Reverend Jonathan Waits
Naked (Genesis 3:1-7)
February 2, 2025
I love playing hide-and-seek. I think I always have. I don’t play it as much anymore as I used to—my kids have mostly grown out of it—but it’s still a lot of fun. I remember one time playing with the boys at my folks’ house years ago. They have a loft area overlooking the living room. There’s a linen closet up there that’s really big. I got in there behind the blankets that were on the bottom, and they couldn’t find me. I had to finally start texting clues as to my location to Lisa so she could give them some hints. It was an awesome hiding place. But, the best part of the experience was being found, and the laughter that echoed through the house in that moment. When playing hide-and-seek, it’s always fun to find a killer spot. But if you stay hidden forever, eventually it gets boring. The real excitement of hide-and-seek is in being found. Deep down, we all really want to be found.
Today we are in the second part of our new teaching series, Back to the Basics. This is a journey about marriage. It’s about uncovering some principles that will help move us in the direction of having the marriages we have always wanted. Marriage is a long and often difficult journey. We do our best, of course, but our best is regularly not enough to bring us to the places we want to be. This isn’t necessarily a symptom of some insufficiency on our part, though, but an indicator perhaps that we didn’t know all the things we needed to do in order to get it right in the first place. Having come a good ways down the road in our adventure, and possibly way off the course that leads us to the place we want to be, getting back on track just may mean getting back to the basics in order to properly move forward again.
Last week, we started our journey by talking about getting our priorities in line. With Jesus’ admonition in His Sermon on the Mount to seek God’s kingdom and His righteousness before everything else as our guide, we faced the fact that we often fall into the trap of putting our spouse and even our marriage itself ahead of our relationship with God. These things should absolutely be our priorities, but not our highest priorities. The reason for this is simple: our highest priority relationships are going to be the ones we look to first and most to have our emotional and relational needs met. There isn’t anyone other than God, though, who is capable of meeting those needs. If we try to saddle any other relationship with that weight—especially our relationship with our spouse—we’re setting everyone up for disappointment and frustration. Properly loving your spouse means loving God first.
If we’re being honest, though—and we should be honest enough to acknowledge that our culture has played into this expectation on our part—we don’t just want a marriage in which we love our spouses properly. We want to be close to them. We want to know them deeply and even more importantly (at least as far as we are usually personally concerned), we want to be known by them. There’s a word for this kind of a situation in a relationship: intimacy. We don’t just want loving marriages, we want intimate marriages.
The problem, though, is that intimacy is hard. It’s hard for several reasons. Culturally speaking, we are programmed to think about intimacy in purely physical terms. If these terms aren’t being met, we are told, then we don’t have sufficient intimacy. Yet intimacy is far deeper and wider than the physical. In fact, physical aspects of intimacy are just a small part of the full picture and are usually in place as a symptom of getting the deeper and richer…and harder…parts right. Another, more significant, challenge to intimacy is that we are afraid of really being known. This often stems from insecurity in some form or fashion. Insecurity is always rooted in a lie—namely, that we don’t have value—but it is a lie that is difficult to root out. The only real solution for insecurity is to expose ourselves constantly and intentionally to the truth, and especially the truth about what God thinks about us in the Scriptures. Then we make sure His opinion counts more in our minds and hearts than ours or anybody else’s does.
Yet the challenges of intimacy run even deeper than common misunderstandings and insecurity. Problems with intimacy are ultimately a function of sin in our lives. In fact, this has always been the case. We know this because in the story of the very first sin, the first thing that happens is a loss of intimacy. If we are going to rebuild and strengthen the intimacy in our marriages and in our relationships more generally, we have to get back to the basics and confront the heart of the problem. In order to better get our minds and hearts around all of this, let’s take a look at the story where it all comes unraveled. If you have a copy of the Scriptures handy, find your way with me to Genesis 3 right near the very beginning of the story.
If Genesis 1 and 2 offer two different pictures of how creation unfolded, Genesis 3 shows us how what God made to perfectly reflect His nature and character began to fall apart. But for something to fall apart means that it was right at some point before then. And indeed, that’s what we find here when it comes to the relationship of husbands and wives. Let’s jump back just a few verses before Genesis 3 and see how things started.
