Naked, Come to Him for Dress

Nothing is more fearful than the prospect of standing naked before the judgment seat of God. Today, R.C. Sproul teaches that if we are to be saved, we must not hide behind the rags of our own works but be clothed in the righteousness of Christ.

We go all the way back to the garden. We’re told that in creation, the man and the woman were naked but without shame until sin came into their life, and the very first psychological self-awareness of guilt and of shame was an uncomfortable awareness of nudity. Since that hour in the garden of Eden, human beings have been the only animals who have adorned themselves and covered themselves with artificial garment because it’s built in to our fallen humanity to equate shame and nakedness, humiliation with nakedness.

Throughout the pages of Scripture, when God speaks of bringing judgment against the guilty, He exposes their sin and strips them of their clothes because all of us have garments that clothe us, and our righteousness is, we’re told, like rotten filthy rags. The only way any one of us can ever stand in the sight of God is to be stripped of those rags and then clothed afresh in the garments of the righteousness of Christ. That’s the gospel. You and I can never stand in the presence of a holy God unless we are clothed from on high with a righteousness that is not our own.