Kingdom Harbor

Lectionary Reflection: Third Sunday after Pentecost: Genesis 3:8-15

“They heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. But the LORD God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?”” He said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself… And the Lord God made garments of skins for the man and for his wife and clothed them.” Genesis 3:8-10, 21

The entire human-divine drama, and a good bit of the gospel, is found in these few verses. Humanity, now estranged from God with the juice of forbidden fruit still drying on their cheek, is walking away from God, afraid and hiding in the shadows. Hiding because they now feel “naked” and exposed (inside and out), insecure and no longer at ease in their own skin or at peace with God in his garden world.

The human race as a whole became perpetual middle schoolers walking into the cafeteria and looking for a table to sit, gawky, self-conscious, hyper-aware of warts and pimples and not sure where they belong. This is a multilayered and deeply insightful description of the human condition. Can you relate?

The entrance of Sin changed our tune about God from delight to fear, from dancing to cowering, from intimacy (“into me you see”) to masking and hiding and putting on a front. But God doesn’t walk away from his wayward children. He doesn’t condemn and move on with the story. He walks toward them in the evening breeze with the probing, unsettling, soul-diagnosing existential question: “Where are you?”

God is not asking for GPS coordinates, a geographical location. He’s not asking which tree they are near, or which hedge of bushes they are hiding behind. He’s asking them more about what state of soul or relational pit or existential desert their transgression has landed them. The answer to “Where are you?” the Story invites us to consider is, “I am over here, in a heap of trouble, and in need of rescue.”

No sadder words are found in the Scriptures than that they “hid themselves from the presence of God.” Just as our bodies cannot live without oxygen, so our soul’s cannot breathe and live well outside the Presence of God.

I often ask my college class this Bible trivia question: “Who is the first missionary in the Bible?” Answers often given include Abraham and Moses in the Old Testament, or Jesus, Peter or Paul in the New Testament. It’s kind of a trick question. If we define a “missionary” as someone who goes out to bring good news to lost sinners, then this text is our answer and God is the first missionary. God goes searching in the garden for two lost sinners and after confronting their sin, the episode ends with God clothing them (“covering their shame”) with garments of grace (3:21).

God not only “clothed them” here, pointing forward to Paul’s missionary message that “all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ” (Gal. 3:27), but an animal’s blood was shed and skin used to “atone” or cover their sin and shame as a prefiguring of the OT sacrificial system and Christ’s final atoning death.

This Sunday I will lead my monthly service at the local senior home. The highlight of the service for many is when my daughter Abby joins me in singing the beloved hymn “In the Garden” together. The hymn takes us beyond the treachery of this scene in Genesis 3, beyond hiding in the shadows in fear, to the hope of a restored fellowship in a renewed garden on the other side of redemption.

In the hymn, the sound of God doesn’t send us fleeing in fear. Rather, the “sound of His voice is so sweet” that the birds hush their singing to listen in on the melody that “within my heart is singing.” Jesus walks hand in hand, or arm on heavy shoulder, and reassures us that despite having all partaken of the forbidden fruit, “He tells me I am His own and the joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known.” I want to live with that melody in my heart daily, too. How about you?

Now both Genesis 3 and this beloved hymn speak of the evening falling, and evenings can evoke danger, sad endings, or the devil’s darkness chasing away God’s light. But God’s “light shines in darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5). The hymn pictures God accompanying us through our trials and tribulations, his voice calling to us so long as we stay with him:

I stayed in the garden with Him
Though the night all around me is falling
But He bids me go, through the voice of woe
His voice to me is calling

And the ripe and juicy detail that stands out to me in Genesis 3, begging for deeper reflection, is the phrase “They heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze” (3:8).

What does the sound of God sound like anyways, eager minds want to know?! Some have asked: If no one sees a tree fall in the woods, does it make a sound? I want to ask: Does a God who is Spirit and has no feet make a sound when he goes “walking” in the garden? And what exactly is “the time of the evening breeze”? Is the cool evening breeze God’s very presence blowing on a sweltering soul after a hot summer day of sinning?

Whatever we make of this imagery and these pregnant phrases, I find it very comforting that both in this Story and in our own mini-sagas of rebellion, the evening ushers in not God’s icy silence, haunting absence, raging storm of judgment, or crippling stillness, but a gentle wind and loving voice approaching to ask, “Where are you, beloved?”

As we drag ourselves home after a hard day’s work, or busy day’s sinning and missing the mark, we too can hear the sound of the gentle wind of God’s evening grace blowing in our backyards. He bids us to come walk with Him, offers us a new set of clothes, even with sin’s stain still on our cheek.

And if the “sound of God” in the Garden of Treachery sounded like footsteps of judgment, a violent stormy wind, the pounding of our own heart or condemning voice of a guilty conscience, we don’t belong to that garden anymore. Our lives are planted in the Garden of the Resurrection, and the definitive sound of God moving in this particular garden sounds like a stone rolling away from the tomb where our sins were buried once and for all, and New Life stepping out into a New Day!

And He talks with me
And He tells me I am His own
And the joy we share as we tarry there
None other has ever known.