“The Lord God took the man and placed him in the garden of Eden to work it and watch over it. And the Lord God commanded the man, ‘You are free to eat from any tree of the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for on the day you eat from it, you will certainly die.’ Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper corresponding to him.’ The Lord God formed out of the ground every wild animal and every bird of the sky, and brought each to the man to see what he would call it. And whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all the livestock, to the birds of the sky, and to every wild animal; but for the man no helper was found corresponding to him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to come over the man, and he slept. God took one of his ribs and closed the flesh at that place. Then the Lord God made the rib he had taken from the man into a woman and brought her to the man. And the man said: ‘This one, at last, is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh; this one will be called “woman,” for she was taken from man.’ This is why a man leaves his father and mother and bonds with his wife, and they become one flesh. Both the man and his wife were naked, yet felt no shame.”
Now, there’s a lot going on here, and we could spend the rest of our time just talking through these verses, but let me draw your attention to a couple of highlights. God made man and woman uniquely to complement and complete each other. There was no creature other than the woman who the man recognized as capable of meeting his relational needs. And, in the beginning, when the first pair were joined together in marriage, they shared a perfect intimacy with one another. They were naked and yet felt no shame. This was true literally, of course, but it was true relationally and emotionally as well. They had the kind of intimacy we all desire to experience with our spouse.
But then…
“Now the serpent was the most cunning of all the wild animals that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God really say, “You can’t eat from any tree in the garden”?’ The woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat the fruit from the trees in the garden. But about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, God said, “You must not eat it or touch it, or you will die.”’ ‘No! You will certainly not die,’ the serpent said to the woman. ‘In fact, God knows that when you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’ The woman saw that the tree was good for food and delightful to look at, and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it; she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.”
So, again, there’s a lot going on there. We’ve talked about it before, and I suspect we’ll yet talk about it again at some point in the future. This is a pretty foundational passage of Scripture. Let me once again direct your attention more specifically than the whole thing. Listen one more time to the very last verse I read there. “Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.” Does that ring any recent bells? Remember the last observation we got about this first couple at the end of chapter 2? They were both naked and not ashamed of being naked together. Now, though, that has changed. Now they see their nakedness and are ashamed of it. And, as before, there’s an obvious physical aspect to this, but it is the relational and emotional and—as we will see—spiritual aspects of it that are far more significant for our purposes right now.
In the verses that follow this, God “discovers” what the man and woman have done. I say “discovers” because He was God and knew all along what was happening. Perhaps a more theologically accurate way to put it would be that God called the man and woman before Him and let them acknowledge what they had done, that they had willfully violated the one command He had given them to follow. God shines a bit of the light of His righteousness on them, and then goes on to describe the consequences that would flow from their decision.
To the serpent, God describes the enmity that would perpetually exist between it and the people God created. To the man, God describes the futility that will now characterize everything people do. In disconnecting from the God who created the world and everything in it, and who gives it purpose and meaning, we will be stuck making up our own meaning. That is, we’ll be stuck playing make believe. That’s fun for a little while, but it gets tiring pretty quickly, especially when we’re doing it with something as significant as our lives. Thus the futility. To the woman, God talks about increased pain in childbearing, but more importantly describes the relational chaos their decision to disconnect from Him in favor of their own desires will unleash.
The heart of this relational chaos will be a breakdown of marital intimacy. God says, “Your desire will be for your husband,” which sounds like it should be a good thing. A bit closer look at the operative Hebrew and the other places the expression is used in the Scriptures reveals the tragedy here. Wives won’t simply desire their husbands, they will desire to control them; to rule over them. But they will not win this battle. Instead, “he will rule over you.” This kind of a power struggle is a destroyer of intimacy. When you are focused on competing with someone else, you aren’t giving much attention to truly knowing or being known by them. Everything gets filtered through the lens of how you can use them—manipulate them, nag them, coerce them, force them—to get what you want out of them. There’s no intimacy here. And this is all in addition to that initial shame and desire to hide.
Yet lest we sit back and think how mean of God it was to do this to us—after all, this part of the Genesis narrative is often called “the curse”—let’s be clear that God isn’t doing anything here to us. He’s simply describing what will be as a result of our choices. So often God doesn’t have to do any active judging in response to sin at all. He can merely step out of the way and let sin’s natural consequences be judgment enough.
