Umm, if being naked is a “sin and shame” why didn’t God tell them to put some clothes on before they ate of the Tree?
Being naked isn’t a sin or shame. They committed a sin, and now are ashamed. They hide from God because they no longer feel comfortable being that open and intimate with him. Symbolically, nudity means intimacy.
Animals have no sin or awareness of sin, and thus do not feel ashamed being naked in front of God and everybody.
Being naked isn’t a sin or shame.
But, if animals did have sin and awareness of sin, they would feel ashamed being naked in front of God and everybody?
Despite the ‘’‘fact’‘’ that being naked isn’t a sin or shame?
Tell that to a very bad dog that has just stuck its snout where it doesn’t belong…
Yes. It’s not the nakedness that is shameful. It is the sin of eating the fruit that lead Adam and Eve to try and hide from God.
Let me try explaining it a different way.
The nakedness of Adam and Eve is symbolic of their intimacy with God. They “let it all hang out.” God knows everything about them. There is nothing between them. And they are entirely comfortable with this.
But later Adam and Eve sin. And then the first thing they do when they hear God’s voice is to hide from him. They feel shame because they have sinned. They no longer feel comfortable in God’s presence without some sort of barrier between them. It’s as if God can see their sin, and they want to cover it up.
That feeling of discomfort is shame. They don’t feel ashamed for being naked. They are ashamed because they sinned. And that leads them to feel uncomfortable with feeling naked–being so intimate and open with God.
Imagine you drew a picture. You don’t think it’s very good. So you feel ashamed showing it to people. Does that mean showing picture to people is shameful in general? Does it mean that all the other people who draw things should feel ashamed? No.
Adam and Eve only feel ashamed to be naked and vulnerable in front of God because they have sinned. It is eating the fruit they are ashamed of, not being naked.
So if eating the fruit wasn’t the original sin, then what was? Hanging brain in front of God?
Not obeying God . . . which they couldn’t have known was wrong/evil having no knowledge of the difference between good and evil!
That’s a helluva catch.
So - God saw that all was good - yet created sin - and thats bad - so he hid the knowledge from his creation that he created bad and then killed them for finding out about it.
Yeah - that’s worthy of worship.
You left out the part where He planned to fix it all by sending Himself Jesus to Earth to take the punishment for sin, an eternity in Hell, by being dead for a couple of days . . . thousands of years, and a global flood later.
PS The Fall, the eating from the tree, was part of the plan from the beginning.
I’ve heard a pastor say that God would have but Eve to death and created a new woman for Adam, though I disagree, as Adam put it, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh;" and this seems to relate to them as well:(Matt 19: 4x)’ “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female … and the two will become one flesh’… 6 So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
That two becoming one seems to imply that due to one doing it, the other did too., since they were one. This in the beginning situation does not seem to be what we have today due to hardness of heart as that verse continues, so I don’t think we can really understand this two becoming one flesh.
That’s the route the Jehovah’s Witnesses tend to go in their art - witness the Warty Toadpear of Knowledge:
So, the Original sun was Waldorf salad, and the second sin was telling a lie to the Creator of the Universe?
(“I hid because I saw that I was naked and I was ashamed”)
He did that before with Lilith, so why not?
For context:
“It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed.
I’d like you to thank you for giving me the one explanation of that passage that seems to make any sense to me.
However – don’t they say that it’s after eating the apple that they realize that they’re naked?
Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves
They don’t hide until they hear God coming (rather a different interpretation of God than any under which God’s omnipresent); but they clothe themselves immediately, as soon as they realize that they’re naked.
So I think it’s the realization – it’s knowledge – that’s the issue here. And I agree with @Two_Many_Cats2 that it’s a metaphor for our separation from the other creatures; but I think it’s giving an explanation for two ways in which we appear to be separate. One of those is the knowledge that we’re going to die – not only that we might die or that some creatures have died, which I think at least some other species have in some version; but that each individual human is certainly going to die sooner or later – a realization that we’ve been fighting in assorted ways since, probably, we first came to it. And the other is the invention of the concepts of good and evil. Again, not out of nowhere – other species have ideas of good and bad, and at least some have some sense of justice. But the concept of – maybe moral and immoral is a better phrasing – the concept that something that’s common, natural, and even essential to the existence of the species, may nevertheless be in some essential sense wrong. Note that the first thing we applied it to is nakedness – and there’s nothing wrong with nakedness. But humans think that there is; to the extent that it’s taken for granted by the story that as soon as Adam and Eve know that they’re naked it makes sense for them to put on clothes! The first thing that we did when we discovered the concepts of right and wrong, the story says, was to misapply them. And that’s what got us thrown out of the garden.
And that is certainly an unorthodox opinion. But here’s another, to bring it to the thread topic: if only one single hominin had come up with that concept, and had been unable to communicate it to any other hominins – we’d still be just one of a batch of primate species, if we’d survived; not who we are at all. Whatever genetic shift made that type of concept possible wouldn’t have met a compatible gene. To put it in the framework of the story: Eve wouldn’t have had any kids; or if she had, they wouldn’t have had a human concept of good and evil. End of story.
Of course, that should be “Garden of Eden”. Stupid spellcheck.
Adam and Eve were not killed. He lived to be 930 years old.
Animals do not know sin either. (well, there is some argument that some animals can distinguish “Good vs Evil”)
Not in the actual Bible.
Romans 5:12 -
Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned.
If ‘death’ were not an issue prior to the apple event, then God allowing death is the same as God killing them - granted, he took a long time to get it done (and much shorter today), but its still a killing.