Acceptance is crucial in the pursuit of happiness. Your identity and value changes when you see them in the light of who is seeing you. And much of our sense of worth is formed in other people’s eyes: a child who’s seen with warmth grows up feeling inherently valuable, while one who’s seen with contempt often carries that lens for decades.
In the garden before sin, Adam and Eve identity was fully received, they were naked but not ashame? (Gen2:25) but the moment they choose to sin they felt the effect of separation from God. They felt exposed, defective and inadequate. Their following action says,”I am exposed, defective, not enough” Luke 15 explained what separation from the Father looks like. A young man full of life suddenly returned broken. Not wanted, not happy, not adequate!
In both cases man sinned and what they believed about how God saw them changed — and that belief alone was enough to shatter their entire emotional world.
Human unmediated identity was given by God.
Adam and Eve had done nothing to earn any of it. They contributed nothing to their own existence. Their entire identity was gift . That’s why nakedness was nothing to them — there was no gap between who they were and who they appeared to be. No image to manage. No standard to meet. Nothing to hide.
Shame is the terror of being seen as deficient. And it only exists where identity is believed to be conditional. In Genesis 2, identity was unconditional; they were fully accepted, so there was simply no room for shame. But the moment they bit, they experienced for the first time what every human since has lived with: an identity they now had to construct and defend themselves.
Actually, the deepest agony of the cross was not physical pain, but absolute rejection. When Jesus cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, He absorbed the
ultimate rejection from the Father. Because he was forsaken, you never will be!
