“There is no darkness or deep shadow where the workers of iniquity
may hide themselves.” Job 34:22
Hiding is very common in the Bible. We find it mentioned at the beginning of the Tribulation where we read “The sky receded like a scroll being rolled up, and every mountain and island was moved from its place. Then the kings of the earth, the nobles, the commanders, the rich, the mighty, and every slave and free man hid in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains. And they said to the mountains and the rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of the One seated on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb.”
(Revelation 6:15). We also see hiding at the beginning of the Bible
in the Garden of Eden when sin entered the Garden of Eden. In
that passage we learn of some of the way men (sometimes
even believers) try to hide from God.
After they had sinned Adam and Eve heard God walking in the Garden and Genesis records they “hid themselves from the presence of the
Lord God”. Men try to hide from God by removing themselves from where God is. They may not believe their sin was that bad or that God is compassionate to forgive, so men avoid God. They don’t want to read the Bible; they don’t go to church, they remove God from from the marketplace. Men try to ostracize God. They do not want to hear God’s commandments or of eternal judgment, even of His mercy. If the don’t hear God’s voice they feel they are safe (even though their guilt remains). Much, if not all, of God’s silence culture today is based on hiding from God. After all one cannot be accountable if they did not know, right?
The second way men hide is to cover their shame. Men know in their hearts they are guilty before God. Sin opened Adam and Eve’s eyes and they realized they were naked. Their nakedness caused great shame to them (when we are naked all our imperfections are visible. Sin does the same thing to us before God.) Thus they wanted to hide their imperfections from God.
A third way man tries to hide himself from God is described in Genesis 3:12-13. When God confronts Adam and Eve with their disobedience to His word both do the same thing – they shift the blame to someone else. (The comedian Flip Wilson made a living off making people by laugh with his phrase “the devil made me do it”.) Adam blamed his wife for causing him to eat the fruit and goes so far as to blame God for giving him such a flawed woman as a partner. “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate”. In other words, “It’s not my fault, God!”
The fourth way that Adam and Eve tried to hide from God is to cover their shame. In trying to become like God they learned how far they were from God. Instead of fleeing to God and confessing what they had done, they tried to cover themselves with leaves. This is not God’s way – “without the shedding of blood here is no forgiveness of sin”. Covering their nakedness with leaves is the modern equivalent of covering our sin with our own good deeds. “Yes, I am a sinner God but You won’t notice is if I cover it up with these good works. This is the basis of every false religion.
What can we learn? When we sin our human reaction is to hide or conceal it. We do that because of shame or we do not believe God can forgive us . Yet at the very beginning of Genesis God points the way. “If we confess our sin, he is faithful and just to forgive…”