If you’ll turn with me in your Bibles this morning, we’re going back towards the beginning, covering territory again but saying different things, looking at things slightly differently. Turning first to Genesis chapter 2, beginning with the eighth verse: ‘And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there He put the man whom He had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden and there divided and became four rivers. The name of the first is the Pishon; it is the one that flowed around the whole land of Havilah where there is gold, and the gold of that land is good. Bdellium and onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is the Gihon; it is the one that flowed around the whole land of Cush. And the name of the third river is the Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.’
From there, we turn to the next chapter, to chapter 3, beginning with verse 8: ‘And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, ‘Where are you?’ And he said, ‘I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself.’ He said, ‘Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?’ May the Lord bless the reading of His Word. Thanks be to God. Let us pray.
Lord, you have given us your word to teach us, to reveal yourself to us. Open our eyes to see, our hearts to understand who you are and just exactly what you have done, have been doing, and will continue to do with us and for us throughout our lives. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.
So this is kind of an odd appearing sermon title, I’m sure: ‘Emmanuel—God is with us.’ It’s unusual because clearly it’s not December; there’s no snow on the ground, and I’m not anxious for any. There’s no pretty Christmas lights up on the houses, the bells are not ringing, carolers are not singing, especially not Burl Ives. It’s August. So why am I preaching about Emmanuel?
Isn’t Emmanuel just a song that we sing on Christmas Eve? Perhaps, ‘O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.’ Isn’t that a name for Jesus? Right, it is. And that’s something we’re going to talk about in a couple of weeks more—Emmanuel, the understanding and divine promise that God is with us. And it’s not limited to only a single day, a month, or a whole season of the year. The idea that God is with us goes all the way back to the very beginning, back to the garden of Eden.
Even though the Hebrew word ‘Emmanuel’ only appears in the Bible three times, Emmanuel is seemingly a simple word, but it intimately describes the relationship between God and man. It is a relational idea that God is with us without suggesting, requiring, or even assuming that the reversed order is true—without saying that we are with God, and that’s why this word is so special.
Because it describes the relational feeling of God towards His chosen people. For if God is for us, then who can be against us? Now, the Lord, He is the active one generating and nurturing this relationship, while we are the recipients and beneficiaries of His relational care.
However, beneficiaries that we are, we are not passive members in this relationship. For since God requires our faithful response, He also initiates it within our heart and empowers that response. He initiates it within our heart by the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit, and He gives us the desire to respond to His grace and to respond positively. He gives us the strength and will to respond joyfully.
He is the one who has revealed Himself in creation, in His word, through the person of Jesus Christ, and by the gift of the Holy Spirit. And the Lord God, Emmanuel, He is the one who sent His only begotten Son into the world to restore and normalize our relationship with Him and with one another so that the relationship between God and man would no longer be one-sided, but be typified by our mutual love and faithfulness between God and man and the faithfulness and love from man towards God.
This divinely generated relationship of Emmanuel is described across all of the Bible, and it’s something we’re going to be exploring over the next few weeks. But today, we’re going to focus on the beginning of God’s relationship with us.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. But even before the beginning, God is. Before the beginning began, the Lord God was already in a relationship together with the three persons of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Then, out of the Lord’s sovereign will and desire, God created, each person of the Trinity working together in a perfect intention and action, creating imperfect tri-unity.
Why did God choose and will to create? For His own good pleasure. The Lord created us because He wanted to, because it pleased Him. God did not create us just for our sake; it wasn’t all about us; it isn’t all about us. He created us for His own pleasure, from His own desire. He created us so that He might have joy in us.
Why did God choose and will to create? Because He wanted to. He wanted to create people who would be in a personal relationship with Him. The Lord did not create us from any need or lack within Himself. He did not need our human worship and praise. He was not deficient in any regard before creating us, and He does not need for us to exist to cater to His needs and wants, not like the deities of all these other ancient religions were said to need.
While He does desire and require our worship as an obligation out of our obedience and our devotion, He does not require it or desire it because of His existential need. God alone is deserving of our worship because of who He is and who we are—our status as creatures and He as our Creator. It is this relative nature within that relationship that requires our obedient worship.
God created us so that He would have us to love and for us to enjoy loving Him. For me, myself, I cannot imagine any better reason or understanding for why God would create us: for Him to love us and us to love Him.
So God created man in His own image; in the image of God, He created him—male and female He created them. The Lord God made us to be like Him—similar but not the same. We reflect His nature and His diverse attributes as His image. As God exists together in relationship within the Trinity, so too we, His creations, reflect that relationship by existing in our many different, diverse relationships—person to person, person to environment, people to animal, animal to environment, animal to animal, and so forth.
