the tragedy of the unbeliever is that the unbeliever has never experienced the benevolent gaze of God were God looks at that person and sees him in all of his sinfulness and says I love you to be this with the gospel is all about is that the God who knows me and all of my nakedness loves me. How else could David say search me oh God, no me know my thoughts know my heart see if there's any wicked way within me, cleanse me because there's something about God that when we come to him, even in our guilt, though he rebukes us and admonishes us and corrects us and chastises us he never ever humiliates us. There is a tenderness about his judgment as he seeks to correct this so that we can be comfortable in his presence. That's one place that's the supreme place, but the second place, humanly speaking, where God has provided for people to be naked and unashamed is in the holy bond of marriage. There's no place in this world among people where I am more comfortable than with my own family home with my family.

I can relax. I don't have to perform. I don't have to meet people's expectations. I can relax and be myself, put my shoes up on the table. My family know me and as I said a million times. There's no human being in this whole world who knows me better than my wife were married for 25 years. We went together for eight years of where we grew up together same time in kindergarten virtually together are not kindergarten, second grade 5 we both submit their third grade teacher last night. Then there's USA you two are still hanging around the other.

Always use a week. Share that common background in common friends and so we know each other.

She knows going to say before I say it home going to respond before I do it. She doesn't know everything she can get inside my mind like God she can only know what I unveil to her what I am willing to expose of myself to her. But here's the thing.

Even given those barriers. The remaining she knows me better than any human being on this planet knows me. I guess what she laughs them instantly that the person who knows me the best loves me. The person who was seeing me naked body and soul loves me. Is it any wonder that God uses the human institution of marriage as the supreme image to communicate to his people. The relationship that he wants with them that Israel in the Old Testament is the bride of Yahweh.

The church in the New Testament is the bride of Christ because that image of marriage is to demonstrate intimacy and a depth dimension of communion were were comfortable.

Is it any wonder why one of the most emotionally devastating human experiences a person can go through is a divorce when your partner walks out what's happening with you experiencing your expressing just the opposite, where you realize that the person who knows you best in this world has a chest rejected that is brutal to human being and makes a person very fearful of ever becoming naked again but God has given us an institution with safeguards as well as with responsibilities and saying here you can be naked.

Can you be naked in your marriage. Do you know your partner do you feel like you are known.

The worst complaint we all text my wife doesn't understand.

When that happens there's a breakdown in intimacy. The clothes are coming on, because something is being hidden and concealed some of the marriages that I observed are really games of hide and seek. People are trying to prevent each other from knowing each other so for going to have that experience of being naked and unashamed.

We've got to learn how to know that's Dr. RC Sproul with a message from his series, the intimate marriage you're listening to Renewing Your Mind. Five. We Webb, thank you for being with us your RC say that he and his wife were married for 25 years that was at the time he recorded this message when he went home to be with the Lord in 2017. Vesta had been married for 57 years, and for those of us who have the privilege of knowing RC.

It was a beautiful relationship to witness the institution of marriage is God's idea, and he's given us clear direction for how it should be lived out RC and Vesta model that the series wearing this week establishes not only what marriage is. It also provides us with answers about how husbands and wives can best care for and serve one another would be happy to send you the six part series on two DVDs for your donation of Eddie about to leader ministries. You can find us online@renewingyourmind.org or you can call us with your gift card number is 800-435-4343. By the way, you can listen to today's program on our free app, it is loaded with great features you'll find an archive of this Renewing Your Mind program daily videos and articles, plus you'll find the digital Bible and many reading plans to choose from to search for ligand here in your app store and again it is free. One of the keys to a long-lasting fulfilling marriage tomorrow. Dr. Strobel give us some road tested methods that kept his marriage alive for decades, and we hope will join us for that Wednesday here on Renewing Your Mind