Known Is Scarier Than Loved
On Genesis 3, fig leaves, and the fear of being known
For as long as I can recall, I get pretty freaked out thinking about letting someone in at a deeper level. It’s so much less complicated to keep everyone at a distance and to be known to only a certain extent.
Because it’s so difficult, when I think about vulnerability, I have trouble pinpointing one pivotal moment that stands out among the rest as the pinnacle of avoiding being truly known. Yet, among the catalog of moments, I keep circling around the time when I thought I had tricked a therapist into thinking I was okay.
When my dad died, I wasn’t really sure how or if I was going to recover. I was in 6th grade, and talking about real things like grief and loss at that age is almost unheard of, and even something that most middle schoolers don’t know how to do in the first place. My mom made me go to counseling to try and talk it out and work through the pain, but I had other plans once I stepped into those sessions.
I remember it got to the point where I even had to switch therapists, because what the first one was telling my mom about how I was doing obviously didn’t match up to what she was seeing. I was so closed off to telling anyone about the hurt that I let it lock the door to getting over it.
I told them what I wanted them to know, and that’s it. No recounting what the last conversation I had with my dad was. No processing the downright torturous words that someone told me a few weeks after it happened, that he wished I had gone with him. None of that. I instead talked about going to a baseball game, or going to church, or something so inconsequential that I don’t even remember it.
And you’ve done the same thing too, even if it wasn’t sitting on a couch in a therapist’s office.
Think about the last time you actually answered honestly when someone asked, “How are you doing?” and they genuinely wanted to know.
Maybe your friends only know so much about you because you’re afraid that they won’t be okay with the real “you,” with all of the baggage.
What about in your church small group, when you chose to tell the sanitized version of the deep struggles you’re facing to a community that’s designed to help you get through all parts of life?
If we’re to understand why we feel this way, why we make hedging decisions to protect ourselves, we have to go back to the very beginning, to territory that feels so familiar yet rushed through. The Garden of Eden holds so many keys to unlocking and explaining the way things are, all packed into 3 rather short chapters. Where we want to see the moment everything changed is what we skip over to get to the exciting part. At the end of chapter 2, we read this phrase:
25 Both the man and his wife were naked, yet felt no shame.
The state Adam and Eve find themselves in is incredibly important; “naked and unashamed” aren’t merely descriptors to pass over but a deliberate setup for what breaks in the following passage. This is anticipatory of the shame found a little bit later in 3:71, and it “[links] the foregoing narrative of creation to the subsequent narrative of human sin.”2
In only a few words, we get the ideal state that we’re about to lose right before it gets snatched from us. We feel relief as we think about what it means to be known, without having to go through the process of opening up, only for us to learn a few sentences later that it’s about to be lost.
As the next chapter opens, the intentional use of “cunning” or “crafty” (depending on what version you read) is there to juxtapose and undercut the first couple’s “naked” state.
1a Now the serpent was the most cunning of all the wild animals that the Lord God had made…
In our English translations, we don’t get the full weight of how the Hebrew structures the contrasting ideas; the words for naked (ʿărûmmîm) and crafty (ʿārûm) share the same consonant and paint a picture of just how inverted the two are. To put it plainly: the serpent’s craftiness is the narrative’s exact inversion of the couple’s transparency — hiding intent versus having nothing to hide.3 Crafty, cunning ways like the serpent’s operate with an ulterior motive, for the sole purpose of controlling the narrative we want to portray. We now have the reflex to conceal ourselves rather than live with the capacity to be exposed.
Just how deceitful the serpent is shows up in the first sentence he speaks to Eve:
1c …“Did God really say, ‘You can’t eat from any tree in the garden’?”
2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat the fruit from the trees in the garden. 3 But about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, God said, ‘You must not eat it or touch it, or you will die.’
He introduces a moment of doubt, making the woman rethink whether what he asked really was, in fact, what she heard God say. It leads to deception:
4 “No! You will certainly not die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “In fact, God knows that when you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
The same deception here is what we experience when we’re faced with the choice to open up or shut down. And, when we close ourselves off in a way that turns us away from God’s original plan, it leads to disobedience in the same way Eve chose, as the story continues:
6 The woman saw that the tree was good for food and delightful to look at, and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it; she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.