One of the first social laws, which all people come to naturally understand, even if we never verbalize it, is that like attracts to like—like how Cleveland fans will gather together with other Cleveland fans or Yankee fans will gather and stay apart from Red Sox fans, or even more how some children and some adults I know may separate and organize M&Ms, Skittles, or jelly beans by color. Birds of a feather flock together, as it were.
You see, it’s our shared commonality that draws us all together. The Lord made us to be like Him, to reflect Him, so that we should be naturally attracted towards Him just as the persons of the Trinity are drawn together, drawn towards Him in this relational bond of love.
Because He made us, and He approaches us in love, then the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. Just as God worked for six days to make the sun and moon, the air we breathe, the water we drink, causing all of the plants to grow, giving us food for our nourishment and our continued survival. Just as the environment He created supports our lives, so too we’re people created to work by caring for and tending His great creation as His stewards and representatives.
We were made to preserve His creation because His creation preserves us. God declared His creation to be very good, so just as He cares for the whole of creation, just as He loves each of His creations, so we too should love His creations. For by living out this love, we express our love for Him and our work of tending and keeping God’s garden and creation was intended to be a service of love—a truly labor of love.
Service done out of love for the Lord in response to His love for us. And even with the curse of the fall transforming our work into toil, our obligation of loving service to God has not been rescinded; if anything, it has been intensified because of the grace and mercy He has shown to disobedient creatures like us.
Now the Bible does not elaborate on our most ancient forebears and their prehistoric time in the garden of Eden. We do know that at some time after God created Adam and Eve, after He placed them in Eden and had given them their important purpose to work and keep the garden, and after He had also given them a rule to govern their provision: ‘You may eat of this out of any tree you want, but for this one,’ sometime after that, they disobeyed the Lord by eating the forbidden fruit, being deceived by that ancient serpent, Satan.
The fall may have happened any time—just hours, days, months, years—after God created Adam and Eve. But regardless of how long they lived in the garden, what Scripture makes clear is that from the moment of his formation from the primordial clay, Adam was intended to be in a close, intimate, and personal relationship with God.
Even while the glory of the Lord fills the earth so that we are never apart from His presence, many people, if not most, tend to experience their relationship with God as characterized by a sense of distance—as in God is or is not around whenever I need or want Him, like He’s only around when I come to church on Sunday and pleasantly far away during the other six days of the week.
Or perhaps they think of Him as some impersonal and abstract concept of a detached divinity, like the divine clockmaker who built all creation, wound it up, and then let it go just to watch. Or perhaps it’s just from a lack of revelation to them, where they’ve never actually heard the gospel or the message of Christ preached. It could be a lack of understanding, being swayed by the multitude of false religions that are out there, or by not being faithfully taught and discipled in the way, or even by our own stubbornness—our own intentional and belligerent ignorance, like the so-called atheists who attack everybody’s faith because they hate God.
But how can you hate that which you don’t believe exists? The simple fact remains that God only feels to be far away because of our motion away from Him. No matter how far we try and move ourselves away from God, He is right there beside you, always.
We must draw near to God as He Himself draws near to us. Keeping a relationally far distance from the Lord is not how we were created to be, nor was this the type of relationship our first ancestors had with God. What God intended originally and is restoring us to by the cross and the continuing work of the Holy Spirit is a personal relationship with Him because of the Emmanuel promise that God is with us.
This Emmanuel is the divine promise, the divine relationship, which every professing Christian claims to have: a personal relationship with Christ. Regarding this relationship between Adam and Eve living in the garden and the Lord God living in the heavens, the Bible in Genesis 3 speaks in particular to God coming down and visiting His creations, visiting mankind.
It was during this particular visit when Adam and Eve heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the cool of the day. They tried to hide themselves from His presence. And I want you to note that God did not come down into the garden full of wrath and fury. He walked there during the cool of the day—the most pleasant and peaceful time imaginable.
He did not come into the garden like the rider on the white horse of Revelation 19 with eyes like blazing fire, a robe dipped in blood, with the armies of heaven following and with a sharp sword coming from His mouth. No, instead of wrath, He came in peace with the wholeness of shalom.
