H. Nunnerley
Coats of Skins
Adam is not only a “figure” of the “last Adam,” our Lord Jesus Christ, but he is also an object lesson in which we may learn God’s provision to meet man’s sinful condition, and clothe him according to His own mind.
We need not recount the story of man’s fall and its resultant effects. Men have caviled at such a trivial offense being visited by such condign punishment. They forget that thereby God’s supremacy was set aside, His sovereign rights contravened, and man’s allegiance transferred to Satan. The point of prime importance in the prohibition was the maintenance of the relative place of the creature to His Creator, the acknowledgment of his fealty to his liege Lord.
Man demands a “peppercorn” rental from his fellow, not because the thing tendered has any real value, but because thereby his superior rights are acknowledged.
Adam’s possession of an earthly paradise was only as long as the supremacy of the Creator was practically owned. His tenure depended on obedience, and the prohibition under which he lay — not to touch the tree of knowledge of good and evil, under penalty of death — was the way the Creator took to maintain His rights.
Adam’s disregard of God’s prohibition involved serious results for his descendants. By it, not only was God’s authority, as supreme Ruler, contravened, and Satan’s purpose to oppose God, and gain ascendancy over man, accomplished, but man’s moral nature was tainted, and death’s reign begun.
How then could God defeat the devil, remove the taint of sin, and abolish death?
The coats of skins, and the death which necessarily preceded their formation, supply the answer.
Words such as “atonement” and “expiation” (margin Num. 35:3333So ye shall not pollute the land wherein ye are: for blood it defileth the land: and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it. (Numbers 35:33)), all come from the word “Kaphar,” which means “to cover.” The covering wherewith God clothed Adam and Eve is the earliest figure of the “best robe” with which every returned prodigal has been clothed since the day of grace began (Luke 15). This covering was obtained from a dead victim. What a symbolic delineation of God’s way was presented in that earthly paradise, when Satan was cursed, man clothed, and the woman’s Seed announced!
We find a companion picture in the third chapter of Zechariah. Joshua, like Adam, is unfit for the divine presence; he has garments indeed, but they are “filthy garments.”
Satan is there, adversary and accuser, to resist.
God also is there, the holy and righteous God, against whom Adam and Joshua had sinned.
Both men are polluted, both fallen from their high estate. What are they called upon to do? Nothing! Joshua utters not a word, he stands silent and convicted. How gratefully upon his sin burdened conscience must have fallen those gracious words “I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee, and I will clothe thee with change of raiment” (or “festal robes” as it should read).
How the goodness of God must also have passed before Adam’s soul, as he learns that his iniquity has been removed. Clothed in coats of skin, in “festal robes,” he too was arrayed in a garment which was typically one of righteousness apart from works.
What of Satan? Cursed and rebuked, his doom is sealed, his judgment announced and pronounced. The promised Seed of the woman should be his undoing, and at the same time the Savior of ruined Adam.
Here we see God taking up the question of man’s sin and settling it. Acting for and from Himself, clearing the whole scene, stopping man’s mouth, and defeating the adversary.
In Eden the Creator is moving, acting in the midst of a fallen world, revealing Himself in a new glory. God does everything. It was His own blessed hand wrought, formed, fashioned, those coats of skin, and clothed the naked sinner. Adam’s fall becomes the occasion for the disclosure of God’s resources in the woman’s Seed — Christ. Fallen, ruined man, the platform for the display if a more excellent glory than that to which creation has witnessed.
The only begotten Son, the perfect Exponent of grace and truth, was seeded to fully reveal, declare, and give affect to it: but the morning dawn of God’s purpose to bless, and provide all hat is needful for blessing righteously, s thus early discovered to us.
Every saved sinner, from Adam’s day to Paul’s, from Paul’s to ours, is a witness that the ruin and fall of man by sin has been made the occasion for the display of bounding grace, sovereign goodness, infinite matchless love, a love no thought can reach, no tongue can tell, a love which finds its joy in giving a fair and costly robe, a righteousness of its own providing.
In this first presentation of God’s gracious provision for fallen man, we see, in the covering which the Lord God “made,” the coats of skins with which Adam was clothed, God’s way of meeting man’s need. Blood must have been shed, life given up in death, to provide that covering. An innocent victim provided a coat for a sinner, and that coat made, fashioned, fitted, wrought, from first to last by the hand of a Savior God.
“Soon as the reign of sin began,
The light of mercy dawned on man.”
Behold then a man whose life, typically, had come to an end in the death of an innocent victim, clothed, enveloped, robed, mantled, in the skin of one who had died. Declared thus to be in all the worth of the person and work of his substitute.
Herein we get a foreshadowing of Calvary. God “hath made Him — Christ — to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Cor. 5:2121For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. (2 Corinthians 5:21)). This is the true coat of skins, the best robe prepared by God’s own hand for every poor convicted sinner, who is prepared to submit himself “unto the righteousness of God” (Rom. 10:33For they being ignorant of God's righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God. (Romans 10:3)).
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LIVING we are the Lord’s, to know His will And to obey;
His mighty love, the soul to sway and fill And keep alway.
DYING we are the Lord’s, for us in love He died and rose:
Our happy spirits He’ll receive above At this life’s close.