And Jehovah Elohim called to Man, and said to him, Where art thou?
Sin had just entered the world, and the first thing God said to the guilty pair was not a verdict but a question. God comes into the garden looking for the man who is hiding from Him. Here the Bible's picture of a seeking God begins.
The visit itself was ordinary; the hiding was not. One writer asks why the meeting could not go on as before:
What a question for Adam to have to answer! How it showed that he was not where he used to be! Why the difference? Why not meet, as he was used to meeting, the One who chose to visit the creatures of His power and love? No change had taken place with Him. What had happened to Adam, that he should hide himself when He came near? ... And yet He approaches — He speaks — not to accuse or to scold, but to ask. There is nothing unusual in His approach. The change was in those who run and hide, instead of welcoming with worship the God who stooped to visit them, as they had before. It is for them to account for the change.
These are the first words God spoke after the fall. One writer finds man's ruin and God's grace packed into them:
God, at the first, came to create; and then, when the serpent dared to meddle with creation, God came down to save. This came out in the first words spoken by the Lord God after man's fall. "But the LORD God called to the man and said to him, Where are you?" This question proved two things. It proved that man was lost, and that God had come to seek. It proved man's sin, and God's grace. "Where are you?" Amazing faithfulness! Amazing grace! Faithfulness, because the question itself told the truth about man's condition. Grace, because the very fact that He asked brought out the truth about His character, and His attitude toward fallen man. Man was lost. But God had come down to look for him. He came to bring him out of his hiding place behind the trees of the garden. In its place, in the glad confidence of faith, man could find his hiding place in God Himself. This was grace. To create man out of the dust of the ground was power; but to seek man in his lost state was grace.
Adam is later sent out of Eden. But the distance was there before the sentence:
Man is self-convicted of departure from God because of sin. God "drove out the man"; but man had himself fled from His presence first. His own conscience told him that he could not stand before God. God made this plain by the words of His call to Adam: "Where are you?" He was gone from God, banished by conscience before God drove him out.
The same writer sets this question beside the one God put to Cain:
But the great question, besides what had been done, is, "Where are you?" This is a far wider question than the one to Cain — "What have you done?"
This call sets the pattern for how God deals with sinners right through to the Gospels:
If men do not want Him, He wants them! Right after the rebellion in the garden, the voice of God was heard, saying, "Adam, where are you?" The Gospel tells us — what a wonderful thought! — that God is now the Seeker after men. This is the meaning of the coming among us of His beloved Son. So in the New Testament sinners are never told to seek the Lord, though it is still their responsibility to do so. Instead, they are told that God is seeking them... "the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost" (Luke 19:10).
God could have ended it there. That He called instead points ahead:
Verses 7 and 8 are full of gloom. A ray of light, however, appears in verse 9. The Lord God might have discarded the guilty pair on the spot and handed them over to their doom. Instead He sought them out — a sure sign that He had plans for their ultimate blessing. His call was, "Where are you?" In response Adam had to reveal where he was. By trying to cover his nakedness he uncovered his sin.
- God comes. The visit was normal; the hiding was new. Nothing had changed on God's side, so the man must account for the change on his.
- God asks. "Where are you?" is a wider question than "What have you done?" It asks where a man stands, not only what he has done.
- God convicts. Adam had already fled; his conscience banished him before God passed any sentence. The question made that plain.
- God seeks. The same words prove two things at once — that man was lost, and that God had come after him. Making man was power; seeking him was grace.
- God saves. He could have discarded the pair on the spot. That He called instead is the first sign of the seeking Saviour who later said He came to find the lost.
And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I feared, because I am naked; and I hid myself.
Adam is hiding when God calls him, and this is his answer. He names his fear and his nakedness, but never the sin behind them.
The word is not about clothing. One writer reads it in the light of verse 21, where God clothes the pair.
We judge that the key to understanding the word "naked" here and in the next verse lies in verse 21. There we read that "the LORD God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them." So from his fall, his transgression, until God clothed him in a coat of skin, Adam was naked before God. The word "naked" expresses his moral condition after his sin — his moral exposure, so to speak, before the all-searching eye of a holy God.
Adam had already made himself a covering before this moment. He calls himself naked anyway.
The moment Adam heard the voice of the Lord in Eden, "he was afraid." He confessed the reason himself: "I was naked." Yes, naked, although he had his apron on. But it is plain that that covering did not even satisfy his own conscience. Had his conscience been divinely satisfied, he would not have been afraid... Adam's apron could not screen him from the eye of God. He could not stand in His presence naked, so he fled to hide himself. This is what conscience will do at all times. It will cause man to hide himself from God. What is more, all that his own religiousness offers him is a hiding-place from God.
