The Fig Leaf Dilemma

There is a story of a boy who follows his dad to the dark corners of a carnival, sneaks into a tent for “adults only” and sees what he knows he should not see. He is wracked with guilt and makes an attempt to do something about it:
He took his boots out into the woods, took them off, and filled the bottoms of them with stones and small rocks and then he put them on. He laced them up tight and walked in them through the woods for what he knew to be a mile, until he came to a creek. Then he sat down and took them off and eased his feet in the wet sand. He thought, that ought to satisfy God. Nothing happened. Anything happening he would have taken as a sign – but nothing happened.
After a while he drew his feet out of the sand and let them dry, and then he put the shoes on again with the rocks still in them, and he walked the mile back before he took them off.
The boy, being a human being like all of us, knew by instinct that he had crossed the line. He attempted what he thought should be adequate payment for his wrong. In the end, it just didn’t seem to be enough.
We are all born into this world like that boy – guilt is in our spiritual DNA. The absence of guilt in any person is unnatural; it is normal to sense when we’ve done wrong. And like any human, we intuitively know that some penalty should be paid. We believe we need to do something to take care of the debt that guilt leaves in our hearts. I call this the “Fig Leaf Dilemma”, and it stands in blatant rebellion against the name on the front of my church, “Grace Church”.
Grace is God’s unearned, undeserved goodness alive in me. Grace achieved by my own merit or morality is not grace at all – that’s the dilemma.
Some traditions in the Catholic Church still alive today are self-flagellation – beating yourself with a whip or rod to draw blood in penance for your sin. Or in Mexico, there is the practice of getting on your knees about 200 yards in front of the Cathedral and shuffling over the hard rock street on your knees all the way to the entrance. Leaving your knees bloody is again a practice of penance for your sin.
In the Middle Ages, the doctrine of the “temporal punishment for sin” came to the fore. This is the belief that even though Christ paid the eternal punishment for our sins, we still have to pay a physical hardship price in our human lives – either before our death, or in a place called “purgatory” after our death. This then led to the concept of “indulgences” by which you could remove some of this necessary physical punishment, on earth or in purgatory, by giving some of your hard earned money to the Catholic Church in exchange for the elimination of so many “days” or “months” or “years” of temporal punishment.
Where did we get this? Where did this sense of guilt come from? Where do we get the gnawing need for repayment?
Repayment by us doesn’t do anything to take care of our sin. But that’s not what our minds tell us. Our minds say that we can pay for sin by making up for it, working off the debt.
We can balance out our bad side with our good side, and, as long as the good side wins, even by an edge, it will be enough to get us to heaven and into good standing with God. Carry enough painful rocks in your tight-tied boots for long enough, walk on your bloody knees far enough, whip your own back painfully enough, and God should be satisfied.
The Garden of Eden is an example. Eve contemplated the temptation, weighed the benefits against the risk and decided to eat. She shared the fruit with Adam. Immediately something changed. In that one, fateful instant, the nature of every man and woman born throughout the history of the world was altered.
This is the moment we call “The Fall.” Adam and Eve sinned; they broke the one and only prohibition and brought sin into the world. From then on mankind shared a “sin nature.”
What is a sin nature? Boiled down, it means that because we are all broken and all guilty. We carry a weakness and propensity to sin. We are prone to it, conformed to it, weak against it. We inherit a good/evil economy.
A recognition of right and wrong. (The eyes of both of them were opened.)
A realization of guilt. (They realized they were naked.)
A need to fix the problem for themselves. (They sewed fig leaves together.)
A fear that prompted them to hide from God. (They knew the leaves didn’t really take care of things, so they went off and hid from the Lord.)
Humanity has been caught in the trap every since – the Fig Leaf Dilemma. It’s that inward pressure, produced by the concentration on good and evil inherited from Adam and Eve, calling out for us to pay our sin-debt on our own.
As a Christian child of God, you also face the dilemma when you try in your own strength to obey a bunch or rules and regulations in order to be considered a good player of God’s team.
A Christian friend faces the dilemma when she tries to deal with guilt feelings in the following way: she heard on Christian radio once that refined sugar was “of the devil,” so she ransacked her kitchen, tossing out offending food in order to avoid God’s judgment.
This is the mess that humanity finds itself in. FIG LEAVES NEVER COVER. MAKING UP FOR OUR SIN NEVER WORKS. WE CAN’T FIX THE PROBLEM.
Genesis 3:21 SAYS, “The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.” This is no small matter. Adam and Eve stood before God already clothed. They had made coverings, sewed fig leaves, for themselves. But it wasn’t sufficient. What they had done by taking initiative to handle their shame was insufficient. They, and the rest of humanity after them, had to learn that their efforts to handle their sin for themselves would never, ever be enough.
In essence, God says, “Let Me do it for you. You’ll have to trust Me on this. What I provide for your shame will be enough, My grace is sufficient. Take the rocks out of your shoes – you’ve got to do this MY WAY.”
God’s way is prefigured in the Old Testament by the taking of animal life and human life in order to cover sin. This was a crude but effective way to demonstrate the seriousness of sin. But this was all directed to the ONLY way for the resolution of sin.
God’s way is through the sacrificial death of Jesus, the son God loved. God’s way is that Jesus gives His life to provide permanent covering for all of our sin. God seeks out the ashamed, the afraid, the guilty. His built-in conscience still embarrasses us, still allows us to sense our nakedness when we come to Him. His desire is for everyone to join Him in His covering of GRACE – (Isn’t that a great name for a Church?)

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