God Clothed Them

The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife, and clothed them.

—Genesis 3:21*

Steve Lawson comments on the “symbolic picture of the future death of Christ for His chosen ones” seen in the passage above:

The Lord Himself killed an innocent animal and made coverings for the nakedness and guilt of Adam and Eve. This was the first death in God’s newly created world—a slain sacrifice. This animal was killed at the hands of God Himself, and He provided its skin freely for the first couple as an expression of His saving grace. Their garments of skin represented God’s provision for restoring Adam’s and Eve’s relationship with Himself. This bloody sacrifice pictured the coming of Christ into the world to redeem His people. God’s Son would be the Lamb of God, who would take away the sin of His people (John 1:29, 36). His sacrifice alone would provide a covering for the exposed nakedness of Adam and Eve’s guilt.

In explaining this substitutionary death, Boice points out that it symbolized the shed blood and perfect righteousness of Christ. Boice writes: “In order to make clothes of skin, God had to kill animals. It was the first death Adam and Eve had witnessed, as far as we know. It must have seemed horrible to them and have made an indelible impression. ‘So this is what death is; this is what sin causes,’ they must have exclaimed. But even more important, the death of the animals must have taught them the principle of substitution, the innocent dying for the guilty, just as the innocent Son of God would one day die for the sins of those God was giving to him. When God clothed our first parents in the animals’ skins, Adam and Eve must have had at least a first faint glimmer of the doctrine of imputed righteousness. . . . God saved Adam and Eve from their sins by clothing them in the heavenly righteousness of Jesus Christ, which he symbolized by their being clothed with skins of animals.”

—Steve Lawson, Foundations of Grace (Reformation Trust, 2006), 64