That was the problem Paul was addressing when he said the following. “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.

Even in early times, the apostle Paul was facing this problem with the Areopagus. The Areopagus refers to the earliest aristocratic council of ancient Athens, perhaps comparable to a group of extremely bright, learned, and accomplished people of today. Paul was trying to have a conversation with these men about God.

The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’”

–Acts 17:22b-28

This is the God who desires more than anything else that we come to know Him. We meet Him in the story of creation found in the book of Genesis.

When God was done telling universes, stars, moons, winds, and rains to appear, He then breathed life into plants, animals, birds, and a multitude of creatures.

“God said, Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
–Genesis 1:26-28

Then God breathed His likeness into dirt, which God had spoken into existence. And from His breath, human life came into existence.

“[Then] God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
–Genesis 1:26-28

“This was the free and glorious state of mankind before The Fall. Genesis tells us that “Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.”
–Genesis 2:25.

The Hebrew word for naked used here is עָרֹם, pronounced arom, which means a living state of absolute nakedness, (עֵירֹם), a freedom. Note, further, that Genesis 2:25 tells us that they felt no shame, (בָּשְׁנָה), pronounced, boshnah, living as such.

Just as it is impossible to know life as it was before The Fall, it is impossible, on our own, to know God as we now are.

I cannot stress this truth enough: We are beings born who are bound to our own significance. The following verse from Genesis explains this state of being.

“But the Lord God called to the man, ‘Where are you?’ He [man] answered, ‘I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.’”
–Genesis 3:9-10

That is the drastic change in our state of being, we became dastardly self-conscious.

We live in a state wherein it is impossible to free ourselves from ourselves. This makes it impossible to even have a truthful relationship with anyone else.

The reason for this is that every intention that we have is misdirected. Genesis tells us how this happened. Satan, referred to in the Word of God as crafty, (עָרוּם), pronounced arum, talked Adam and Eve into their becoming significant. I paraphrase, “Listen to me and you can become just like God.” Eve listened to Satan, and Adam listened to Eve, and the result was that we became gods onto ourselves. Living in such a state is to be living in sin.

John Calvin & John Milton on The Fall