From the time we are little girls, we are taught to care for and dress our bodies. We tug on our clothes in the morning, brush our teeth before bed, and run a comb through our tangled tresses. Eventually, we learn how to paint our nails, put on makeup, wear heels, and maybe even get our ears pierced. We brave the insecurities of adolescence, traverse the tumultuous teenage years, and settle at last into our own unique way of presenting ourselves to the world. Some of us wear dresses, some of us prefer jeans, but we all have a habit of adornment in our daily lives.
It is an instinct as old as the world itself.
Every time we shrug on a shirt, we are acknowledging that we, like our first parents, are fragile, dust-formed, and deeply needy. We cannot sustain ourselves. We require an external source of Goodness and Light to hold the frames we so carefully clothe together. To be adorned, then, is to be cared for. To be adorned is to be the needy object of provision and love.
Our ancient mother and father were naked, yet perfectly adorned. Like lilies in the field that do not toil or spin, Adam and Eve were tenderly clothed in the love of their Maker. But then came the tree. The bite. The knowing. The hiding. Adornment distorted into armor, and clothing became a way to protect ourselves from not only a dangerous world, but a God we were too ashamed to face.
We still scramble for fig leaves in all sorts of forms. We layer on trendy clothing and makeup and achievements and filters, trying to cover what we fear others might see if they looked closely enough. Sin keeps us naked and ashamed.
But our God is in the business of dressing His fragile dust creatures. He always has been.
There in the garden, after his humans’ folly, God did something tender and terrible. He made garments of skin for Adam and Eve and clothed them. It is easy to read past this moment, but we should not. Those garments required the death of an animal, the first death recorded in Scripture, the first blood spilled in a world that had known only life. An innocent creature died so that the guilty could be covered. It is the earliest whisper of a story that will crescendo at Calvary.
Even then, in the wreckage of our first sin, God was pointing forward to the lengths He would go to clothe the ones He adored.
This thread runs through all of Scripture. It weaves through the elaborate, sacred garments of the priests… every detail prescribed by God, every fabric and color laden with meaning, a picture of holiness worn on a human body. It is prophesied through Isaiah's cry of worship: "He has clothed me with garments of salvation; he has covered me with a robe of righteousness" (Isaiah 61:10). It appears in the parable of the prodigal son, when the father throws the best robe over the shoulders of his filthy, returning child.
And then we arrive at another tree.
The soldiers stripped Jesus before they killed Him. They took His garments and divided them, casting lots for His clothing while He hung dying above them. Not only that, but the flogging that preceded His crucifixion violently tore His very skin.
He became the animal in the garden. The slaughtered innocent one. The Lamb of God who bears our shame and takes away the sin of the world, whose death makes our covering possible. Every animal skin in Eden, every priestly garment in the tabernacle, every lamb on every altar… all of it was pointing here, to this moment.
When we accept this as true and surrender our lives to it, we are choosing to put off our old selves and put on Someone new. Our adornment has shifted. As Paul said in Galatians 3:27, we have “put on Christ”. We wear Him. He is in us, and we are in Him, surrounded by His righteousness, enveloped in His destiny, wrapped in His presence, His power, and His glory.
To belong to Christ is to be adorned in the most costly garment ever given.
God still wants to care for and clothe his precious humans. His tender love is the force that drove Him to the garden and the cross and the empty tomb. The robe of righteousness we wear is stitched together with love.
So, next time you are perusing your closet, remember that you do not have to scramble for fig leaves. You do not have to earn your covering or construct your own worth. You have been seen in your nakedness and tenderly adorned, not because you deserve it, but because He is that good, and you are that adored.