Most Christians, like their non-godly counterparts, do not think much about nakedness and those who do - enough to proclaim it wrong in God's sight - often quote the verse in Genesis that says God made clothes for Adam and Eve, as if that were the equivalent of a divine command to be always clothed, particularly in public.
Their argument is superficial, and untrue. When God wants us to do something he makes his will very plain: he issues a command, and says clearly that it is one; he emphasises, he says the same thing in many ways and many places; and he forbids the opposite course. In short, he leaves us in no doubt at all. But nowhere in the Bible does he command us always to wear clothes; he gives no such emphasis; nowhere does he forbid public nakedness - on the contrary, as we shall see in many passages, the opposite is true.
We have no right to read a divine command into one short sentence, just because it suits our own opinion.
In Genesis 1:31 we are told that "God saw all that he had made, and it was very good." True, that was before the Fall, but even that catastrophic spiritual event did not make everything, or anything, unworthy of being seen, otherwise we would all have to have our eyes put out. And it certainly did it not put particular things such as genitals, pudendas, and breasts beyond the pale. Or antelopes, grey rocks, and red leaves, for that matter.
When Adam and Eve fell from God's grace by disobeying him and bringing sin into a sinless world, they vainly tried to hide their shame, the shame of their self-will and newly discovered lust, by stitching fig-leaves together and making themselves loincloths. God replaced those with tunics of animal skins. He was not by that action commanding them to wear tunics, or animal skins, or clothes, but taking pity on them and showing them better and more lasting protection against the rigours of the life they faced outside the Garden of Eden.
The great seventeenth-century Puritan poet, John Milton, whose epic poem Paradise Lost is perhaps the most the brilliant exposition of the creation story ever written, shows graphically in Book IX what happened after the Forbidden Fruit had been consumed.
Carnal desire inflaming; he on Eve
Began to cast lascivious eyes; she him
As wantonly repaid; in lust they burn,
Till Adam thus `gan Eve to dalliance move:
`...come; so well refreshed, now let us play,
or never did thy beauty...so inflame my sense
With ardour to enjoy thee...'
So said he, and forbore not glance or toy
Of amorous intent, well understood
Of Eve, whose eye darted contagious fire.
Her hand he seized, and to a shady bank...
He led her, nothing loath.
Later, the guilty pair awoke to find themselves "destitute and bare of all their virtue", and were plunged into a despair of shame, which Adam puts into words:
... our eyes opened we find indeed, and find we know
Both good and evil, good lost and evil got:
Bad fruit of knowledge, if this be to know,
Which leaves us naked thus, of honour void,
Of innocence, of faith, of purity,
Our wonted ornaments now soiled and stained,
And in our faces evident the signs
Of foul concupiscence...
"How", he asks in despair, "shall I behold the face henceforth of God or Angel, erst with joy and rapture so oft beheld?" He talks wildly of hiding away in some dark place, he calls to the trees to cover him so that he never has to face the heavenly gaze again. The best remedy he can think of, which is not much, is to cover the "ornaments now soiled and stained", (his genitals and Eve's pudenda) on which their expression of lust was centred.
"But let us now, as in bad plight, devise
What best may, for the present, serve to hide
The parts of each that seem most
To shame obnoxious, and unseemliest seen--
Some tree, whose broad smooth leaves, together sewed,
And girded on our loins, may cover round
Those middle parts, that this newcomer, Shame,
There sit not, and reproach us as unclean."
Milton later points to what was obviously a sudden degradation in the climate to explain the sudden need for warm clothes, which the skin tunics provided by God obviously are:
"While the Creator, calling forth by name
His mighty Angels, ... to bring in change
Of seasons with each clime: else had the spring
Perpetual smiled on Earth with vernant flowers,
Equal in days and nights"
That interpretation is perfectly consistent with the penalties that God laid upon Eve, Adam (and the Earth itself) in Genesis 3:16-19 because of the defiling effect of their sin:
To Eve he said:
"I will increase your labour and your groaning, and in labour you shall bear children. You shall be eager for your husband, and he shall be your master."
And to Adam:
"Because you have listened to your wife and have eaten from the tree which I forbade you, accursed shall be the ground on your account. With labour you shall win your food from it all the days of your life. It will grow thorns and thistles for you, none but wild plants for you to eat. You shall gain your bread by the sweat of your brow until you return to the ground; for from it you were taken. Dust you are, to dust you shall return."
In Genesis 5:29, there is further evidence of a climactic change, in the amount of work that is now needed to gather sustenance: [Lamech] named him Noah, saying, "This boy will bring us relief from our work, and from the hard labour that has come upon us because of the LORD's curse upon the ground."
