Where Art Thou Is the First Question in the Bible, and He Knew the Answer

He has been hiding so long that hiding has become the ordinary condition and he does not experience it as an activity.

That is what makes this difficult to describe. A man who is hiding knows he is hiding. He is aware of the effort and he could tell you what he is hiding and from whom.

This is further along. The hiding has become the shape of his ordinary week, and it is not tiring anymore, and there is nothing in his life that runs against it, so there is nothing to notice it by. He would tell you honestly that he is not hiding anything, and he would not be lying, because from inside there is nothing to see.

The only tell is a small thing: he cannot pray about one particular area. Not will not. Cannot. The words do not form.

There is a garden in Genesis where the first question God asks anybody is asked to a man in the bushes.

What the hiding was made of

Here it is, in the King James Version, and the sequence is worth having in order:

And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons. (Genesis 3:7)

They sewed fig leaves together.

That is the first thing. Before any hiding from God, there is a covering made for each other, out of what was to hand, and it is craft: sewing, making, aprons.

Then:

And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden. (Genesis 3:8)

In the cool of the day.

That detail is not decoration. It is the ordinary time. Whatever was happening in that garden in the evening had been happening, and the sound of it was familiar enough to be recognized, and the recognition is what triggers the hiding.

So the hiding is not caused by the arrival of something new. It is caused by the arrival of the usual thing.

You are not hiding from something strange and you were never running from anything that had changed. Genesis 3:8 puts the hiding at the sound of the ordinary evening, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than a change in how God comes who makes the familiar thing something a man can stand in front of again.

The question

And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou? (Genesis 3:9)

Where art thou?

That is the first question recorded in the Bible and it is asked by somebody who knows the answer.

Which means the question is not for information. It is a call, and it functions the way a name called in a dark yard functions: it does not locate the child, it tells the child that somebody is out there looking.

And notice who moves. God comes into the garden. God calls. The man in the bushes does nothing at all in the sequence except be found.

That matters for a man whose words do not form. The chapter does not have him coming out first and being addressed afterward. It has him addressed while still in the trees.

You are called while still in the trees and you were never required to come out first. Genesis 3:9 has God ask the question while the man is still hidden, and it is His Spirit who makes a question asked in a garden something a man hears about his own week.

And if the hiding has taken you somewhere heavier, if it has reached not wanting to be here at all, that is not a thing to hold alone. A doctor, a counselor, somebody you trust who will pick up the phone. In the United States the 988 crisis line answers day and night. Nobody is asked to carry that by himself.

Where a man can actually get to

And the psalm that answers the question of whether there is anywhere the hiding works.

Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. (Psalm 139:7-10)

Even there shall thy hand lead me.

That psalm is usually read as comfort and it is comfort, and it is worth noticing that it is also the end of a strategy. There is no location listed where the arrangement works. Heaven, the grave, the far side of the sea. All covered.

And the verse names His Spirit in the first line, which is the same Spirit named as the one who searches and knows.

So the honest situation is that the hiding was never operationally effective. What it was effective at was keeping a man from saying anything, and that is a different achievement and a much more costly one.

You have never actually been out of reach and you were never hidden from Him in any real sense. Psalm 139:7 asks where a man could flee and finds nowhere, and it is the Holy Spirit named in that verse who makes being fully found something other than being cornered.

What He does at the end of the chapter

And the sentence that most people never notice, at the very end of Genesis 3, after the consequences have been spelled out and the garden is closed.

Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them. (Genesis 3:21)

Did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them.

They had made aprons out of fig leaves. He makes coats, out of skins, which means something died, and He puts the coats on them Himself.

That is the last thing He does before they leave. Not a lecture. Not a final word about the fruit. He makes them clothing that works and dresses them in it.

The covering they sewed was real work and it was not enough and He did not mock it. He replaced it with something that cost a life.

And the New Testament says what the whole search is for in one line:

For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost. (Luke 19:10)

To seek. That is the first verb and it is the one that has been running since Genesis 3:9.

You are sought and you were never merely tolerated once found. Genesis 3:21 has God make coats and clothe them Himself, and Luke 19:10 says the Son of man came to seek, and it is His Spirit who makes a search that old feel current in a man's own house.