Themes From Genesis with R. C. Sproul, “Noah’s Nakedness,” 7

Noah’s Nakedness as a Picture of the Gospel

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, 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? Bill Cosby, 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. Let me take a moment to read it to you. The Noah, this is after the flood, began farming and planted a vineyard. And he drank of the wine and became drunk and uncovered himself inside his tent.

Now Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brothers outside. But Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it upon both their shoulders and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father.

And their faces were turned away so that they did not see their father's nakedness. Now when Noah awoke from his wine, he knew what his youngest son had done to him, and so he said, Cursed be Canaan! A servant of servants shall he be to his brothers.

And he also said, Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem, and let Canaan be his servant. May God enlarge Japheth, and let him dwell in the tents of Shem, and let Canaan be his servant. 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 him 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. Very strange story. 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, and his youngest son comes in the tent and looks at his father's nakedness.

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 jadeberg, 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 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.

And some have taken the conclusion that what really happened here was that Ham committed incest with his father, sodomy. But the text doesn't say that, and I don't think it requires that interpretation.

I say that parenthetically, and I just leave that for your consideration that there are other interpretations to this passage. I'm going to take it at face value that what happens is that the young man goes in there and comes out and jests about the fact that his father is naked and makes a spectacle about that.

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. So wait a minute. How in the world can the gospel be in the story? Well, do you remember earlier in Genesis with the creation of woman and the institution of marriage, and how after we read that narrative that God makes the woman from the man so that He declares, This is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.

And then sort of tacked on in the last verse of chapter 2 of Genesis, like a dangling participle concluding on scientific postscript, are those words without explanation, and the two, the husband and his wife, were naked and unashamed, that originally man was made naked without shame.

The Fall, Shame, and God’s First Act of Covering

And then we'll 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 He, 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. Instead, God says, How did you know you were naked? Did you eat of the tree?

Now notice, Adam and Eve didn't say, We hid because we were guilty, but somehow there was this sensation of nakedness that was interwoven together with their guilt. Biblically, there is a close tie between a person's physical sense, his spiritual sense, his emotional sense.

And the Bible uses the word naked to capture not just the physical, but also the emotional, the psychological, the spiritual. And we see it right there in Genesis 3 where the people had a spiritual problem.

They sinned. They had an emotional problem. They felt guilty. How did they express it in terms of an awareness of nakedness? Let me ask you this. What was the first act of redemption that God ever did for a 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. 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, and in fact I wrote a whole chapter on it in this book, If There is 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.

It pops up in the Old Testament, in the Psalms. It pops up in the other biblical literature, Amos, where Amos makes predictions of the day of the Lord at the end of the age, the day of God's judgment, the day of God's wrath.

What does Amos say? That in those days the enemies of God will be judged and sent running away naked. They will be left unclothed. To the ancient Greek, the worst thing they could think of as far as the torments of Hades, their concept of hell, was that the person who went to hell went there naked in the Garden of Gethsemane.

When Jesus rebukes those who come to arrest Him, one of those from the outskirts, we were told, I believe by Matthew, sort of just a tiny little reference, that He runs out into the night. How? Naked.

The odds are that Jesus was crucified naked. I know we don't portray Him that way in the art of the church, but it was customary in the ancient world to include in the punishment of public execution the total humiliation of being exposed physically, being naked, because there is a sense in which the physical exposure is made more burdensome by the spiritual exposure.

Nakedness, Shame, and Human Vulnerability

Have you noticed that how culture moves, that there is a fascination with respect to nudity? People will pay money to see naked bodies, male or female. They'll pay them to see them, you know, in a movie.

They'll pay money to see them in a magazine. They'll pay money to see them live and on stage, right? Beg your pardon? Or museums. And I remember kids running to read National Geographic, not because they're interested in geography, but because they have pictures of nude aborigines in them, and kids laugh about that.

So there is this strange interest in the nude human form. And some people are given to what is called exhibitionism, where a woman will get up on stage and take off all her clothes, or a man now. You've got male dancers doing that sort of thing.

But even that, when the act is finished, that striptease artist doesn't go walking down the street naked. And not only because there are laws against that, but at the same time as we have this attraction to nudity, there is also a built-in repulsion to it.

As I've said before, if you want to invest your money in an item that's staple and has a future, invest in shower curtains and window blinds, okay? Because built into human nature is a desire to remain hidden to a certain degree.

We do not expose ourselves physically for the world to gaze upon. People can't stand the thought of being reduced to nakedness. I spoke on this in Florida a little while ago, and there were a lot of doctors there.

And I said, Don't forget that, doctors. It may be a commonplace dimension and necessary to the healing arts that you examine people without their clothes on, and you may do it every day, or your nurse may do it every day.

