By Elin Henderson
“…and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the
LORD God among the trees of the garden.”
Genesis 3:8 (NKJV, emphasis added)
We all know that feeling as parents.
We walk into a room, spot a disaster of some kind, and encounter a silence like
no other. There isn’t a soul to be found, seen or heard. And we all know what
has happened: Someone is hiding and, generally speaking, it is the perpetrator!
From the time we are little, the number
one response to doing wrong is usually hiding. This negative behavior is
nothing new but, in fact, is as old as mankind itself. If you think about it,
it was the first response to sin. Adam and Eve knew they had sinned and they
HID themselves. Imagine the silence God encountered when He came down to walk
with them in the garden that day!
Now granted, as we get older, the
hiding takes on different forms. It may or may not be physical hiding. We might
hide emotionally from people by always keeping our relationships shallow. We
might hide spiritually by avoiding encounters with spiritual people or places. Either
way, we see our nakedness - - our bare emptiness and failure - - and we retreat
to those bushes where we think we can find safety and security. Then, like Adam
and Eve, we try and cover ourselves with leaves from those same bushes, like
somehow that will hide our nakedness. What we really end up hiding is who we
really are. We try and appear in a “clothed” form that isn’t really “us.”
It isn’t hard to hide from people. They
are easily fooled. In fact, we may encounter many friends in the bushes with us,
or walking around in the same leaf outfits. Sometimes the guise goes so far that
we even fool ourselves.
Hiding from God, though, is another
story. He knows the ugly, naked truth of where we are, who we are, and what we
have done, but unlike a world that would judge us or be fooled by us, he looks
on us with love. He gently allures us from our hiding places and graciously
covers us with His clothes of splendor. He keeps who we are as individuals
intact, but covers us and makes us presentable so that we can stand unashamed!
GOING DEEPER:
1. What are some reasons we hide?
(Ex: fear, shame, regret…)
2. Who else can you think of in
Scripture who tried this “Hiding Tactic” either with other people or God?
(Hint: Moses, Jacob…)
FURTHER
READING:
Oakwood’s
missionaries Elin Henderson (a registered nurse) and her husband Phil serve as
church planters with New Tribes in Mozambique, Africa. Elin is
mother to fourteen-year-old Callie and twelve-year-old Elias.