The essential thing to see here, though, is that intimacy has been a challenge almost as long as there have been relationships. It entered the picture before even the first one had been around very long. This means that we don’t have to feel guilty or insecure about the challenges we have in enjoying a more intimate relationship with our spouse as if we are experiencing something most couples don’t deal with like we do. On the other hand, it means that if we want to address the issue in a meaningful way, we’ve got to go back to the beginning.
Because intimacy challenges entered the relational picture when our relationship with God was severed, this means two really important things. First, we can’t fix the problem of a lack of intimacy on our own. Simply trying harder is not a bad thing, but it will not be the thing that solves the problem. Second, if we actually want to solve the problem, we have to fix the relational break that caused it in the first place. Let me put that a bit more directly, and then we’ll talk about it in more detail. If you want to improve your intimacy, improve your relationship with God. Or, to put that still another way, if you want to be better connected to your spouse, get better connected to God.
Understanding all of that, let’s get practical. I want to help us see three things in particular that are intimacy killers in our marriages, and offer three specific things we can do to restore and strengthen our intimacy. Are you ready? The first and biggest intimacy killer in marriage is just the same as it was in the beginning: Sin. The serpent sold sin as a chance to gain wisdom and a better understanding of right and wrong; to be more like God. That was a lie. The reality is that sin did none of those things. Well, that’s not totally true. It gave us that greater understanding of right and wrong, but only in the sense that we had done wrong and were aware of it. We were aware of it, and we were ashamed of it, a shame that quickly permeated all our thinking about ourselves. The couple who were once naked and unashamed, suddenly realized their nakedness and hid both from each other and, later, from God.
If you’ve got unchecked sin going on in your life, your ability to be in an intimate relationship with another person is going to be severely curtailed. This goes double for marriage. If you’ve got something going on in your mind or heart, or an undiscovered habit, that you don’t want your spouse to know about, you are going to hide. The hiding will start small, but will gradually grow bigger from there. Eventually, you’ll be so focused on hiding that you’ll have no time at all for knowing and being known. You’ll be too busy keeping yourself from being found out. That weight gets heavy over time. It creates frustration on the part of the spouse who just wants to know you more, to be intimate with you. It creates resentment on your part in that you have to keep hiding more and more of yourself from your partner as they keep trying to know you more and better. This all eventually creates deep bitterness on both parts. This is not a path to intimacy. It is a path to divorce. To quote from Gary Thomas again, “There can be no peace if you live in perpetual fear of being ‘found out.’ Eventually, you will begin to resent rather than welcome your spouse’s presence, and that is devastating to a marriage.”
A second intimacy killer in our relationships is selfishness. Intimacy comes from a concerted effort to learn more about another person and allow them to know you more. In this sense, intimacy is always a choice to give of yourself to another person and to receive their gift to you. When you have selfishness lurking in your heart, though, your focus is going to be on how you can get what you need and want for yourself first. Efforts by your spouse to receive from you will be met with denials because you don’t want to give away something that belongs to you. You want to keep it all for yourself.
A third intimacy killer in marriage is power shifts in the relationship. Marriage is a journey of seasons. And depending on the season we are in, one partner is likely going to hold more power than the other. When this happens, the one who perceives the lack often begins seeking how he or she can gain more power for themselves so things are, in their view, balanced once again. This typically provokes a response in kind, and suddenly the two individuals who are supposed to be partners working toward the same goal are fighting for dominance over one another…just like God said would happen. This tension is rarely overt or direct. It tends to be subtle and very passive-aggressive. But whatever form it happens to take, it destroys a couple’s intimacy with one another (not to mention with God).
If those are some ways that intimacy is often destroyed in our relationships, how do we counter them? Well, we go back to our basics. If you want to be better connected to your spouse, get better connected to God. How do we get better connected to God? That’s one we’ve talked about a lot around here. I’ll bet some of you can repeat the three-fold pathway to me without my even having to prompt you for it. If you want to grow in your relationship with God, you need to be intentionally engaged with God through the Scriptures, prayer, and the church.
