Fear’s First Introduction

This article is excerpted from Blair Linne's book, Made to Tremble: How Anxiety Became the Best Thing That Ever Happened to My Faith.

The moment sin was chosen, Adam and Eve became keenly aware of their fallen exposure before a holy God, along with the reality of death. As a result, for the first time in human history, fear was exalted in man's heart. This is the first time we hear of fear mentioned in Scripture. They've never been scared of God—never had a reason to be. And yet here they stood, in the home that God had made for them, afraid. At the moment of this conversion—from good to bad—this novel emotion eclipsed all of the goodness they enjoyed, and they were filled with fear. Anxieties multiplied. What-ifs consumed. The lush hues made room for dull, dim shades of doubt. Harmony between Heaven and Earth faded into a cacophony of chaos. And in this jarring discord, they heard the faint sound of God approaching, and they suddenly had a strange new impulse to hide.

Ever since that grave day in Genesis 3, this has been humanity's problem with God: feeling exposed to sin and death, which gives rise to fear and anxiety, which leads to hiding. We say along with Adam "I was afraid" of facing you and your perception of me, God, "so I hid." We too run for cover because we're scared. Just like Adam and Eve, we hide. We slip out of church quickly because we are nervous about what we fear may be an awkward, or even condemning, interaction. And we're not alone. All of humanity and all of creation have groaned, hid, and been afraid since that day in the Garden.

Hiding Behind an Improper Covering

Along with feeling exposed, and choosing to hide from God, there are two more things Adam and Eve did in response to their great fall: cover their nakedness with fig leaves and cover their sin through blame shifting.

Why did they sew leaves together? Why not just dart in the bushes and hide? Because feeling fearful and exposed not only makes you want to hide, but it also makes you want to cover up. We innately know this as humans. When someone does something terrible and tries to ensure no one will find out, we call their strategies a "cover up" or "covering their tracks." There's a reason for that. When you know you're in the wrong, you try to conceal it. Adam and Eve were naked and unashamed prior to the fall, but after, their disobedience made them want to cover up. And they did just that by:

Crafting clothes.

Tenebrous tailors

Stitching stalks and petals,

To pretend.

To patch and cloak.

Covering the glory lost

Masking the shame of newfound nakedness

For Adam and Eve, their nakedness was now synonymous with their sin. Their hiding was the result of a shift in allegiance. They thought the best solution was to fix it themselves. Not to move toward God, but to run away from him.

The second way Adam tried to cover up his sin was by blaming his wife:

In the face of their sin-soaked conscience, they hid behind fig leaves and excuses. They ran away from the only one who could do something about their shame and clean up the mess they made. As God's original children, they could have had the attitude of the psalmist, who would later sing,

But they did not run to God's comfort when their anxieties multiplied. If they only knew that hiding is the antithesis of how a child of an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-charitable Father should respond.

This feeling of exposure, this instinct to hide, this strategy of covering ourselves by way of fig leaves or blame shifting—this is our inheritance from Adam.

As humanity's representative, the sin Adam committed expanded to the entire race, and we are all the recipients of that inheritance. We also individually choose to sin, showing that we are not merely a victim of our ancestors' sin, but we are active participants. There are so many ways that we try to hide the stain of living in a world shattered by that sinful ancient bite. When we are guilt-ridden and shame-filled, we hide. We hide in plain sight to take our minds off of what we fear: death.

We might think hiding behind fig leaves is a foolish thing to do when one is afraid of death but in truth, we all do the same thing, just in different ways. Everyone will face death. Often, it's not that we will die but how we might die that can frighten us. When I received that janky cancer diagnosis, I never shared it with anyone but I remember thinking: well, maybe God is not calling me to help serve the church anymore. I remember being concerned about not seeing my children grow up and I had fears about how my family would make out without me. What I was fearing was the unknown. We know 10 out of 10 people will die, but we don't want it to be a painful, slow death. So we hide. We hide behind our carefully crafted images, our social media feeds, our youthful products, sin, and excuses, or we throw ourselves into work and ministry, assuming that if we patch enough of these things together, we will avoid what is inevitable and that is judgment. As though what we hide behind will conceal what God already knows. The problem with fig leaves, real or metaphorical, is that they do not make for a proper covering for the aftereffects that come with something as damaging as sin.