Where He Leads I Will Follow: Eve and Beauty

 

That is why a man leaves his father and mother and unites with his wife, and they become a new family. The man and his wife were both naked, but they were not ashamed.  Genesis 2:24-25 NET

 Can you imagine being naked and not ashamed? I can’t. As a distant concept, maybe, but I don’t think it will ever be my lived reality on this earth. Why do you think they were able to be this way?

 At first, you might argue that they were made by God and there was nothing in them to be ashamed of. They didn’t have a bulging belly or cellulite or blemishes. They had never gotten a bad haircut or dye job. No wrinkles, no gray hair. All the things we count in ourselves to be “bad” they didn’t have yet. This is because they were made by God, but wait, so were you and I! God made each one of us, formed us in our mother’s womb (Psalm 139:13).

 Also in their favor was a lack of comparison. Eve was the most beautiful woman on earth, because she was the only woman on earth. They weren’t trying to live up to airbrushed ideals in magazines or people more formed by plastic surgery than by God. They weren’t being told by advertising that how they were wasn’t good enough, thin enough, strong enough, pretty enough. Can we get back to that kind of innocence? Can we erase a lifetime of social conditioning? I don’t think it can be done completely, but at least by acknowledging it we can recognize that our displeasure with ourselves does not come from God, it isn’t how we were made to be.

 You see, sin messes up a lot of things. As Adam and Eve walked in the Garden of Eden, eating the fruit, playing with the animals, they had no sin. There was nothing wrong. It's hard to imagine. At this point in the story, they still had a choice. They had been told not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, and they hadn’t. They had chosen God’s way, and they were living in the result of that, which was no shame. There was nothing to be ashamed of!

 If we look ahead, shame didn’t come into the picture until sin did. Had their hair been messed up? Probably. Had they fallen in the mud and gotten dirty. Likely. Did they have grass stains on their knees? Maybe. There were likely to be lots of physical things that, today, would have us hide or change them, but at that time they didn’t cause shame because there was no sin. The two go hand in hand – sin and shame. Thanks to our sin nature, we now feel shame about all sorts of things, ones we have caused by doing wrong and those that we are exposed to in society. We feel shame for things we should, like breaking the law, and for things that we shouldn’t, like getting a pimple. The good news? This situation isn’t forever! We read in Revelations 21:4, “He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. All these things are gone forever." It’s not listed specifically, but it seems like along with these things there would be no more shame. No longer will we mourn for what we have done, what we have lost. Even better news? We don’t have to wait until then for relief from our situation. “So now there is no condemnation for those who belong to Christ Jesus.” (Romans 8:1, emphasis mine). Once we are in Christ, we are a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17). We have been freed and cleansed of our sin, and we are not subject to condemnation anymore. And yet, our worldly structures fight to keep us enslaved to it. So how do we learn to live in this new way, maybe not naked, but unashamed? Colossians 3:10 tells us, “Put on your new nature, and be renewed as you learn to know your Creator and become like him.” We keep our eyes on God and not on this world. We choose to align our thoughts, our desires, our values with Him and not the media around us. It's not easy, maybe not even fully possible, but the more we do it, the better we feel. And that is worth the effort!

Here’s the Thing: Will I ever be naked and unashamed? Probably not before heaven. That said, I can be real and unashamed. I can be at peace with who I am in Christ and turn to Him for a reminder of how He has cleansed me when voices from my past entreat me once more to the dungeon of self-depreciation.