More than that, because sin is an intimacy killer, if you have unchecked sin in your life—especially unchecked sin that your spouse doesn’t know about—you need to deal with that. Jesus once said that it is better to dismember and disfigure yourself than to have sin running unchecked in your life. He was speaking hyperbolically to make a spiritual point, but the dramatic nature of His rhetoric should not be lost on us. Getting rid of sin is worth whatever it takes to make that happen. Confess it with wisdom and with safe people. Seek out accountability for help in keeping yourself away from it. Put in place firm guardrails if you need to. Get rid of your sin so that you don’t have anything to hide from your spouse.
Additionally, learn to see yourself in light of who God is, not merely who you imagine yourself to be. Definitely don’t see yourself in light of who the world says you are. Don’t even see yourself in light of who your partner says you are. When God’s assessment is the only one that matters (because it’s the only one that is ultimately correct), you won’t feel the need to hide anymore. You won’t have to slavishly seek the approval of others. You will be able to love more freely and generously when others fall short of your expectations for them. You will be able to share more deeply and intentionally of yourself with others. If you want to be better connected to your spouse, get better connected to God. This is how you do that.
Another practical way you can restore intimacy to your marriage is to start looking for ways to actively put the other first. This is a counter to the selfishness that can so easily take up residence in our heart. Do the hard work of learning to see things the way your spouse does. Do a daily, careful consideration of their needs. Instead of worrying about how you can get your needs met by your partner (which just leads to resentment and manipulation), wake up each morning and ask yourself this question: How can I bless my partner today? Then, set about doing those things. You can’t meet all of their needs. As we have already talked about, that’s something only God can ultimately do. But you can be the vehicle through which He meets many of them. Set out to be that blessing to your spouse.
When you do this, it is going to naturally draw your spouse in your direction. We naturally gravitate toward people who have made loving us intentionally and well an obvious priority in their lives. We are naturally more open to them. We are more ready to receive from them. And if you don’t think you can get to a place of doing this really well for your spouse, you’re partially correct. You can’t…on your own. Doing this will require you to lean harder on God’s strength, His wisdom, His patience, His graciousness, His humility, His gentleness, His kindness, and His love. In other words, it will require you to get better connected to Him. If you want to be better connected to your spouse, get better connected to God.
One last thing here. If you want to see intimacy restored and strengthened in your marriage relationship, you need to be prepared to walk a path of repentance and forgiveness with one another. Because sin is in the world and still has at least a toehold in our lives, sometimes things happen that disrupt our relational intimacy with the people who are closest to us.
When this break occurs, two things need to happen. The first is repentance. We need to repent of our contribution to the interruption and the wounds that have caused it. It may be that we only played a small part in the conflict, but we need to own and repent of at least that. Repentance includes making a specific and clear apology. This is not some off-handed, “Oh yeah, sorry,” but a direct, “Honey, I am sorry for doing _______. I know that hurt you and that it was very selfish of me to do. I won’t do it again.” That’s repentance. If you want intimacy restored in your relationship, you have to get in the habit of practicing it quickly and willingly when a break has occurred.
The other side of this is forgiveness. That could be a whole message in itself, but for now, forgiveness is releasing another person from a debt they owe you because of an offense they’ve dealt you. Forgiveness also releases you from the weight of trying to sit on God’s throne which, since you weren’t made to sit there, winds up disrupting your own relationship with God, which just takes us back to that first intimacy killer. If someone has hurt you, if you are a follower of Jesus who wants to maintain a relationship with Him, you’ve got to forgive them in solidarity with God’s gracious forgiveness of your sins in Christ. Intimacy isn’t possible where unforgiveness lingers. Your partner may be repentant and seek once again to share himself or herself with you, but you won’t be able to do any sharing back because you’ll be stuck behind your wall of unforgiveness. If you want to be better connected to your spouse, get better connected to God. Forgiveness and repentance are how that happens when you’ve gotten disconnected…both with God and with your spouse.
Intimacy is a huge part of what makes marriage such a good thing. To know and be known—to stop playing an unending game of hide-and-seek—is one of the deepest desires of our heart. And while God can meet this need all on His own, He often meets it through another person who happens to be our spouse. If you want the marriage you were always and rightly led to desire, doing the hard work of maintaining and building intimacy is how that will happen. And that hard work starts with being properly connected to God. If you want to be better connected to your spouse, get better connected to God.