Covering Shame: The Gospel in Noah's Story

"In this segment in our study of Genesis, we're going to turn our attention to one of the most bizarre stories I think that we find anywhere in the Bible, and certainly bizarre and strange, unusual in the context of Genesis. It's the story of what happens to Noah after the flood has subsided. When we think about Noah, we think about Noah and what? The flood, right? And it's almost as if all Noah ever did was make a boat and go through a flood. But in Genesis 9, we read this very, very strange story, and let me take a moment to read it to you." [00:00:08]

"Now, what's going on here? First of all, at the end of the text we read what's called the patriarchal blessing, where the promises of God are transferred from father to son. But Noah has three sons, and who gets the blessing? Shem, okay, and then the secondary blessing is given to Japheth. But instead of a minor portion or a third of the inheritance being distributed to Ham or to his son Canaan, instead what does Noah do? He curses that generation and that part of his own family. And the narrative that we read tells us why Noah cursed Canaan, a very strange story." [00:02:07]

"After Noah lands on shore, on Ararat, he becomes a farmer, and he plants vineyards, and he grows grapes, and from the grapes he grows wine…he makes wine. But he overindulges in his own product and he gets drunk, okay? And when he goes into his tent, he is blotto, to use the colloquialism of our day. He is stinking drunk, so drunk that he's in there in a state of undress. You've seen people who are drunk, that just don't know what they're doing, and they let themselves be exposed and whatever. He's in his tent naked and drunk." [00:02:55]

"Now notice that the story is not that Ham looked at his drunkenness. He looks at his father's nakedness and comes back outside and tells his other brothers. And said…it's like, 'You ought to see the old man. You won't believe it, he's in there naked as a jaybird,' and he makes a spectacle of his own father. Now, I'll just make a parenthetical statement here. I realize that there are Old Testament scholars who, when they look at the laws set down in Deuteronomy and in Leviticus and so on about nakedness, 'You're not allowed to uncover your father's nakedness or your mother's nakedness,' and all of that, that those can be sort of euphemisms for prohibitions against incest or that sort of thing." [00:03:52]

"But the other two brothers, then, instead of participating in the humiliation of their father, what do they do? They take a covering, and they spread it between them and they walk backwards into the tent and cover their father's nakedness without looking at it. And in that act of covering their father's nakedness, they receive the patriarchal blessing of Noah. Now, what I'd like to suggest to you about that strange story is that contained in that story is nothing less than the gospel. The gospel is in that story. You say, 'Wait a minute, how in the world can the gospel be in the story?'" [00:05:24]

"And then we read in chapter 3 about the fall of Adam and Eve. The first experience of sin and of guilt is what? An awareness of nakedness. When God comes into the garden and says, 'Adam, where are you?' Adam and Eve are hiding, they have fled from the presence of God. Instead of rushing to Him in delight, now they're hiding. And God says, 'Why are you hiding?' What do they say? 'Because we are naked.' God doesn't say it, but you know, you might have expected God to say, 'Well, so what? I made you naked. Why should that cause you to run into the bushes? You were naked yesterday. You didn't have any problems when I came to see you.'" [00:07:07]

"Let me ask you this, what was the first act of redemption that God ever did for fallen man? He clothed them. He didn't say, 'Look, if you feel embarrassed because you're naked, because you sinned, too bad! The bed you make is the bed you sleep in, you're going to have to go like Cain and wander all over the world, naked and embarrassed.' And then God takes away the fig leaves and exposes them and makes them live in perpetual humiliation. No. The Lord God made clothes to cover the nakedness of His sinful people. He covered their embarrassment. This was indeed a cover up, not a cover up in a wicked sense, but in a merciful sense. He clothed His naked people. That is the gospel." [00:09:11]

"And as God clothes His naked creatures, so Noah's sons hide the nakedness of their father. Their father's dignity was more important to them than their own fun and their own pride. I mean, the father should not have been naked. The father should not have been drunk. Noah, who was the righteous man that God spares in the flood, was a sinner in that tent, and his sons clothed him. Again, that is the gospel. Now it's interesting, I think at least, in fact I wrote a whole chapter on it in this book If There's a God, why are There Atheists? on God and nakedness, where I tried to examine the motif of nakedness from the garden of Eden all the way through the Scriptures, because that motif keeps popping up." [00:10:17]

"Yet there's another side to it still, another facet. There is a sense in which all of us have a desire, deep down in, to find that Eden where once again we can be naked and unashamed. I mean, I've had people say to me, 'Boy, at the end of the day there's nothing better than to go in the room, close the door, pull the windshield, you know, take off all my clothes, jump in the shower.' There I don't have to hide anything, I don't have to put on a good impression. I can be, for once in my life, in the privacy of my shower, naked and what, unashamed. But that's when you're alone, and nobody is looking at you." [00:16:23]

"Is there any other place in life where you're free to become naked and unashamed where somebody else is there? The ultimate place is in marriage. And that's where we read about it in the Bible, that God, even though He expels Adam and Eve from Eden, and the marriage estate is disrupted by sin, nevertheless there's a sense, figuratively and spiritually and physically, where God has provided a place in this world where we can once again be naked and unashamed. And that's in marriage. But again, even that isn't merely a physical consideration. The concept of nakedness biblically is linked to being known." [00:17:14]

"God knows what He's doing, and yet He said, 'Here is an opportunity, a safe place for you to be naked again, and I'm going to protect that with all these different sanctions.' But that's just a human estate of nakedness, see? But what we need more than anything else is not just to be back in Eden, where we can find a woman who can look at us while we're naked and not laugh, but that we can find a place where we can be naked before God, without shame. Adam and Eve weren't embarrassed about their nakedness with each other. They weren't hiding from each other. They hid together from God, didn't they? It's God who made them embarrassed." [00:21:29]

"How much time do we spend making ourselves physically look as attractive as we possibly can? Think about it, because we don't want people to see our blemishes, we don't want people to see our shame. You know what the word the Bible uses to describe the atonement of Jesus Christ? A covering…a covering. I can go into the presence of God in repentance and contrition and all of that, but I am allowed to come in the presence of God now, why? Because I'm covered. Isaiah says that your righteousness, the righteousness that you have achieved, the goodness that you have accrued in your life is, if you add it all up in the presence of God, like filthy rags. That's how much good it does you." [00:25:38]