Guilt and shame. One is healthy, one isn’t. One is necessary for repentance, one isn’t. One hopefully encourages you to improve your life, while the other takes you further from God and happiness.

In psychological terms, guilt is described as feeling bad about something you’ve done, while shame is feeling bad about who you are. Guilt is about actions, while shame is about the core or essence of your very being.

We see this in the creation and garden of Eden story in the Bible. After God has created male and female, the record reads, ‘And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.’ (Genesis 2:25)

After the serpent manages to manipulate Adam and Even into partaking of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, our first parents¹ hide from the approaching Lord God (Jehovah-Elohim) (Genesis 3:8). In the LDS temple endowment, it is Satan who tells Adam and Eve to make aprons of fig leaves and it is Satan who tells them to hide. We don’t get this in the Biblical account, but we do see that the reason they make themselves aprons is to hide their naked bodies (Genesis 3:7). And when God calls them forth, Adam tells Him that the reason they hid themselves was because they were naked (Genesis 3:10).

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