Clothed in Garments Provided by the LORD God

I'm studying Genesis 3:14-24 this week in order to prepare for Sunday evening's message. Of course, one of the remarkable verses in the entire Bible is found in that passage-Genesis 3:21, where the LORD God, in response to the first couple's sin, shame, and nakedness (which I believe to be the loss of original righteousness)made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them.

Of course, for there to be garments of skins, there had to be animals that had been sacrificed. Listen to what Marcus Dods, the 19th century Scottish preacher/theologian has to say about God's action:
The clothing which God provides was in itself different from what man had thought of. Adam took leaves from an inanimate, unfeeling tree; God deprived an animal of life, that the shame of His creature might be relieved. This was the last thing Adam would have thought of doing. To us life is cheap and death familiar, but Adam recognized death as the punishment of sin. Death was to early man a sign of God’s anger. And he had to learn that sin could be covered not by bunch of leaves snatched from a bush as he passed by…but only by pain and blood. Sin cannot be atoned for by any mechanical action nor without expenditure of feeling. Suffering must ever follow wrongdoing. From the first sin to the last, the track of the sinner is marked with blood….It was made apparent that sin was a real and deep evil, and that by no easy and cheap process could the sinner be restored….Men have found that their sin reaches beyond their own life and person, that it inflicts injury and involves disturbance and distress, that it changes utterly our relation to life and to God, and that we cannot rise above its consequences save by the intervention of God Himself, by an intervention which tells us of the sorrow He suffers on our account (The Book of Genesis, 24-25).

Was Adam Stronger than Lions and Bears?

I'm working on my Genesis sermon for tomorrow night (Gen 1:14-31). In the process, I found something quite intriguing from Martin Luther (the great Reformer).

In commenting on man's dominion over the animal world, Luther asserts that in his opinion Adam in his original state (before sin) was superior to the animals even in those points where they were strong. He writes:

I am fully convinced that before Adam's sin his eyes were so sharp and clear that they surpassed those of the lynx and eagle. He was stronger than the lions and the bears, whose strength is very great; and he handled them the way we handle puppies (Martin Luther, Luther's Works, Vol 1, Lectures on Genesis Chapters 1-5), 62.

Is Luther on to something? In my opinion, it is probably an overstatement. However, one important point we can take from it is the reminder of the glory that was lost in being the image of God before the Fall. It also reminds of the supreme glory of the one who is the image of God, par excellence: the man Jesus Christ (Col 1:15). It should also wet our appetite as we who are in Christ, the image of God, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another (2 Cor 3:18).