1. Please pray with me. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be pleasing in Your sight, O Lord, our Rock, and our Redeemer. Amen. The message from God’s Word on this Ash Wednesday is taken from Genesis 3:1-13, 21. It’s entitled, “The Good News of a Savior Who Covers our Sin,” dear brothers and sisters in Christ.
2. Old Testament, Law. New Testament, Gospel. Old covenant, Moses. New covenant, Jesus. Mount Sinai, Ten Commandments, bad news. Mount Calvary, John 3:16, good news. Genesis, the fall into sin. Revelation, heaven. No question where we’re heading as tonight we begin this Lenten season—the cross of Jesus on Calvary, that event so detailed in all four Gospels, is the event that secures Good News for the world, that whoever believes in Jesus shall not perish but have eternal life in heaven. The season of Lent is a time to reflect on and repent of our sins, sin first infected the world in Genesis 3 and is shown to us in stark reality in the thundering of Sinai and the Commandments we fail to keep.
3. But it’s wrong to think that people had to wait all those Old Testament centuries to receive the Gospel of Jesus Christ and his cross. From the very beginning God was promising the Savior. Genesis means “beginnings,” and that first book of the Bible tells not only of the beginning, the creation, of the world, but also of the first words of Good News. That’s what our sermons during these Lenten midweek services will explore—the Gospel as it’s so richly proclaimed in the book of Genesis, beginning with a story almost as old as mankind, a story that’s reenacted every day. You do something you know is wrong, and almost as soon as you’ve done it a sense of shame comes over you like a cloud: A friend betrays a confidence. You speak thoughtlessly and hurt the feelings of someone you love. A woman and her husband eat from the one tree the fruit of which the Lord had told them not to eat. You think less of yourself for what you’ve done, and you feel sure that others will too—or that they would, if they knew.
4. So, you start thinking of ways either to hide what you’ve done or to hide yourself: A man quickly closes his web browser so no one will see where he’s been. You don’t pick up the phone when the caller ID says the call is from that person you don’t feel ready to face. Adam and Eve make themselves coverings of fig leaves because they’re no longer comfortable being seen and then they try to hide themselves from the Lord when they hear him in the garden. Even when we don’t have the option of trying to hide ourselves or what we’ve done—maybe because what we did was out in the open from the beginning, or because our initial attempts at hiding didn’t pan out—that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re ready to own up to what we’ve done. Instead, we tend to look for different ways of covering over what we’ve done.
5. We might make a special effort to be on our best behavior for a while, thinking that the good we do now will cover over the wrong we did earlier. Often, we try to cover ourselves by making excuses or shifting the blame to others: “I know I shouldn’t have done that, but it wasn’t really my idea; it was so-and-so.” “I know I shouldn’t have said that, but I wouldn’t have if you hadn’t said such-and-such.” “Did I eat of the tree you told me not to eat from? Well, it was the woman whom you gave to be with me. She gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.” “What have I done? Well, it was the serpent. He deceived me, and I ate.”
6. Even as we say those things, we know in our conscience that we’re not really making things right. The cloud of guilt and shame hasn’t lifted. If anything, our hiding seems to make the cloud darker, and our excuses and blaming of others then add a little thunder and lightning into the mix. We’ve all tried to come up with our own ways to make the problem of our sin go away, and like our first parents, we’ve found that it doesn’t work. We are sons of Adam and daughters of Eve, and we have all experienced what they learned after the fall: fig leaves can’t cover our sins, excuses can’t blot out our iniquity, and you can’t find peace by hiding from the Lord.
7. As Adam and Eve were about to be exiled from Eden, they knew very well that their cover-up attempts had failed. But then, before sending them out of the garden, the Lord did something remarkable: “The Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them” (Gen 3:21). Adam and Eve’s attempt at covering themselves had been unsuccessful. The fig leaves had failed. But now God gave them a covering. And with this covering, the Lord was also giving them much more. With this covering for their bodies, the Lord was also giving them a preview of how he would provide for the covering over of their sins. The covering they needed was not something they would be able to provide for themselves. It would come as a gift from the Lord. In the gift of those garments, the Lord was revealing himself as a God who saves by grace alone.
8. That is very good news for us—because that is exactly the kind of God we need! We all have sinned in thought, word, and deed—by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. Like Adam and Eve when they doubted and disobeyed, we have not loved God with our whole heart. Like Adam when he tried to shift the blame to Eve, we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.
9. We can’t hide our sins (or ourselves) from God. And we can’t cover our sins by making excuses or by trying to hide them under a layer of good works. The wages of sin is death. We justly deserve God’s present and eternal punishment. We justly deserve to be banished from paradise. That’s why it’s such great news for us that the God who confronts us with our sin, who shows us that we cannot cover up our sin, and who shows us the seriousness of our sin, has also shown us that he is the God who freely provides a covering for our sin. He is the God who showed Adam and Eve that they could trust him to provide the covering they needed. And he is the God who’s provided the covering we all need—by giving his only Son to cover us sinners in the robe of his righteousness.
10. Like the clothing he gave Adam and Eve, this covering for sin is a free gift from God. Like those garments, this covering is free to us, but it came at tremendous cost to another. When the Lord provided garments of animal skin to clothe Adam and Eve, that clothing was freely given to them—but a sacrificial victim had lost its life so they could be clothed. In that gift, and in all the Old Testament sacrifices that followed, God was giving a glimpse of how he would ultimately provide for the covering of all our sins—that it would come freely to us but would cost a Sacrificial Victim his life.
11. When the time had fully come, that final, perfect sacrifice was offered as Jesus willingly laid down his life, giving himself into death as the atoning sacrifice for our sins—and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world. As soldiers cast lots for his clothing, he was right then paying the price to cover us in spotless white robes finer than any seamstress can sew.
12. As Paul writes in his second letter to the Corinthians, “For our sake [God] made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5:21). Christ covered himself in all our sins and bore them to the cross, so that when the Father saw him there standing in our place, he saw nothing but sin. God “made him to be sin who knew no sin.” And in exchange for our sin, Christ covered us in his righteousness—so that when God looks at us, he sees nothing but the pure righteousness of Christ in which we are clothed. In Christ, “we . . . become the righteousness of God.” That is how God now sees you. In Christ, God has covered your sins and clothed you in righteousness. You are righteous and holy in his sight.
13. There is no need to hide and no need to make excuses. You can come before the Lord in repentant faith, knowing that he will not cast you away from his presence or take his Holy Spirit from you. He has washed away all your iniquity. He has cleansed you from your sin. And because of what Christ did for you as he hung on the cross, the cloud of your guilt has been taken away, and you are free to walk in the light of his salvation until the day you join that great multitude of people wearing white robes and standing before the throne of God, praising the one who has clothed us for eternal life in paradise. All glory, honor, and praise be to him, now and forever. Amen. Now the peace of God that passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, until life everlasting. Amen.
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