But it's a rare individual that is comfortable in the presence of somebody like that if they are made to strip. The strip search in prison is one of the most humiliating dimensions of incarceration if you ask the prisoner.

His defenses are gone. He is reduced to this terrifying state of humility. That's one of the reasons why soldiers in the ancient world, when they would capture warriors, would strip them of their clothes.

They became less aggressive, less terrifying, more subdued because they felt so vulnerable. So we shrink from having to be reduced to nakedness. 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.

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. And if I live behind closed doors with a woman, that person has an opportunity to know me better than any human being in the world has a chance to get to know me.

You know, we live in the same house. We use the same shower. We sleep in the same bed. How much is hid? No, two people don't know each other perfectly. She can't get into my mind, and I can't get into her mind.

But she knows me more intimately than any other person. That's why the marriage situation is so risky because if my marriage breaks up, I have to live with the fact if my wife leaves me that the person who knows me best on this planet has rejected me.

There's an awful lot at stake when two people enter into that relationship. Just writing the other day about, you know, answering the age-old question the teenagers ask, Why do I have to get married?

Why do I have to sign a paper to make it legal? Why can't we just have an agreement between two people and go out and live together? If you want to be foolish enough to do that, go ahead, but you are taking such an unbelievable risk of the state of your soul, of your mind, your emotions, and your body that I don't think you realize how much you're risking there.

Because why do you sign that piece of paper? God has instituted marriage as a covenant, and biblically there's no such thing as a private marriage covenant between two people. Why not? Why do covenants require witnesses?

Because if I promise you that I will do something, and you promise me that you're going to do something, and then I break my promise, I violate you, what recourse do you have? It's the survival of the fittest.

Same thing in business. You know, the employer says, Hey, I don't want a contract. I'll just, you know, you just…. I say, Hey, I want it in writing. Why? Because you are a man, and all men are liars, and all people are covenant breakers.

And you might break that promise, and I might get hurt by it. And if you do break that promise, I have a recourse to other authorities, to other people who can come in and help me get justice so that I have a safeguard.

That piece of paper makes that marriage vow public. It makes it official. It puts you under the protection of the family, the church, the state, all kinds of people. And before I strip my body naked and my soul naked, I need to have some security that your promise is a serious promise.

And I say to women, Don't give your bodies and your souls away to a guy who makes a frivolous promise in the backseat of a car. You're exposing yourself to the worst kind of damage that you can imagine.

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.

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. He realized that there are thousands and thousands of people out there in this world who can't stand the thought of God looking at them, can't stand it.

Jean Paul Sartre, the French philosopher, you know, he hated the idea of God knowing all people because he said, That makes God a cosmic voyeur. It's like God is up in heaven peering through the keyhole and observing me like I'm a monkey in the zoo or a picture in an art gallery.

I'm reduced to an object. Do you like to have people stare at you? They tell us in seminary that when we preach and when we speak that it is vitally important that we maintain eye contact with the congregation, with the people to whom we're speaking, right?

What would happen if I was standing up in a pulpit on Sunday morning and Marie Sweeney's sitting there in the congregation, and for 20 minutes I didn't take my eyes off Marie Sweeney, and I'm talking about you've got to repent, you've got to do this.

I'll tell you what, she could not sit there for 20 minutes under that. She would have to leave, or she would become so hostile. There's no people have measured it in societal groupings the appropriate length of the meeting of the eyes of people on the street, and all somebody has to do to elicit a violent reaction from you, an action of anger, is to look at you too long, and your skin starts to crawl, and you start to get mad.

Well, imagine that in the Alderman sense. That's what Sartre does. He's a philosopher. He says, my skin's crawling every minute as God is out there looking at me, and most people don't want God to look at them.

They want people they want God to overlook them. We're still looking for that bushes that'll protect us from the gaze of God, because under the gaze of God, what happens? Our shame is put out in front of us, because we are guilty, and God knows it, and God sees it, and the psalmist says, where can I flee from it?

If I go up to heaven, He's there. If I run down to Sheol, He's there. If I stand up, if I sit down, doesn't matter. There's nowhere I can go to flee from God's presence. And when the Bible talks about the last judgment, when all the time for repentance has been removed, Jesus and the psalmist and the prophets say that the people will cry out to the hills, saying, Fall upon me.

Why? And cover me. Let the mountains fall down on top of me, not because I want to have stones hitting me in the head, but I've got to have something that'll protect me from the unveiled gaze of God. Why are people like that?

Because we're guilty. 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 Bible, 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 into 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. Yet the Bible says the Christian is clothed in the righteousness of Christ. So I don't have to go into the presence of God naked. I go into the presence of God covered, just as Noah's sons covered the humiliating, embarrassing drunkenness and nakedness of their father.

Christ covers my sin with the cloak of His righteousness, so that in Christ I can be naked and unashamed. That's the gospel.