On Clothing, Light, Knowledge, & Free Will

Don: I was stimulated by the blog comment on the Emperor’s New Clothes and its application to the story in Matthew 22 of the wedding guest who refuses to don the wedding garment. It suggests that what is called for is a return to a grace-dependent nakedness that was part of the condition of Man before the Fall. The guest without the wedding garment is really in a sense a man with a fig leaf, trying to show his self-righteousness.

But there is another aspect, which takes us full circle back to where we began this discussion: Light. Maybe that is what Adam and Eve were clothed in before the Fall, and maybe a garment of light is evidence that God’s grace covers us.

When we are restored to Paradise, as in Adam’s condition before the Fall, we see the forming of this external light. It is in distinction to the inner light that enlightens every man (Book of John.)

In the beginning, Adam was created in the image of god. If we take that as our baseline premise then look at how god was clothed, it might give us an insight into how Adam was clothed. It is always referred to as supernatural clothing of light.

Psalms 104:1-2

…O Lord my God, You are very great; You are clothed with splendor and majesty, Covering Yourself with light as with a cloak,…

Matthew 17:1-2 & Mark 9:3

Six days later Jesus took with Him Peter and James and John his brother, and led them up on a high mountain by themselves. And He was transfigured before them; and His face shone like the sun, and His garments became as white as light. Mark emphasizes: …and His garments became radiant and exceedingly white, as no launderer on earth can whiten them.

Revelation 19:7-8 (This links us to the Wedding Feast)

Let us rejoice and be glad and give the glory to Him, for the marriage of the Lamb has come and His bride has made herself ready.” It was given to her to clothe herself in fine linen, bright and clean; for the fine linen is the righteous acts of the saints.

So there is a sense in which being clothed in righteousness, this garment of light, is a gift of the covering of graciousness. In the story of the birth of Jesus, and of the resurrection, the angels are clothed in brightness and light. What is it about sinfulness that seems to strip us off this covering of light, and is it related to the inner light?

Isaiah 60:1 also specifically refers to light being associated with God’s grace: “Arise, shine; for your light has come, And the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.

Isaiah 60:19

“No longer will you have the sun for light by day, Nor for brightness will the moon give you light; But you will have the Lord for an everlasting light,…”

Isaiah 61:10

I will rejoice greatly in the Lord, My soul will exult in my God; For He has clothed me with garments of salvation, He has wrapped me with a robe of righteousness, As a bridegroom decks himself with a garland, And as a bride adorns herself with her jewels….

It seems that when Man made the willful choice in the Garden, the clothing of light fell away and we acquired our sense of nakedness.

1 John 1:5-7  

… God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth; but if we walk in the Light as He Himself is in the Light, we have fellowship with one another….

In the wedding feast, in the end, the unwilling guest chooses outer darkness.

There are physical properties about light that occur within the human makeup. Even DNA is thought to emit photons, and there is much interest in intracellular communications using photons. The idea that there is something from god that is within us and emits light is literally true in some primitive sense.

How should we understand this metaphor? Does it give us any insight into graciousness, or into the meaning if nakedness? Why did god not restore the light garment after the Fall, choosing instead animal skins? Is the final restoration of Eden associated with the idea of recapturing the covering of light?

When Moses returned from his encounter with god on mount Sinai, his face was so bright that the Israelites could not bear to look at him. In a way, they were looking tangentially at god.

Proverbs 13:9 takes us to the question that troubles me. Something extinguishes the light:

The light of the righteous rejoices, But the lamp of the wicked goes out.

Other relevant scripture:

Job 29:14

“I put on righteousness, and it clothed me; My justice was like a robe and a turban.”

What is called for is a distribution of the clothing we consider to be our own clothing. Isaiah talks about our righteousness being like filthy rags, where God’s righteousness is a gorgeous, clean, robe, suggesting that we must in a sense disrobe before donning the new clothes, and risk what Hans Christian Andersen’s emperor risked.

Lloyd: Clearly there is a physical aspect to the light, as when god appeared to Paul on the road to Damascus. But there is a spiritual aspect, too. Paul’s very life had been “dark” before this encounter, and filled with his own righteousness. So the physical light that confronted him was also meant to let him know that he was a spiritually in the dark. The very first words of creation were “Let there be light.” God gave us a clear description of what was here before, i.e., void, darkness, nothing. Then, with the light, came something.

Don: It appears that the establishment of light was the foundation for everything.

Lloyd: Light is the metaphor for God’s righteousness, and it provides a distinction between the creator and the created.

Don: we are like glow sticks: We have to absorb light before we can emit it.

Robin: In Revelation 21 John describes a vision of the new heaven and earth, and in 22 he says god’s glory provided the light for it.

David: If we absorbed righteousness like a glow stick absorbs light, how does it go away simply as a result of acquiring knowledge? What was in the minds of the wedding guests who did elect to disrobe? Anticipation of an orgy? Or the loss of everything they knew? Why would they do the latter? Adam and Eve thought that knowledge, and the clothing that came with it, was better than their ignorance and nakedness, so why should their descendants risk going back there, to the unknown?

