On Man: Made to Know Him, Hiding from His Face

We believe man — male and female — is made in the image of God. The image is not one capacity among others, not reason alone or dominion alone or moral sense alone. It is the whole orientation of the human being toward the God who made him: the capacity and the calling to know Him and to be known by Him. Man was made for the face of God. Coram Deo is not an achievement of the spiritual life. It is the original condition of human life. The garden account shows God present with His people as the native environment of humanity — man at home in the presence of His Maker, unashamed, receiving life as gift.

We believe the Fall is real, historical in its effect on every human life, and total in its reach. And we believe Scripture shows us its root in the first scene after the eating:

"Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God moving about in the orchard at the breezy time of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the orchard." — Genesis 3:8 (NET)

The first recorded consequence of sin is not a thunderbolt. It is a hiding. Before any sentence is pronounced, before any curse is spoken, the man and the woman are already in the trees. Sin at its root is the breach of the knowing — the turn from receiving life from God's hand to seizing it on our own terms, and the flight from His face that follows as surely as shadow follows the turning away from light. Coram Deo inverted: the presence that was home becomes the presence that is fled.

Guilt is real. Corruption is real. The breach produces both, and neither may be minimized: we stand justly condemned before the holiness of God, and the corruption reaches every faculty — mind, will, and affections are all bent by the turning. But guilt and corruption are the fruit. The root is relational. A doctrine of sin that names the legal standing and the moral damage while missing the broken knowing has described the wound from the outside. The wound, from the inside, is this: the beings made for the face of God can no longer bear it, and hide.

The image is defaced but not erased. Every human being still bears it, which is why every human life carries dignity that no condition can revoke, and why every human heart carries the ache that no substitute can satisfy. But man cannot repair the breach from his side. The hiding has become his nature. He does not merely commit sins; he is turned away, and every religion, therapy, philosophy, and achievement he builds is finally another tree to stand behind.

This is why the adversary's primary operation in the contemporary world is the concealment of this diagnosis — the construction of systems and narratives that convince people they are not hiding, not broken, and not in need of rescue. And it is why poverty of spirit is the entry to everything:

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to them." — Matthew 5:3 (NET)

The kingdom opens only to the one who stops defending his position in the trees, steps out with empty hands, and lets himself be found.