Yet more confirmation of why Adam and Eve were given clothes is found in Matthew 6:25-34, where Jesus tells us that "the body is more than clothes", then goes on to command us sternly. "No, do not ask anxiously, What are we to eat? What are we to drink? What shall we wear?" All these things are for the heathen to run after, not for you, because your heavenly Father knows that you need them.
He knows that we need them. Clothes are as necessary as food and water; it is not possible to go through life without them. But that does not mean we must eat all the time, drink all the time, or be clothed all the time.
There is yet more confirmation of this in Exodus 22:26-27, where the Children of Israel are commanded to make sure that if they take a neighbour's cloak in pawn, you shall return it to him by sunset, because it is his only covering. It is the cloak that wraps his body; in what else can he sleep?
What is wrong before God there, is not the sight of a man's nakedness during the day, but depriving him of the covering he needs in the chill of night; or, as Isaiah 58:7 and Matthew 25:31-46 add, of not providing him with that protection when it lies within our power.
In Ecclesiastes 3:1 we are told: "For everything its season, and for every activity under heaven its time", then comes the famous list: "a time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to uproot; a time to kill and a time to heal..." and so on. There is a time for everything good--for "every activity under heaven". To that, as we shall see, we may justly add: "there is a time to be clothed and time to be naked."
Another biblical passage often cited by people determined to prove that nakedness is evil in God's sight is in Leviticus. That is the book in which are set down the laws by which people had to live, the laws that were the temporary path to salvation and eternal life that God provided before sending his Son in a later time. After Jesus came, some of those practices, such as sacrificing animals, were no longer required, because Jesus gave himself as the final sacrifice for all who put their faith in him. Others, such as the prohibition against incest, remain. It is still in our law.
Leviticus 18:6-30 sets down a long list of prohibitions, all of which are still valid. But what the condemners stumble over is that throughout that passage the King James Version of the Bible, also known as the Authorised Version, uses the phrase "uncover the nakedness of".
It begins, for example, with (verse 6): "None of you shall approach any that is near of kin to him, to uncover their nakedness: I am the LORD. The nakedness of thy father, or the nakedness of thy mother, shalt thou not uncover: she is thy mother: thou shalt not uncover her nakedness."
It then continues in similar fashion to list many other people whose nakedness thou shalt not uncover: your father's wife, your sister, your father's daughter, your mother's daughter, your son's daughter, your daughter's daughter, etc., etc.
Modern translations simply say "intercourse" or "sexual intercourse", which is clearly what is meant. Verse 6 alone proves that. What we are being warned to shun is incest. "Uncover the nakedness of" is as much a poetic way of saying sexual intercourse as "lie with" or "know". But there is a deep and perceptive truth in that poetry, for sexual intercourse is the most intimate exposure of a woman to a man. And not just of the woman involved--as the passage points out, it is also a very intimate exposure, a very intimate knowledge, of her husband. He too is deeply exposed by incestuous adultery (or any adultery, for that matter).
"Uncover the nakedness of" also refers to the lust that is being exposed by being expressed, which, again, is why Adam and Eve felt such shame.
Another passage from Genesis much used by the condemners of nakedness is chapter 9:20-27, where, after the Flood, Noah planted a vineyard, got drunk one day and lay naked inside his tent. One of his sons, Ham, saw him, and told his brothers outside, Shem and Japheth. They went in, walking backwards so as not to see their father, and covered him with a cloak.
When Noah recovered he cursed Ham, and all his descendants, because of what he had done, and blessed Shem, Japheth, and their descendants. "See," say the condemners of nakedness triumphantly, "it was evil for Ham to see Noah's nakedness. Therefore it is evil for anyone to see anyone's."
The famous seventeenth-century Bible commentator, Matthew Henry, saw the real truths in this passage: "...the consequence of Noah's sin was shame. He was made naked to his shame, as Adam when he had eaten forbidden fruit. Observe here the great evil of the sin of drunkenness. It discovers men. It disgraces men. [Then we see] Ham's impudence and impiety. He pleased himself with the sight. He told his brothers in a scornful deriding manner. It is very wrong to make a jest of sin (Proverbs 14:9) and to publish the faults of another, especially of parents, whom it is our duty to honour."
Matthew Henry saw what we are really being warned against: drunkenness, taking pleasure in another's failings, breaking the fifth commandment ("Honour your father and your mother")--not nakedness. Michelangelo underlined the point on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel by portraying both Noah and all his sons naked.
One of those lessons is also underlined in Lamentations 4:21 where God tells us: "when you are drunk you will expose yourself to shame."
But if the irrepressible condemners of nakedness were right, then a little-known passage in the Old Testament, supported by passages from the New, would be a lie, and God would be evil, for He would have commanded a sinful act.
That, as Part 2 will show, is not true.