We so wish that when we turn away from what God intended, things will be okay. That no one will experience any negative consequence, or that we’ll just feel better about ourselves as a result. But, how often do we instead turn from a healthy way of being known to an unhealthy outcome that leaves us disgusted, making the choice to
7a Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew they were naked
The sin they committed brought “shame and conflict rather than status and power,”4 where the shame they experienced brought “disgust over having disobeyed.”5
7b [S]o they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
And so this section ends in a destruction of God’s original design. They covered themselves as an attempt at control, managing the results instead of dealing with the cause.6 They felt exposed and like they needed to make a “desperate attempt to regain the safety”7 that they lost, the feeling they had before shame showed up.
As if feeling shame for the first time wasn’t enough, the One they disobeyed comes into view. God does something so unimaginable by human standards, knowing that the pair had sinned already: He asked a question.
8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9 So the Lord God called out to the man and said to him, “Where are you?”
10 And he said, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.”
Notice that what God does isn’t asking for Adam to tell Him where they were because God didn’t know. God, the all-knowing, all-powerful, all-present Person He is, already knew that Adam and Eve disobeyed Him. Like when your parents already knew you broke the lamp, but still asked, “Who did this?”
If we knew that someone had transgressed against us, how we would confront that person would be very different from what we read here. We’d approach in anger, bust down a door, and seek immediate vengeance. Take action first, ask questions later. Yet God’s appearance here is presence-seeking rather than punitive.8 He “gently invites the man to reveal himself”,9 showing how much more relationship means in this exact moment than justice; yet justice and punishment do come a few verses later.
The relationship between God and man, as we know from the following scene, was broken. Yet, that wasn’t the only relationship broken. We see here that the horizontal, spouse-to-spouse relationship was severed too. The eye-opening the pair experienced was all-encompassing, leaving nothing to hide from anyone at all and a need to conceal from everyone and everything.
We don’t talk about this enough. Adam and Eve didn’t just hide from God—they started hiding from each other too. When you hold back and share only a safe version of yourself, you’re protecting something you learned to hide long ago.
Ask yourself what you’re really protecting. Be specific, and don’t hold back. Think about the answer you’ve practiced so you never have to say the real thing. The version of your struggle that’s just true enough, but still controlled. It’s time to stop telling yourself that’s humility. What you’re actually doing is sewing together your own version of fig leaves.
Think about your Wednesday night group, a place meant for people to know and be known. Maybe it feels hard to be open there, not because of the room, but because you’re testing if it’s safe—just like Adam wondered if God’s question was a threat. He assumed the worst and hid. You might be doing the same with people who haven’t given you a reason to doubt them.
Here’s where the text keeps going. John, thousands of years later, picks up the same vocabulary the author of Genesis used when he wrote about the garden and gives it back to us as an answer rather than a diagnosis:
7 But if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. 8 If we say, “We have no sin,” we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. 9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
Look at that phrase again: fellowship with one another. It’s not just about you and God—a faith that’s only about “Jesus and me” is weak. Both our relationship with God and with others are restored in the same verse. Confession and vulnerability, our modern version of being “naked,” are the only real coverings that work. Fig leaves never could.
You can’t get back to being naked and unashamed by pretending everything is fine. You get there by doing what Adam and Eve should have done—staying in the garden and facing the questions, not running away.
There’s a sixth grader in a therapist’s office in all of us somewhere, still giving the practiced answer instead of the real one. Still choosing what others are allowed to know about the day everything changed.
We weren’t made to be that lonely. We were created to be naked and unashamed, and we’re being remade into people who can be truly known again. Not just by a therapist or a small group we filter ourselves for, but by each other, fully, like it was before there was anything to hide.
That’s what the church looks like at its best—a place where the question is asked, and finally, someone tells the truth.
This is part of The Whole Story — walking Scripture’s arc one text at a time. Last week: “Betrayed on Purpose” (Mark 14–16, Acts 4). This week continues the thread from rupture into hiding, the instinct underneath the betrayal.
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Iain M. Duguid, "Genesis," in Genesis–Numbers, ed. Iain M. Duguid, James M. Hamilton Jr., and Jay Sklar, vol. 1, ESV Expository Commentary (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2025), 56.
Kenneth A. Mathews, Genesis 1–11, ed. E. Ray Clendenen and Brandon D. Smith, Christian Standard Commentary (Nashville: Holman Reference, 2022), 171.
Mathews, Genesis 1–11, 180-181.
Duguid, “Genesis,” 62.
Phillip Bethancourt, Exalting Jesus in Genesis, ed. David Platt, Daniel L. Akin, and Tony Merida, Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary (Nashville: Holman Reference, 2024), 36.
Bethancourt, Exalting Jesus in Genesis, 37.
Duguid, “Genesis,” 65.
Bethancourt, Exalting Jesus in Genesis, 38-39
Duguid, "Genesis," 63.