Something began in Adam that day which every human being since has carried. Its birth date is the fall.
Conscience, too, is brought to life. Sin did this. "They knew that they were naked." At the hour of its birth it was an uneasy conscience, as it is to this hour — a conscience that makes cowards of all who carry it. "I was afraid," says Adam, unable to look at God, "because I was naked." Conscience in man must be like this, because it owes its existence to sin. There was no sense of good and evil in him till he sinned. Gained this way, that sense must leave him a coward in the presence of the righteous One.
Notice what Adam names, and what he leaves out.
Was Adam's response a frank acknowledgment of sin, and submission to the will of the One who had such cause of just offence? Sadly, no. He owns the effect of sin — the sense of nakedness, and the fear that came from it. But he says not one word about having sinned. Not a word of sorrow for his offence. Then the question comes closer to his conscience, in a form he could not dodge. He casts the blame on "the woman," and indirectly on God Himself — blame for what he could neither deny nor hide any longer.
The expulsion from Eden comes later in the chapter. This verse shows the separation had already happened from man's side.
Adam "was afraid," as he confessed to Him who called him from his hiding-place... When man hears His voice, every hope of enjoying life is gone... God "drove out the man"; but man had first fled from His presence. His own conscience told him that he could not stand before God. God made this plain by the words of His call to Adam, "Where are you?" He was gone from God, banished by conscience before God drove him out.
Before the chapter ends, God answers the problem Adam confessed here.
Adam and Eve hid themselves, for they could not stand in His presence in their nakedness. But oh, the love of God's heart! As soon as they needed clothing He in mercy and love provided it... How different is their clothing now! Instead of an "apron" in which God has not put one stitch — the whole thing was poor human effort — each now wears a "coat" in which man has not put one stitch. The Lord God made the fitting garment and gave it. What grace!
One writer traces that garment back to a death, and forward to Christ.
Grace worked, and grace provided what Adam could never get by his own efforts. God clothed him in his nakedness, and clothed him with the skin of an animal that had been put to death... So the coat of skin Adam wore was surely a picture of this fact: only Christ can cover our moral nakedness before God.
- Exposed. "Naked" describes Adam's moral condition before a holy God. It is not a clothing problem. The exposure lasts until God clothes him.
- Covered badly. The fig-leaf apron was already on him. It satisfied neither God nor his own conscience. Man's religion can only offer a hiding place.
- Afraid. Conscience was born at the fall, and it has made cowards of all who carry it ever since.
- Evasive. Adam admits the effects of sin — fear and nakedness — but never the sin itself, and then blames his wife and God.
- Clothed. Man's apron had no stitch from God. God's coat of skins had no stitch from man. It came from an animal put to death — a picture of Christ, who alone can cover our moral nakedness.
And he said, Who told thee that thou art naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree of which I commanded thee not to eat?
God speaks to Adam again, and the question moves from where he is to what he has done. Two questions stand side by side in one verse: one about the shame Adam has just confessed, the other about the one command God gave him.
The Creator was not gathering information. One writer asks who these questions were really for.
Let us note, first of all, this questioning of Adam by God. Three separate times we find these questions. He questions the man, and He questions the woman. He does not question the serpent, but moves straight to judgment instead. Clearly there is something significant in this. It cannot be thought that the all-knowing God needed to learn the things He asked about. So if He did not ask for His own sake, He must have asked for man's sake. It was, in fact, an appeal to man for confidence in One who had done nothing on His part to forfeit it. It was a gracious effort to bring him to admit, in front of his Creator, his present condition and the sin that had brought him into it.
The same writer shows why the order matters, and that this pairing runs through the rest of Scripture.
The first question is an appeal to Adam to consider his condition — the effect of his sin, rather than his sin itself. It is the second that refers directly to the sin, not the first. We will find this double appeal everywhere in Scripture. Does a man "thirst"? He is told to come and drink of the living water. Is he "labouring and heavy laden"? He is invited to find rest for his soul.
The questions single out one man. One commentator makes that the whole point.
Notice here, before moving on, how solemnly precise and personal the questions are. Not "My creatures, where are you?" but "Adam, where are you?" He had only one companion in sin. But this question completely isolates him. It sets him alone before God and forces him to answer for himself. "I heard"; "I was afraid"; "I hid myself." The next question is just as direct... I and you, God and the sinner — the sinner and his sin facing each other! And is this not still the effect of God's word, when it is felt to be His living voice?
