In our previous meditation, we came across Noah who stripped himself in his drunken state. He drank too much of the wine of his success. That singular moment of indiscretion was going to have a lasting consequence on his descendant. Ham saw him naked and told his other brothers. When Noah sobered down and learned of what had transpired, he cursed Canaan, Ham’s descendant. This raised some problems. How can Noah’s severe anger toward Ham be justified? He was not the reason for his father’s drunkenness and nakedness, yet he received a heavy penalty. In his verse-by-verse commentary, David Guzik cited the ancient Hebrew text of this incident. It suggested that Ham did not just see his father’s nakedness, but he went and told it “with delight” to his brothers. It was more like mocking his father.
Solomon said, “The eye that mocks his father, And scorns obedience to his mother, The ravens of the valley will pick it out, And the young eagles will eat it.” (Proverbs 30:17 NKJV). God gave great authority to parents and He expects children to honour them. They may suffer slackness in judgment sometimes, but that will never justify their ridiculing. Besides our relationship with parents, we may chance on the ‘nakedness’ of people. This time around we are using nakedness in a non-literal sense. Perhaps you received sensitive information about people. What you do with such information may not only have consequences on them but on you also. As we noticed in the scriptures, God is in the business of covering people’s nakedness. We dare not turn people’s nakedness into a movie thriller.