The Cover-Up
Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings (Gen 3:7).
Here the sin goes a little deeper. As we have studied, Adam and Eve\’s first response to sin was for them to look at themselves. Self-centeredness is the poison from the Tree of Knowledge that kills. We were created to be God-centered. The restoration process through which our minds are renewed and we are delivered from our sin nature, comes from seeing the glory of God, as we read in 2 Cor 3:18:
But we all, with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit. Deliverance from sin comes from turning away from sin and self-centeredness to become God-centered again. It is not our goal to just find out who we are in Christ, but rather who He is in us. The former can still be self-centeredness, even though it can be mixed with many good motives. If we are going to be changed into His image, we must behold His glory with “an unveiled face.” Veils are the defense mechanisms that the sin nature compels us to wear to protect ourselves. They are an extension of the coverings that Adam and Eve made after their sin. Sin causes us to be self-aware and self-protective to the point where we are afraid for anyone to see us as we are. These veils must be stripped away so that we can see the Lord as He is, and so that we can be real with one another.
- In March 2015, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt launched an initiative to form a “Joint Arab Force” to counter the rising threat of radical Islam, especially in wake of the atrocity perpetrated by the Islamic State terrorist group against Egyptian Coptic and lately Ethiopian Christians in Libya. Pray that this president will be used of God as a voice in the Arab world with regard to clamping down the terrorist challenges facing nations. He closed down 27,000 mosques!
- Those nations who fed the fundamentalist Islamic terrorist movement must be the ones to stop it.