Many thanks to my brother Wayne for suggesting that I revisit this topic in the light of the controversy surrounding the full body scans and pat downs being conducted at airports this holiday season.
When I was in high school I had an opportunity to visit Jamaica over Easter vacation. I was told that the tree in the parking lot of our hotel was a fig tree, so I went to check it out. I was expecting huge leaves because I had read that Adam and Eve used to leaves from this plant to cloth themselves after the fall. I was surprised to find that the leaves were actually quite small. That led me back to the Bible where I read that they did not make clothes for themselves. Instead they made "loin coverings" (Genesis 3:7 NASB). They had a need to cover a specific part of their bodies and I find their choice to be quite fascinating.
Why do we wear clothes? The answer that most people would offer is that we have some sort of compulsion to cover up the sexual parts of our bodies. The thought being that sex is somehow dirty and something we should be in some way ashamed of. But clearly Adam and Eve were not trying to cover up the parts of their bodies that a member of the opposite sex might like to look at. If they were trying to do that they would have needed to cover themselves from head to foot! Consider the parts of the body that were not covered. The breasts, the legs, the buttocks, and their faces were completely open to view.
Clearly sexuality was not the primary issue here. Instead, they felt a need to cover their reproductive organs. Why did they suddenly have this feeling? What had happened to them?
By committing an act of sin, they found themselves infected with the power of sin. Sin started as something that they did. It was an action. But they quickly found out that sin was also a power that had somehow infected their personalities. Satan had come and had assaulted them from without. All of the temptation had come from an external source. But now they found that temptations were arising from within their very beings. Their hearts had been corrupted. And that corruption has been passed on to their descendants, and that is why the Bible asserts that "all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." (Romans 3:23) It is impossible for any of Adam and Eve's descendants to live a life of total purity in thought, word, and deed.
Now you might want to raise the objection that you, personally, have never felt a sense of shame connected in some way to your reproductive capacity. That's a good objection. Here's the answer. You've never been clean. You were born dirty and you don't know what it's like to be perfectly pure and sinless inside. Adam and Eve knew what this felt like. When sin entered their souls and bodies, they could actually feel the pollution inside of them. This is what caused them to cover their loins and it is the unconscious basis for clothing to the very day.
