Genesis 3:9-10 ( NKJV )
Then the Lord God called to Adam and said to him, “Where are you?” So he said, “I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; and I hid myself.”
I have been spending time in this forum talking about the affect of the fall of man on us today. When Adam and Eve committed the sin of high treason in the Garden of Eden, the bible says that death passed upon all men. In Romans 5 we see this truth but we also see another reality. Life came to all by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. For anyone who chooses to receive Jesus as both Lord and savior the affect of the fall has been reversed. We are “heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.” We are back in relationship with the Father God. All of the blessings of God’s covenant with Abraham are ours. In fact the book of Hebrews tells us that we have a better covenant with better promises. In the words of the book of Genesis everything is good.
In over 30 years as a pastor, I have seen countless people who were truly saved have great difficulty living in the blessings of that salvation. I believe that a root cause is the guilt that came upon man in the Garden along with the curse. Adam was guilty. He had committed a terrible sin. He knew it, that’s why when God came calling He found Adam hiding. Not only was Adam hiding but he was also trying to cover that guilt with fig leaves. In a prophetic act God showed Adam that there was nothing he could do to cover himself. God had to do the covering and he did it by shedding blood and covering them with the skins of animals.
For all of history man has tried to cover this guilt. It is real. We carried the guilt of what Adam did. We carry it in the curse of rejection, discouragement and many other emotional and psychological problems that continue to plague us even after salvation. We are forgiven by God, but there is something else we need. We need to have this underlying sense of separation from God removed. He has forgiven but we know that there is (or was) something really wrong. It is an abstract thing. It’s not that we did this wrong or that wrong, but in relation to God it is a sense that we are just wrong. Until that is gone we can never feel comfortable in the presence of God and we will continue to try to fix this problem by religion. It will never work.
It’s a little like the phantom police car. That was a commercial many years ago. Anyone who drives is aware of this idea. You are driving along following the speed limit and suddenly we see a police car behind us. No matter how legally we are driving we feel that something is wrong. We fear we will do something wrong. We are on edge until the policeman finally turns and is no longer behind us. This is what guilt or unrighteousness feels like. We do the best we can but it never seems to be enough. If we do something wrong it is much worse because we are already living under an underlying sense of guilt. Thank God He provided a full salvation including provision to eradicate this guilt.
Romans 3 tells us that God provided a solution for this “unrighteousness” by providing the payment for the sin Adam committed. It was not a partial payment nor a false payment. The payment each man had to pay was death. When it was paid the individual who paid it passed into a place from which he could not return. He remained dead for eternity. The solution was that God himself became a man. He was not born of a human father so he did not carry the human curse nor the human guilt. When he died it was because he choose to identify with Adam’s sin but also with Adam’s guilt.
Since neither the sin nor the guilt actually belonged to Jesus. The payment made by Him could not be applied to Him. Therefore God had the right to apply it to anyone He chose to. He chose to apply it to all who would believe in what Jesus did. It was legal. Since God was the wronged party it was his right to accept whatever payment was legally obtained. It is absolutely appropriate for us to consider ourselves completely not guilty. Completely righteousness.
How do we walk in this? We must accept this by faith. How can we have this kind of faith? Rom. 10:17 says, “Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God.” We need to read, study, confess and meditate what the Bible says about our righteousness. We can win the battle over genetic guilt but we can only do so by fighting with the Sword of the spirit, the Word of God.
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