The Starting Place

And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.

Genesis 2:25 ESV

For many people, interest in Christianity lasts right up until the word sin enters the conversation.

Up until that point, the faith can seem compelling. People can appreciate the ideas intellectually and even recognize the good it produces socially; community, meaning, purpose, stability. But when sin is mentioned, something shifts. The conversation suddenly feels personal. It stops being about beliefs and starts feeling like a statement about who we are.

The word carries weight. As it should, look at the world surrounding you examine your experiences and actions. It is real. For some, it brings up shame, guilt, or memories tied to judgment, hurt, and control. Depending on a person’s life, it can feel exposing rather than inviting. So the resistance people feel is rarely theological; it’s emotional. It comes from what the word seems to say about them as a person.

For many, sin sounds like: I am bad. I am being judged. Religion wants to control me. I should feel ashamed. Something is wrong with me. Even if Christianity does not intend those meanings, culturally that is often how the word lands. The reaction becomes protective: If I accept the idea of sin, am I admitting that something is wrong with me?

In many ways, this response mirrors Adam and Eve covering themselves in the garden. Human beings instinctively protect their dignity. Many people genuinely try to be good and care deeply about others, so the question arises naturally: why frame humanity negatively at all?

But this reveals one of the biggest misunderstanding about Christianity, the assumption that it begins with human sin. It does not. Christianity actually begins with belovedness, not brokenness.

Before Anything Went Wrong

This is why Genesis matters. Before anything goes wrong, humans are created good, made in God’s image, and placed into relationship. Only afterward does rupture enter the story. Sin is not humanity’s starting identity; it is the breaking of a relationship meant for flourishing. This is not how God originally intended us to live. In Scripture, Adam represents humanity and Eve represents relationship, and together they reflect the love of God. Sin is not a declaration that humans are terrible, but the recognition that something has gone terribly wrong within what was meant to be whole.

Genesis describes humanity before that rupture in a remarkably simple sentence: “And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.” The Bible follows a principle often called the Law of First Mention; the first time an idea, word, or theme appears, it establishes a foundational meaning that shapes how it is understood throughout Scripture. In other words, the Bible introduces its central concepts intentionally, allowing their first appearance to set the pattern and tone for what follows.

When Christianity is reduced to moral language alone, we miss what the Bible is revealing to us about reality. Genesis 2:25 sits at the edge of the narrative, the final line before the fall, functioning as a hinge between innocence and fracture. What defines humanity here is not perfectionism, rule-keeping, or moral anxiety, but unashamed relational openness.

Naked and Unashamed

When you talk to people about the idea of living in a world or radical honesty, being completely vulnerable, or even being in a romantic relationship with someone you could consider your best friend, a lot of people respond with “that sounds nice.” When we say this we are admitting to a level of nakedness with each other that we long for deep down in our souls, that we are somehow detached from.

Nakedness in Genesis, contextually, is not primarily about bodies. In Hebrew thought, the word arummim carries the sense of being fully seen, with nothing hidden, no need for self-protection, and no fear of exposure. Adam and Eve stand before God, before each other, and before themselves without needing to defend or perform. Emotionally, it is the experience of being completely known and completely safe. Nice, right? Before Genesis 3 there is no shame, no hiding, no blame, no fear of rejection, and no self-consciousness. Human identity is grounded in perfect relationship rather than evaluation.

This means Christianity’s starting claim is not that humans are sinners, but that humans were made for fearless intimacy with God and one another. Let that sink in. Sin only explains the loss of that state, something we can easily recognize in the world we live in now. Something that I like to mention when I am talking to people about this topic, that connects directly to the Gospel is, we haven’t even begun to flourish yet as humans. And that’s primarily due to the fact that we are not operating in our original identity.

The Literary Turning Point

The narrative shifts immediately in chapter 3: “Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made” (Genesis 3:1). The Hebrew word translated “crafty” is arum, which sounds almost identical to arummim, the word used for nakedness in the previous verse. This wordplay is intentional. The final image before sin is naked and unashamed openness, and the next is crafty awareness. The same linguistic root points in an opposite direction.

The term arum itself is not purely negative; it can describe someone as perceptive or prudent. Intelligence is not the problem, nor is awareness. The issue is how it is oriented. The serpent represents awareness turned inward toward manipulation, suspicion, and self-protection. Humanity moves from open trust to guarded calculation. The fall does not begin with violent action but with a change in consciousness. Humans shift from simply being to constantly evaluating themselves and others. In other words, the story is describing an inner shift before it ever describes an action. Something we all can relate to.

The Voice That Creates Distance

The serpent’s first words deepen this shift: “Did God actually say…” (Genesis 3:1b). The serpent does not command Eve to disobey. He introduces distance. By questioning God’s words, he subtly shifts Eve’s perception of the relationship itself. God moves, in her mind, from trusted giver to possible restriction. Before any action occurs, relational trust is weakened.

Most people recognize this experience, an inner voice or impulse that slowly pulls us away from trust and relationship with others. We know this moment deeply when we rehearse conversations in our heads, protect ourselves from being hurt, or knit together stories in our minds interpreting reality through suspicion and insecurity rather than connection. We detach while convincing ourselves we are being wise.

Genesis later shows the result of this shift: “then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths” (Genesis 3:6). What we see here is that they literally became crafty. Notice how, when we try to protect ourselves, the mind becomes craftier, how we can design entire realities not grounded in truth. The immediate consequences of this shift are covering ourselves, hiding, and blame. It is this psychological shift that produces shame, not Christianity, and certainly not God. It is what happens when we distance ourselves from Him.

What Sin Actually Is

Sin begins when humanity adopts the serpent’s posture toward reality, relating through control instead of trust. In Genesis 4:7, when God speaks to Cain before he kills his brother Abel, He says:

“If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is contrary to you, but you must rule over it.”

What is striking here is how personal and psychological this moment is. Sin is not introduced as an identity but as something waiting at the threshold, seeking permission. Cain is warned before the act ever happens, showing that the real battle begins internally. This pattern appears earlier as well in Genesis 3:6, “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit, and ate.” Eve convinced herself before she acted.

Sin is defensive at its core. It is the moment we stop receiving life as a gift and begin trying to secure ourselves through knowledge, comparison, and autonomy. A thought or impulse alone is not yet a sin; the struggle itself is part of being human. Sin begins when we choose the thought and give ourselves over to it, allowing it to take form in reality. Sin defends itself by turning a passing thought into a lasting reality. Shame appears instantly, not because humans suddenly become evil, but because we become aware of how our choices fracture relationship, separating us from the life we were created to share.

Christianity’s aim, then, is not to make people feel sinful but to restore the possibility of being unashamed again, a movement back to Genesis 2:25.

Wisdom Redeemed, Not Removed

Modern people interpret innocence as ignorance or naivety, yet Jesus reframes the idea when he says, “Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matthew 10:16). Awareness is not erased but redeemed. The goal is not returning to ignorance but reuniting wisdom with innocence, sinful awareness healed by love rather than governed by fear.

The Cross and the End of Hiding

This is why the cross matters. On the cross Christ is stripped and exposed, entering the very shame and humiliation humanity hides from and absorbing it rather than returning it. Does God want us to feel shame? Of course not, because Christ carried it to to the cross and broke its power. Sin is whatever makes us hide. Salvation is the discovery that we no longer have to. Where sin turns a passing thought into a lasting reality, Christ meets us in that reality so it no longer has the final word. Through Christ, the first true human, we can stand known, accepted, loved, and unafraid again, moving back toward the beginning. Toward being unashamed.