Adam had already made himself a covering. God's question shows how little it was worth.
Fallen, they knew good and evil, and they knew that they were naked; they are under the shame of sin. Then we learn how completely powerless all human means are to hide sin. The moment they hear the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, all the fig leaves are simply nothing. They had used them to cover themselves from one another; but the moment God was there, they say that they are naked.
Adam was afraid. But fear is not repentance.
He shrank from the One whose word he had disobeyed, and recognised himself as naked... He was in fact self-condemned. It was not sorrow of a godly kind for the wrongdoing. There was no earnest care, no clearing of self, no indignation, and no other such feeling as the Spirit works in the conscience towards God. So in nothing did Adam prove himself pure in the matter. His sense of nakedness showed his guilt.
One commentator describes the answer Adam could have given.
As yet there is not a trace of repentance, but hardness of heart and self-justification. Had there been the least self-judgment, any real sense of the dishonour done to the Lord God, they would have confessed their sin in listening to the tempter. They would have humbled themselves at once, instead of covering their nakedness in their own way.
What Adam did with the question, we still do.
Of course God knew what had happened, but He questioned Adam as to whether he had eaten from the forbidden tree (v. 11). Adam admitted it, but not before putting the blame on his wife, and even hinting that possibly God had some blame too, because He had given the woman to Adam! How true this still is of us all: no matter how guilty we have been, we always want to shift the blame to someone or something else!
- Asked, not accused. God did not need the answer. He asked for Adam's sake, to bring him to admit his condition in front of his Creator.
- Asked twice. The first question touches the state he is in. The second touches the act that caused it — the same double appeal Scripture makes to the thirsty and the heavy laden.
- Asked alone. Each question is personal. It sets one man before God with nothing between them but his sin.
- Asked of a self-condemned man. His sense of nakedness proved his guilt. The fig leaves that hid him from his wife counted for nothing once God spoke.
- Answered badly. He could have repented. Instead he chose self-justification and blame — his wife, and behind her, God. We have been doing it ever since.
And Man said, The woman, whom thou hast given [to be] with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate.
God asks a plain question, and Adam answers with an accusation. His reply names the woman, and behind her the One who gave her.
Adam admits that he ate. He will not own the sin as his own.
Self-justification is as pointless as trying to hide from God. How the mighty has fallen! The head of creation stoops, to excuse himself of his sin, and casts the fault on his wife — yes, on God Himself! How degrading evil is, once we allow it and let it rule. The hardest thing for a sinner to do is to confess his sin truly and thoroughly; to judge oneself is only the fruit of grace through faith. A bad conscience dreads God and the consequences too much to confess, while it knows its sin too well to deny it.
Every fact in Adam's sentence is true. That is what makes it so slippery.
It is hard to imagine anything lower, or more insolent, than the man's answer. On the surface the words might be true; morally they were false, unworthy, irreverent, even blasphemous. Sin had debased Adam so far that he tried to excuse himself by the woman's fault, and even to throw the blame on the LORD God. The woman only pleaded the serpent's craft. Neither felt or confessed personal wrong, any more than disloyalty to God.
Adam turns God's gift into a charge against the Giver. He is still too frightened to face Him.
Along with all this cowardice there is sheer nerve. Man lays the trouble down at God's door. He says in effect, "Let God see to it; the woman is His creature, and He gave her to me." In the spirit of his mind he still says the same thing: "Let God see to it; the world is His, and He made it." A strange and horrible combination! The insolence of the heart charging God, and a cowardly conscience that cannot face Him. The sinner may talk big and make a noise. He may reason about God and his own condition, and build speeches and arguments as well as aprons. But despite everything he surrounds himself with, there he is, like Adam, ashamed of himself and afraid of God.
God does not argue with Adam's plea. He picks it up and turns it into the verdict.
There is another kind of evil in our souls — a readiness to excuse ourselves. Adam laid the blame on the woman. It was as much as saying, Why did you give me this woman? It was your gift that caused the sin. He wanted to push it away from himself, as a matter between God and the woman. It was not untrue, and yet it was as far as possible from the truth. It is the way of our guilty nature to throw onto another a sin our own will took part in. And God judged Adam out of his own mouth. The excuse he makes is the very reason for which God condemns him. "Because you have listened," and so on. Our excuses are our condemnation.
Confession was still open to Adam at that moment.
This has always been the way with the flesh once sin had entered. So Adam first makes a false excuse to cover his rebellion. Then he evades God's direct question and refuses to confess his sin. Had he confessed, it might have brought him at once into the results of grace. He was still rolling that sin as a sweet morsel under his tongue, and so he charges God with being the real cause of it, since it was He who had given the woman to be with him.
