The Sound of the Lord

Something goes bump in the night. The fatal sound you hear when you are going to sleep. You sit in bed wondering if you should get up or just stay put? Your mind starts racing trying to figure out what is going on. You mentally go through what could have made the noise coming from the other room. If you own a cat you have go through this many times every night. Only to realize the cat is unaccounted for and is the one who made the terrifying noise. Noise which raised your heart rate and drove you to want to hide.

Adam and Eve have this same reaction in the Garden. But the sound is not their favorite feline but their Creator. “And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden” (Gen. 3:8 ESV). God the Father, Creator of the heavens and the earth, has entered into creation to walk with Adam and Eve in the Garden. This should not be a terrifying experience for Adam and Even. In fact, it should be a time of rejoicing for they are getting to be with their Creator, but they hide. 

They hide because they know they have sinned against God. They have done what God has told them not to do: eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Adam and Eve are terrified of what God is going to do to them. So, they do the only thing they can think of, hide. Hide hoping God will not find them and their sin. We hear God’s Word and join Adam and Eve. We hear the Lord speaking to us and we run and hide among the things of this world. Hoping that by hiding, God will not find us and our sins. We are terrified of what God is going to do to us because of our sins. God calls for us. Calls for us to come to him in the midst of our sins. Calls for us to confess our sins to Him. Called for Adam and Eve to confess their sins unto God their Father and yet they played hot potato. Passing the potato of their sins to the next person in line hoping they would not be caught with it. God knew better. He was not fooled by this game of hot potato. No, God saw their sin and called them on it.

God calls to us. Calls us to repentance for our sins though His Word. There we are pointed to our sins as breaking the very will of God. God calls us to repentance but our fear drives us away from God. Drives us to play a game of hot potato with our sins. Passing them away from us and on to anyone or anything we can find. Driving us to refuse to repent but to hide from God. Driving us away from the one source of relief from our sins. God speaks the words of the Gospel, the very first words of Gospel in the Bible, to Adam and Eve and to us: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Gen. 3:15 ESV). God calls to Adam and Eve in the midst of their sin and us in the midst of our sins declaring help. Declaring God will not leave us to the serpent. God will not leave us to die at the hands of the father of sins. No, God will defeat the father of sins, the serpent for us. He will come as the seed of the woman and accomplish this. Accomplish the work of victory by the bruising, death of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and the Son of Man. When God calls us by His Word He does so to deliver this victory to us. We are shown our sins by the Word of God and then called by it to receive God’s victory over our sins and death. By this bruising of the seed of the women we no longer have to fear hearing the voice of our Lord. We now know we can enter into the presence of God and not worry about what He is going to do to us. We know what He is going to do to us. Deliver us from our sins. Once we know the sound in the dark is the cat we do not fear it. Once we know the sound of the Lord is the sound of forgiveness we no longer have to fear Him. We can confidently come out of hiding and gather around His word knowing there we receive victory and life.