COATS OF SKIN

Transcript

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Hello everyone, this is Pastor Dean Thompson with a word of hope.

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Encounters with grace.

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How grace meets broken people and gives them hope beyond their circumstances. Coats of skin.

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Unto Adam also, and to his wife, did the Lord God made coats of skins and clothed them? Genesis chapter three, verse twenty one. The garden narrative is set in the world of the ancient Near East, where the gods of Egypt, Sumer and Canaan were capricious tyrants who created humanity to be their slaves, and fed on the labor of the fields. The Enuma Elish pictured mankind formed from the blood of a slaughtered rebel god, made to bear the judgment the gods refused. Against that dark backdrop, Genesis tells a starkly, startlingly different story. A god who plants a garden, walks in it in the cool of the day, and seeks his creatures by name. The Hebrew word for the sound of the glory walking mit Halek is the same reflexive form later used of Enoch and Noah who walked with God. Intimacy, not intimidation. Adam and Eve reach for autonomy and find only shame. Their first act as sinners is to project in is a project in self covering. They sue fig leaves, a fabric that withers by nightfall. Religion begins here. The human attempt to hide our nakedness by our own effort. But God does not leave them in leaves. Before he pronounces a single curse, he is already at work stitching. The first death in Scripture is not the death of a sinner, but the death of a substitute, an animal slain so that guilty people so that guilty people could be covered. The word clothed Yalbish is the tender language of a parent dressing a child. Grace is not an idea introduced late in the Bible. It is God on his knees in Eden, clothing the very people who betrayed him. You cannot sow enough fig leaves to cover a real wound. Achievements, reputation, busyness, even good works, all of them will. The gospel is not that you try harder to cover yourself, but that God clothes you with a righteousness you did not earn, purchased at the cost of a life not your own. When the accusing voice tells you to hide, remember God comes looking not to expose you, but to dress you. Bring him the leaves you have been stitching, and let him give you the robe of righteousness. O God, we are tired of covering ourselves. Please clothe us in the righteousness that we could never sow, and help us to walk with you unashamed, upright and true.

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In Jesus' name. Amen. God bless you, brothers and sisters.