Adam and Eve, our first parents, upon seeing their nakedness after eating the forbidden fruit, hide from The Lord God. They make little aprons sewn of fig leaves to cover their private parts. The fig leaves were no comfort in God’s presence. And soon they will be of no comfort in anybodies presence because fig leaves soon dry, crumble, and fall away. In God’s presence, our first parents admit their nakedness. This is a foreshadow of the failure of our own little works, trying to keep His holy law, to give us standing before a holy God in covering for our misdeeds. And how they fall away when we are convicted of sin by the Holy Spirit leading to our salvation and, on the other hand, how they will fall away if we refuse Christ and go to God’s judgement. The Puritans spoke of turning to works righteousness as “legal repentance”. We hear it spoken of as, “turning over a new leaf”. It does not result in a new life empowered by the Spirit as I can testify.

Martin Luther, the leader of the great Reformation, puts it plainly, “It seemeth but a light matter to mingle the law and the gospel, faith and works together; but it doth more harm than a man’s reason can conceive, for it taketh away Christ with all His benefits, and overthroweth the gospel, as Paul saith. The cause of this great evil is our flesh, which being plunged in sins, seeth no way to get out, but by works, and therefore it would live in the righteousness of the law, and rest in the confidence of its own works.”

The Lord God. whom we know as Jesus, whom Jews call the Angel of the Covenant, clothed Adam and Eve , after their repentance and confession of faith in the LIFE with skins from the sacrifice , also a fore-shadow of the death of Christ Jesus and our covering with Him. Gen.3:20-21. The Hebrew Scriptures indicate the Lord covered them entirely with His own work. Beautiful no doubt. Just so will The Lord clothe all who repent toward God and believe in Him with His own beautiful righteousness.