Part One: The Anatomy of Shame

WRITTEN BY DREW MATZ

What is shame, and How do we address it?

Humans are emotional creatures. Because we are made in the image of God, it is natural that we should have the capacity to express love, affection, and desire. In fact, the first human words recorded in the Bible are “at last!” (Gen. 2:23). Because God is an eternal community of three divine persons, human beings are created to reflect this communal aspect. Made in God’s image, Adam had longed for the same kind of community. He desired to love, and to be filled with love just the same.

Yet something happened.

A serpent tempted the couple, and they disobeyed God’s word:

So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.

Suddenly, the world is turned on its head. Their eyes were opened, and they were no longer secure in themselves. Humanity has been introduced to something it was never intended to encounter. They were experiencing shame. What Freud spent an entire lifetime trying to explain, the Bible explained in just a paragraph. When the intimate bond between God and man was breached, man’s security was taken from him. Our first parents now only wanted to hide themselves from God, and from one another. The intimate perfection of Eden was now shattered.

It is in this initial shame that all of our sinful nature is rooted. We no longer have the security of the ever presence of God, and so we no longer know where to derive our sense of worth and purpose. Our divine compass has been scrambled so that we now seek this security in all sorts of different ways. We no longer know what is up and what is down.

However, God would not leave us in this state. He was already implementing our redemption, which we will investigate in part 2.