Don: Knowledge is the key ingredient. Adam was created in God’s image, so the eventual pronouncement by both the serpent and finally by god that man had become like “one of us,” knowing good from evil, meant that he was not a clone of god. He had the garment of light, of righteousness, but he lacked one characteristic of god: Knowledge of good and evil. That had to be the overwhelming attraction. How do we get this genie back in the bottle?

Lloyd: The original text was not that the serpent said Adam and Eve would be “like” god but that they would be “as” god. The difference is that Adam and Eve were created as perfect beings, but they were created—they were creatures, they were not creators, and therefore could not be god-like.

Robin: So the lie Satan (the serpent) told was that they would be equal to god.

Lloyd: Which is why they said Satan deceived Adam and Eve.

Robin: Genesis 2:25 and 2:29 suggests that there is both a physical and a spiritual meaning to their nakedness.

Lloyd: Job said he felt that everything needed to be poured out from him in the presence of god. Jacob, Moses, Paul all felt a great emptiness of self when they came face-to-face with god.

Don: What happened in the Garden to make nakedness shameful, when it was not shameful before?

David: It seems that they did not know they were naked. They just were not aware of it. So the issue is not nakedness itself, but the knowledge of nakedness. The guest at the wedding feast did not like the notion of losing his knowledge, his awareness, in return for the emptiness that Lloyd talks about. After all, it is a heck of a risk. And when you add to that the temptation of acquiring god-like powers without risk, it’s pretty hard to blame him, especially today, as we seem to be watching that promise being fulfilled: We have become creators. We have created viruses—life—that did not exist before. So the temptation to choose this human road, instead of the terrifying and seemingly bleak unknown, this emptying of self, is hard to resist. That is why we are afraid of death. All we can do is have faith that there is something wonderful in it, but we can’t know it until after we die.

Robin: God provides whatever covering or light we need, so we can be naked of our own doing but god will still take care to cover us with his righteous robe if we choose to accept it. If you choose not to, then you cannot go into the presence of god.

Don: Is that the unpardonable sin?

Robin: It would seem so.

David: But it’s not that you are judged, that the sin you committed will not be pardoned; rather, it is our choice to head for the outer darkness, where there is no god to pardon us.

Robin: It’s not a punishment by god, it’s our choice.

Lloyd: Scriptural references to the wrath of god seem to mean that god gives up on people who choose to go their own way, as he did with Adam and Eve.

Don: Free will gives us that ability to choose. But because the light—god—is within us from birth, we have to actively seek or choose to go away from god. Maybe then it is free will that is evil. The willful act is to reject the robe, to deny the need for it. It seems we are supposed, instead, to just follow the crowd—to don the robe and walk into the wedding hall.

Lloyd: That makes it sound like we are supposed to be automata.

Don: This story suggests that god has put us on the path toward him, but free will can wreck God’s intent, therefore free will seems to be evil.

David: Adam and Eve had the potential to live in paradise for eternity. From a scientific viewpoint, statistically, given that evil was present in paradise, then it was inevitable that they must one day fall. Adam and Eve cannot have been “good” before the Fall, having no knowledge of good and evil. It is easy to have faith in god when you live in paradise and see god every day. You don’t need to be good. But after the Fall, with the knowledge acquired and ignorance lost by virtue of it, then it takes a supreme act of faith to go back to god. If there are such people, it seems to me they have infinitely more good in them than the “perfect” Adam and Eve ever had.

Don: What brought the greatest joy to the father of the prodigal was that his younger son returned, not that his elder son never left.

Robin: These stories point to distrust of God’s judgment. We listen to the serpent, refuse the wedding robe, and whine if our nasty younger brother gets the fatted calf. If the elder brother were really like his father, then he would be rejoicing with him, not whining at him!

Lloyd: The elder brother sounds like any teenager—a bit rebellious! But dads love ‘em just the same.

David: What if the prodigal’s father had a third son, who also decided to go off independently because he is curious about the world, but is not a bad person. In his acquisition of knowledge about good and evil, and given his free will, he chooses—unlike his prodigal brother—to be good. If he came home for a visit, shouldn’t he be the one to break out the fatted calf for? We humans see shades of difference, that we think are important. We reward effort, and if someone makes a supreme effort to get back into the kingdom by giving up everything but without any guarantee that they will find happiness there, we want to reward that, with grace or whatever. The eldest brother has done nothing, in his father’s eyes, to deserve a fatted calf. Yet it seems god does not make any distinction. He tells the eldest son “Everything I have is yours,” which presumably includes fatted calves.

Don: In another parable, three laborers who work different numbers of hours get the same pay on payday. It again illustrates the lavishness of God’s grace. In this case, it apparently was not apportioned out only on the basis of what each worker needed. It seems incomprehensible to us. We’ll talk more about this next week.