8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walkingin the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”10 He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”11 And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”12 The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”13 Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”REFLECTIONSWritten by Stephen SheadI was struck by two tragic consequences of the Fall in today’s reading. The first is seeing the intimate communion with God that humanity lost by defying him. I don’t exactly know what it would have been like to join the Lord God in a daily walk through his beautiful garden in the cool of the day – but I’m sure it was a breath-taking joy! But instead, the first couple became terrified of God, so that they desperately tried to hide from him (v. 10).We still sometimes kid ourselves that we can hide from God, but that’s pretty dumb. Hebrews 4:13 says: “And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.” That really is a scary thought – we are completely “naked” before God, and everything that is hidden will be exposed on the day of judgment (Luke 12:2-3).The second tragedy is how sin corrupts our relationships through blame and self-justification. Again, this sounds so familiar. The woman blames her choice on a legless lizard – “he told me to!” The man goes one step further: he manages to blame both the woman and God at the same time (“The woman you put here with me”, v. 12).Sometimes the hardest thing in the world is simply to admit that you are totally, completely in the wrong, without trying to make your sin sound less serious than it is, or divert attention onto someone else who also did the wrong thing. But that’s what we need to learn to do as Christians, both with God and with one another. The God-given recipe for facing our sin is true confession (that is, naming and owning your sin), along with genuine repentance (turning away from it), as we trust in Christ and submit to him.And when we do that, what comfort and peace we find in the gospel! – knowing that “the blood of Jesus, his Son purifies us from all sin” (1 John 1:7). Our nakedness is covered by his righteousness, so that we can “approach God’s throne of grace with confidence” (Hebrews 4:16) – and one day we will walk forever close to him in his beautiful, eternal City (Rev. 22).QUESTIONCan you think of a time when you did the wrong thing and blamed someone else? How did you feel? Why is it better to admit what you did and ask for forgiveness?ABOUT THE AUTHORStephen Shead is our Senior Minister and leads our Bossley Park Congregation