The Lord came to be with those who could not come to Him. He came to them in love, even though they deserved His full wrath. The Lord God came to them; He met them where they were in their place and in their state as now fallen humanity. And even now, right now today, God comes to us. He comes to meet us where we are, inviting us to return to Him wherever we are—physically, spiritually, mentally, or socially—because He is Emmanuel. God is with us even when we are not with God. He comes to us where we are, and He works for our restoration, sending His Holy Spirit to change us, to return us to the original intended relationship with Him.
Following their transgressions, when God came into the garden to visit Adam and Eve on that day, He already knew about it. He already knew what they had done. He was not caught off guard; He was not surprised. Surely, He was disappointed, but He was not surprised. Neither was He ignorant of where they were; He knew their exact location.
The only omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, holy, faithful, and sovereign one so valued His relationship with His human creations that even after they had offended Him, after they had transgressed His law, after they had disobeyed Him, He still came to meet with sinful man to offer us grace and mercy and give us the promise of future redemption—the promise of Messiah, the seed of the woman—a child who one day would be Himself called Emmanuel, Jesus. Blessed be the name of the Lord!
When God called out in the garden, ‘Where are you?’ this was not a rhetorical question like a parent playing hide and seek with their child who is seen clearly hiding behind the drapes. Nor was it a question derived from anger: ‘Where are you? Get out here now! I’m coming to get you!’ No, it was a call for their repentance—a call for them to come and return into His presence to receive forgiveness.
How many of us, as children ourselves, have hidden in fear from the expected wrath and punishment of an aggrieved parent? How many of us have been the aggrieved parent or other form of authority looking for those under our charge or care, wanting to show them mercy and forgiveness while still needing to dole out judgment and punishment? If the expression of ‘This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you’ applies, and it is so very true for us, how much more do you think that God, exercising punishment on Adam and Eve, must have hurt Him—hurt Him so much that He turned His face away from His only begotten Son dying, hanging on a cross?
Now, the Lord created mankind with the intention for us to be in a loving relationship with Him, but man—all of us—damaged that relationship. Our forebears knew it; they knew that they blew it. Adam’s answer shows us how bad the damage they had done was.
Why did Adam and Eve hide when they heard the sound of the Lord walking in the garden? Adam answered God, saying, ‘I was afraid because I was naked.’ There are two words here that we need to look more closely at: ‘afraid’ and ‘naked.’ Because there’s several layers of meaning within both of these words, especially when used together in this context.
For what seems to be often the most simple and obvious understanding to modern sensibilities is not always the full or true measure of meaning. Adam and Eve did not hide simply because they had no clothes and that they were afraid of punishment while naked. ‘Arai’ in the Hebrew and ‘gymnos’ in the Greek does carry a simple connotation of being without clothes, but it is better understood more wholly and completely as being exposed.
For truly, what naked person is not exposed? They’re naked to the elements, to view, to danger. But the exposure here that we’re talking about is not concerning their unclothed state; it’s about the exposure of their sin before the Lord’s holiness. It is the exposure of their transgressions and their understanding of the divine requirement that justice must be done, having broken God’s holy law.
Adam and Eve knew what they deserved on account of what they had done—death. Although they probably didn’t understand what death was yet, they quickly came to also fear it. It is evident from their actions as described in the Bible that they felt a kind of remorse for their actions because they tried unsuccessfully to cover their exposure. They felt guilt for their sin, and they tried to cover up and hide their shame before the righteous and holy God.
Adam and Eve were not shameless like all those who were yet to come—those who would revel in their sinful ways, flaunting their sins before the whole wide world. They still feared the Lord, clearly still possessing some wisdom, unlike the unrepentant sinners of today who parade their sins for all to see.
Now, to be afraid or to fear, especially in regards to divinity, is not just simply to be frightened. Adam and Eve did not hide in fear because they were frightened or worried about what God would do to them in retribution. This was no horror movie sense of fear. To fear, both ‘yirah’ in Hebrew and ‘phobos’ in Greek, are nuanced words, much more than just describing sheer terror, which is a small part.
For example, 2,000 years ago in Judea, we read about a category of people called ‘God fearers,’ who were generally Gentiles coming to faith, becoming converts toward Judaism—like Cornelius in Caesarea, whom Peter was called to visit. These were people who understood that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
To fear, both ‘yirah’ and ‘phobos,’ carry a sense of revering or showing honor or respect, and they caused the effect of glorifying or worshiping the object of that fear because of their response.
Like the fear and discomfort we might feel if we show up to a party underdressed, or like one of the common folk might feel if they ran into the Queen of England by accident, fearing the Creator God as His creation is natural and good. Because if He created us, then He can also destroy us, just like the potter and his clay.
