You Were Created for a Shame Free Life
By Kirt. A Schneider
After Adam and Eve sinned, they needed to be redeemed because their sin separated them from God. They sinned because they tried to get their desires fulfilled outside of God. The serpent came to Eve and said, “Look at this tree. If you eat of it, it’s going to make you wise.” (See Genesis 3:1–3.) Yet God had said, “From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die” (Gen. 2:16–17). Despite God’s warning, Eve chose to fulfill her desire outside of God’s path for her life. When she saw that the fruit of the tree looked good to her eyes and was told it would make her wise, her desire was aroused. She ate of the tree. And when she ate of the tree and then gave it to Adam, who also ate of the tree, immediately they realized they were naked—and shame set in.
When shame set in, they hid from God, becoming isolated, afraid, and under the curse of the serpent and death. But after they sinned, God spoke to Adam and Eve and gave them the promise of a coming Messiah in Genesis 3:15: “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; He [Messiah] shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise him on the heel” (emphasis added). Notice that this scripture says it would be through the seed of
the woman that the devil would be crushed. This seed is Yeshua, who was born into the world through a woman to redeem us from Satan’s curse, which came upon humanity when Eve fell for Satan’s deceptions.
The promise of our salvation does not begin with the New Testament Gospels; it goes all the way back to Genesis 3:15, which revealed that the Redeemer would come and enter the world through the seed of a woman.
Do Not Bow Down to Shame
Perhaps you are reading this right now from the same place Adam and Eve found themselves in—a posture of shame. You may have made decisions you are not proud of. You may be all too acquainted, this very moment, with the way shame has stripped you of self-acceptance and caused you to run into darkness, isolation, or addiction.
No matter who you are or what you have done—no matter how dense or heavy the shame that you carry— God has a plan for your life. It is better than anything you can imagine right now. Know that God is not surprised or caught off guard by your sin. He made provision for it long ago and set a plan in motion to pick up, cleanse, and redeem you. Father revealed His means for your redemption in Genesis 3!
You are not an accident. You do not have to be defined by your failures, weaknesses, and mistakes. You are passionately beloved by God the Father, and there is no limit to which He will not go to bring you home to Himself. Nothing from your past needs to control you or your future. Yet in order to fully step into our destiny, beloved, we need to fully return to our Creator through Messiah Jesus.
In the same way that we cannot fathom God’s self-existence or how God is Three yet One, we cannot comprehend why God loves us so relentlessly. He simply does because He chooses to do so.
We have been immersing ourselves in texts that tell us the truth about a multidimensional God and His amazing plan. But these ancient texts are not ancient history. The story of Adam and Eve, including their fall and promise of redemption, is our story. In the same way that God is multidimensional, the Scriptures are multidimensional. As we read of God’s activity in the past,
we find God bursting into our present, giving us a hopeful future!