From this lesson on we intend to look into the summary of the Old Testament step by step. In this lesson we will examine the portion of the Old Testament from Adam to Noah.
Immediately after the fall, Adam and Eve realized that they had violated God’s prohibition against eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. They also realized that the result of their transgression was to be death. Therefore, they hid themselves from the Lord’s presence, awaiting the sentence of death. However, God came in, not to declare the sentence of death, but to preach the gospel, giving them a wonderful promise that the seed of the woman would bruise the head of the serpent (Gen. 3:15).
Besides receiving the promise of God’s redemption, Adam also experienced the anticipated redemption of God. (The actual redemption was to be accomplished four thousand years later.) After their fall, Adam and Eve realized that they were sinful. Thus, they tried to help themselves by making skirts of fig leaves to cover their nakedness. This indicates that they attempted to cover their sinful self with their own works. Before the fall man did not need blood to redeem him, but after the fall he needed the bleeding sacrifice to redeem him. Thus, man’s attempt to cover his nakedness with the product of the vegetable life can never work. The skirts that Adam and Eve made from fig leaves did not cover their nakedness in the eyes of God.
In Genesis 3:20, after Adam heard the glad tidings, he immediately called his wife’s name Eve, which means living. He believed that he and his wife were going to live and not die. Because of Adam’s believing, we see God’s justification in verse 21. After Adam believed in the glad tidings, God made coats of skins of the sacrifice for him and his wife and clothed them. The coats fully covered them. This means that God justified them (Gen. 3:21). To be justified means to be covered with the righteousness of God, which is Christ Himself. Adam and Eve’s being under the coats of the skins of the sacrifice signified that they had put on Christ. Christ as God’s righteousness covered them.
In order to make coats of the skins of the lambs, God probably killed the lambs in the presence of Adam and Eve. Thus, the blood of the lambs was shed, for without shedding of blood there is no forgiveness (Heb. 9:22). We have been redeemed by the precious blood of God’s Lamb, who was ordained by God for us before the foundation of the world (1 Pet. 1:18-20) and was slain from the foundation of the world (Rev. 13:8). Christ is the Lamb of God. Hence, we can see a picture of the shedding of Christ’s blood there in the garden of Eden. Without the shedding of blood, God cannot cover the fallen man. On the cross Christ was killed by the righteous God. Through the shedding of His blood God can now cover us with Christ as our righteousness. In the garden of Eden Adam experienced the anticipated redemption. His putting on of the coats of skins was based upon the shedding of the blood of the sacrifice, for the sacrificial lamb became a substitute for sinful man.
Genuine substitution is based upon union. Adam and Eve were sinful, and the lambs were killed and their blood shed for their sins. But if the lambs and Adam and Eve had been separated from one another, the lambs could not have substituted for them. Once Adam believed in the gospel, God covered him with a coat of lamb skins, and he became one with the lamb. The sinner had become one with the substitute. This is union. Union brings about the effectiveness of substitution. Once we participate in that union, whatever the substitute has accomplished is ours. Christ has done everything for us on the cross. Since we are one with Christ, whatever Christ has accomplished on the cross becomes ours. Hence, when Adam and Eve put on the coats of skins made by God, this typifies that they had believed into Christ and become one with Christ.