So Adam and Eve, they hid themselves not from fear of God’s wrath, but out of respect and love of Him within the existing relationship. Their fear was not a conscious choice or a reaction to their being caught in sin; it was the natural response to the change in the relational status they had with the Lord. Formally, they were holy; now, unholy.
Their response was driven by their shame and regret for what they had done and could not undo. It was a response driven by their knowledge and their limited human understanding of the offense they had caused against their Creator. Like the fear that a little child who breaks a plate might feel, and the child offers a response in the same kind, with shame.
Adam and Eve heard the sound of the Lord walking in the garden; they heard Him coming to visit His creations with whom He had an intimate relationship, and they tried to hide from Him—not like Bilbo Baggins hiding from the Sackville-Baggins, his cousins whom he hated and wanted to avoid, but hiding like a child caught reading after lights out with a flashlight.
A guilty and shame-filled hiding because of the disappointment they had caused. They hid like a puppy who, having done something naughty, will go ahead and run and hide with their tail between their legs. But when still called, they will still come slowly and shamefully.
They hid out of their reverence for God, for His holiness. They hid because they understood that their sinful disobedience was offensive to Him, and so they tried to remove themselves from God’s presence in their shame to be respectful of the Lord, not wanting to cause Him further offense.
Like the prophet Habakkuk says of God, ‘Your eyes are too pure to look upon evil.’ Our forebears were not shameless; they were shame-filled, and they respected their relational Lord enough to choose to try and not compound their offenses.
We would do well ourselves to recognize and be cognizant of our own shame. As offended, aggrieved, and disappointed as the Lord surely was, He still came to see Adam and Eve. He still came to be with them, although they had sinned. And He still comes to sinful people like us.
‘For one will scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die. But God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.’ The Lord is holy and just, and He could not forgive Adam and Eve with just a wave of His spiritual hand.
They had broken His law, and they knew the consequences of that violation. The Lord would have actually been unjust if there had been no punishment for them, and He would have violated His own righteousness. So He showed them grace and mercy still by sending them off into exile; for by sinning, they had already chosen to move away from their relationship with God.
So He graciously let them go. Yet He let them go, but still remains right there, right beside us—always near to hand. Furthermore, God showed them grace by clothing them with animal skins. The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.
Those skins came from the first sacrifice made to be a covering for mankind’s sin. Adam and Eve’s continued lives were paid for by the blood of an innocent, as Leviticus tells us: ‘For the life of the creatures is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life.’ Death paid for their lives, and the damage to our relationship with the Lord is a case of our own self-harm.
Yet the Lord is still faithful, especially when we are not. He is the one who initiated the relationship, and being the one aggrieved, He’s the only one who could restore it.
Adam’s first sin and our resultant sinfulness move us ever further away from God and His loving presence, but our Emmanuel will never abandon us. The Lord has promised to be with us always, saying, ‘And behold, I am with you until the end of the age.’
Now, that animal sacrifice, that life taken for Adam and Eve’s atonement, was only a partial restoration of the relationship between man and God, because animal blood and skins could not remove or fully cover the stain of their sin. That sin still shone through; they could not remain in the Lord’s presence—they had to go into exile.
But this sacrifice, like all others under the Old Covenant, points towards the true sacrifice which satisfied divine justice and enabled God’s grace to be given to sinful people like you and me. The language used of atonement is that blood served as a covering for sin, but only the blood of Christ is so opaque that our sins cannot be seen any longer.
Not only are we covered by His blood and our sin not seen, but God, when He looks upon us, only sees Christ. The garden sacrifice points to the death of the innocent Christ on the cross—the righteous one who is numbered among the wicked, so that the elect could be accounted as righteous. We are restored and reunited into a right relationship with God in Him.
It does not seem strange to me that many people feel the most closely connected to God when they spend time in nature, whether it be in the wild or in a beautifully manicured garden. God originally placed His people in a garden, and He came to meet with them there.
Perhaps it’s because in times and places like that—when we are in nature—that we reach the closest point of our lives to being like that original time in the garden, where all the worldly things and distractions are absent. Perhaps that is why we can more easily see and feel the Lord’s presence around us. There, the Lord’s presence fills the earth, so He is always with us and surrounding us.
Any and all distance apart from God is our own self-delusion. Emmanuel—God is with us always and in everywhere and every when. He has come to meet with you. Would you go meet with Him? He is here where and when you want Him to be, because He loves you and He wants you to grow more deeply in your relationship with Him.
Emmanuel—God is with us. So let us be with God as well. Amen.