Christ also speaks of people God gave to Him. Not one of them was lost.
He revealed the secret when He said, "While I was with them in the world, I kept them in Your name: those that You gave Me I have kept, and none of them is lost" (John 17:12). It was His love and power and grace that kept them, so that a subtle enemy could not seduce them away from Him. But all this involved Him in death. He found His own where sin had left them, lying under the judgment of death, and He had to bear that judgment to set them free from it. What a contrast to Adam! As a willing partner in his wife's sin, he stood miserable and afraid before God, casting the blame on the one he ought to have kept.
- Given. God gave the woman to Adam. Sin turns the gift into an excuse and the Giver into the accused.
- Guilty. Adam's words were accurate on the surface and false underneath. He did not deny the sin; he passed it on.
- Judged. God does not debate the excuse. He convicts by it: "because you have listened" turns the plea into the verdict.
- Missed. Honest confession might have opened the door to grace right there; the excuse kept it shut.
- Kept. Adam refused to guard the one given to him. Christ says of those given to Him that He kept them all — and bore the judgment to do it.
And Jehovah Elohim said to the woman, What is this thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent deceived me, and I ate.
God has already questioned the man; now He turns to the woman and asks what she has done. Her answer is true, and still not a confession — the way people have answered God ever since.
Religion can be kept up without ever troubling the conscience. God's question goes straight there, and He asks Cain the same thing later.
Man's religion is one of outward forms with nothing to disturb the conscience. God, beginning with the conscience, raises the question, "What have you done?" (compare Genesis 3:13; 4:10).
One writer traces both halves of her reply — an admission, then a blame — and why people still answer this way.
In turning to the woman the Lord God asked a second question as to what she had done. The first had raised the question of man's state; now the second challenges his acts. Eve admitted she had eaten of the tree but blamed the serpent. It was the same with Adam. What she said was true, for the serpent did deceive her. But she was clearly trying to shift the responsibility for the act off herself. On this point Romans 2:15 is very helpful. But we must add that sinful men always tend to "accuse" others and "excuse" themselves, unless the Spirit of God works in the conscience.
Notice what her answer leaves out.
When the LORD God asked the woman, "What is this that you have done?" her answer was not "I have sinned," or "I am guilty," but "The serpent deceived me, and I ate." So our excuses only make bad worse. God can only deal righteously with pleas so empty and unworthy. They show that unrepented sin tends to spread like gangrene, and is truly ungodliness.
Another writer sums up the gap in one line.
All this is the truth; but conscience is not before God.
Both the man and the woman admit the act. What is missing is any sorrow over what the act did to God.
They were convicted and compelled to own their respective acts of sin; but there was no true self-judgment, no grief at their dishonour of God, no horror at the evil and their own guilt. On the contrary, there was the self-justification that proves the spirit unbroken, and the shifting of the blame from one to another, and even onto God Himself.
Two New Testament passages confirm her account, and one writer measures what that fall cost.
Eve's reply to God's question describes exactly how the enemy won his victory — "The serpent deceived me." Scripture itself confirms her words in 2 Corinthians 11:3 — "the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning." And this record is true as well: she was completely deceived and fell into transgression (1 Timothy 2:14). How deep the fall! How serious the results for a creature so gifted as man was! The height of his former honour measures the depth of his fall now.
God does not argue with either plea.
The very excuse he gave was the very height of sin, and the very thing by which God condemned him. So also with the woman. Out of their own mouths were they judged. In fact, pleading temptation was only saying that they preferred their own desires to God. It was saying that they listened to the devil's word more than to God's commandments.
One writer turns the scene on the reader.
The Lord then turns to the woman, and she puts the blame on the serpent. "The serpent deceived me, and I ate." Quite true! Throw the fault off your own shoulder if you can. You will never be able to hide it from God. And you cannot escape the judgment of God, unless you are hidden in the merits of the wonderful death of the Lord Jesus Christ.
- Question — God's "What have you done?" goes straight to the conscience. The first question asked where man stood; this one asks what he did.
- Answer — Her reply is true, and Scripture later confirms it: the serpent did deceive her.
- Gap — Accuracy is not confession. She never says "I have sinned," so conscience is still not before God.
- Verdict — God does not debate the excuse. He judges them out of their own mouths, because choosing the tempter's word over His is the sin itself.
- Us — We still accuse others and excuse ourselves. No plea hides anything from God. Safety lies only in the death of the Lord Jesus Christ.