SKIN FOR SIN

Skin For Sin

Eve gave her husband Adam the forbidden fruit and he ate (Gen. 3:6). Thus Adam broke God’s covenant with man (Hos. 6:7). God had warned Adam that in the day he ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, dying he would die (Gen. 2:17). Though married, naked and unashamed (Gen. 2:25), after eating the forbidden fruit the eyes of both of them were opened and they knew they were naked. They were ashamed. So they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings to hide their shame from God (Gen. 3:7). Even so, they were still naked before God. Otherwise He would not have made tunics of skin to cover them (Gen. 3:21). Their nakedness being more than physical signified also conscious guilt before God.

Fig leaves were no longer the fashion. As Rebecca covered her son Jacob with skins of young goats, so the LORD God covered Adam and Eve’s skin with skin. Why skin and not leaves? The Hebrew words for ‘skin’ and ‘naked’ are closely linked. The one implies the other. And, Scripture teaches that without the shedding of blood there is no remission for sins (Heb. 9:22). Therefore in light of the rest of Scripture we take it that the Lord shed the blood of an animal before their eyes to act out the Gospel already heard by the man and his wife (Gen. 3:15). Thus God ‘covered’ their sin.

Did the LORD God crush the serpent’s head, skin it, and wrap its skin around the man and his wife? No. It was the sacrifice of ‘the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world’ that was being pictured (John 1:29). Thus by this original (clean) animal sacrifice the Lord taught Adam and Eve substitutionary atonement. The covenant threat was that in the day Adam ate the forbidden fruit dying he would die. Adam and Eve began dying that very day and would undergo physical death many years later. However, there was substitutionary death that day (probably a ‘clean’ animal such as a sheep).

Adam and Eve passed this knowledge on to their posterity. Thus Noah offered ‘clean’ animals to God after he came out of the ark (Gen. 8:20). So did Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob etc. Detailed instruction of the sacrificial system depicting Gospel ‘substitutionary atonement’ was given to Moses (Lev. 1f.) Thus the ‘Lamb slain from the foundation of the world’ (Rev. 13:8b) was depicted, first by the Lord Himself when He gave Adam and Eve ‘skin for sin,’ and thereafter in the Old Testament sacrificial system (including Passover), which ended with the sacrifice of Christ on the cross.

As depicted by the application of water in covenant baptism, those belonging to Christ are said to have ‘put on Christ’ (Gal. 3:27), who ‘washed us from our sins in His own blood’ (Rev. 1:5b), by the ‘washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Saviour…’ (Titus 3:5b&6).

After the first Adam ate the fruit forbidden from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the midst of Paradise, he knew he was naked. He was expelled from the Garden. To those who have had the nakedness of their sin and shame covered, having put on Christ, the last Adam gives to eat of the tree of life, which is in the Paradise of God (Rev. 2:7; 22:14).

In the words of Augustus Toplady: Nothing in my hand I bring / simply to Thy cross I cling / naked, come to Thee for dress / helpless, look to Thee for grace / foul, I to the fountain fly / wash me Saviour, or I die.

Why not come to the Lamb of God to have your nakedness covered?