They Walked In Backwards So They Would Not Have to See

It usually happens at about eleven or twelve, and it is almost never dramatic.

A door is open that should have been shut. A voice comes through a wall at a volume that does not match anything that has ever been said at a table. A phone call is overheard, or a sentence is said in the car about somebody that does not fit with what was said about that same person on Sunday.

And a child who has spent his whole short life being told who his father is finds out something else about him, in about four seconds, and nobody knows he knows.

He does not tell anyone. There is no category for it. He goes on getting in the car on Sunday. And the thing sits in him and gets rearranged over the years into something he cannot name, and by twenty-five he is a man carrying an item that has no shelf.

I want to talk about what to do with that, and I want to start somewhere unexpected, which is a short and very strange story in Genesis about a tent and two men walking backwards.

The story is about a father and it does not tidy him up

Noah has come off the ark. He is the man the whole world was saved through, the man who walked with God when nobody else did, and he plants a vineyard, and then this.

And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent. (Genesis 9:21, King James Version)

Nothing is hidden and nothing is excused. The book does not skip it and it does not explain it away, and it does not stop calling him righteous in other places either.

That is worth sitting with for a second, because a lot of us were raised in a culture where a man's failure and a man's standing cannot both be said out loud, and where naming one is understood to erase the other. Scripture does not work that way. It carries both without flinching, about Noah, about Abraham, about David, about Peter.

You are allowed to know a true thing about somebody and not have it be the whole file on them. Genesis 9:21 records the failure and Genesis 6:9 records the righteousness about the same man, and it is the Spirit of truth, John 16:13, who guides into truth rather than into half of it.

The son who told, and the sons who carried a coat

Then the sons, and the difference between them is the entire point of the passage.

And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without. (Genesis 9:22)

Told his two brethren without. He saw it, went outside, and reported it. That is the whole of his action. He does not do anything to his father. He talks about him.

And then the other two.

And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness. (Genesis 9:23)

Read how much detail the text gives to the logistics. The garment on both shoulders, so two men are carrying one covering together. Walking backward. Faces turned away. It is almost slow motion, and the writer wants every step of it.

You have been shown, in detail, what to do with something you cannot unsee. Genesis 9:23 spends a whole verse on the mechanics of the covering, and it is the Holy Spirit, Galatians 5:22, who supplies the gentleness and the longsuffering that walking backward actually takes.

Covering is not pretending

Here is the distinction that took me years, and getting it wrong in either direction does damage.

Shem and Japheth are not pretending. They know. They know exactly what is in that tent, which is why they are carrying a garment and why they are facing the wrong way. A man who did not know would have walked in normally.

So this is not denial. Denial would be insisting the tent is empty. What they do is know, and not look, and cover, and that is three separate actions and every one of them is honest.

That matters enormously to somebody who has been told, in a family like mine, to act as though nothing happened. Acting as though nothing happened is not what this passage teaches, and I would not teach it, because it asks a person to lie about their own memory and it never holds.

What the passage teaches is that knowing a thing does not oblige you to display it, and that there is a way to carry a true thing that protects somebody rather than exposing them.

You are not being asked to pretend, and Scripture never asked that of anybody. Genesis 9:23 has two men who plainly know walking in with a covering, and it is by the Spirit that a person is led, Romans 8:14, rather than driven either into exposure or into denial.

The New Testament says it as a command, twice

This is not a one-off in an old story. It comes forward into the letters as an instruction.

And above all things have fervent charity among yourselves: for charity shall cover the multitude of sins. (1 Peter 4:8)

Above all things. Peter ranks it, and what he ranks it above is everything else in the sentence around it.

And Proverbs says the same thing with the contrast attached.

Hatred stirreth up strifes: but love covereth all sins. (Proverbs 10:12)

Look at what love is set against: stirreth up. That is Ham's verb. He did not attack his father. He stirred it up, in a conversation, with his brothers, outside the tent, and that is the thing Proverbs sets directly opposite love.

I am not talking here about anything that puts a person in danger. Where somebody is being hurt, covering is not the instruction and never was, and there is a hard line between a father's dignity and a family's safety. If somebody in your house is not safe, that is a thing to say out loud to a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, or somebody who can actually carry it, and in the United States the 988 crisis line is answered around the clock by a person.

You are commanded to something above all things, and God ranked it Himself. 1 Peter 4:8 uses that exact phrase, and it is the Holy Spirit, Romans 5:5, by whom that charity is shed abroad in a heart rather than assembled by a person out of loyalty.

The covering is a picture of what was done for you

The reason this instruction is not merely a family management technique is what it is a picture of.

Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. (Psalm 32:1)

Covered. The same idea and the same word family, and the one doing the covering is God.

That reframes the whole act. When two sons walk backwards into a tent with a garment across their shoulders, they are doing, at a very small scale, exactly what God does with everybody who has ever been forgiven. Nobody is pretending. He knows precisely what is there. And there is a covering.

Which means the thing you are being asked to do for your father is the thing that was done for you, by God, in full knowledge, at cost. It is not a request to be naive. It is a request to be like Him about somebody.

You were covered in full knowledge, and that is the pattern being handed to you. Psalm 32:1 calls the covered man blessed, and it is the Spirit of God who seals a believer, Ephesians 1:13, which is the standing evidence that the covering already happened to you first.