If you have your Bibles and you want to follow along, we are going to look at the first book of the Bible, the book of Genesis starting at chapter 5, verse 1. If you have been here for a while or you are new here, basically we are going through a fall series called “Extraordinary People of the Bible”. The focus is really on the lesser-known people of the Bible. Lesser-known pretty much ordinary people but people who God was willing to use in amazing and extraordinary ways simply because of their faith in God. Last week, we looked at the prostitute named Rahab. This week we are going to look at a little known figure called Enoch. How many of you know who Enoch was? Enoch was a guy who lived a long, long time ago. Last week I mentioned Rahab lived about 3500 years ago. We don’t know exactly when Enoch walked this early but somewhere between 4000 to 6000 B.C. He walked this world during what is known as the antediluvian period. How many of you know what that is? It is actually a new word for me. It basically means the period before the flood. Ante- being before and diluvian comes from the word deluge which means flood. So it is the period before the flood and that is when Enoch walked this earth. You have a new word for the week: antediluvian. Not only does it mean before the flood, but it also refers to something that is outdated or old fashioned. So he lived in the period before the flood that Noah was involved in and all that sort of thing. Not only did he live in that period, because he was an extraordinary person, he basically, like Rahab, got a lot of press coverage. He is in the Old and New Testament. When we first get a glimpse of Enoch is in today’s passage out of Genesis 5. We are going to look at the whole chapter. He doesn’t come in until a little bit later, but we are going to look at the whole chapter of Genesis 5 from verse 1 all the way down to I believe it is about 32, and then we are going to come back and note a few observations. Genesis 5:1. (Scripture read here.)
If you read along with that or you listened to it as I read it, probably a couple things came to mind. First and foremost is probably that those people back then lived a very long time. The average age was about 900+ years, which is a very long time. People wonder how did they live that long. The reality is we don’t know they did it. We just don’t know. There are a lot of theories out there. One theory is that back then, shortly after the dawn of creation after God created the heavens and the earth, at that particular point in time the earth was basically at an optimal time for man. It was basically a perfect environment for man and woman to live in. What happened over time is that the world slowly began to get polluted. Things that we experience now with chemicals and pesticides in our fruits and vegetables and the ozone layer is thinner so you have the possibility of dangerous sun rays coming down and harming our DNA. The theory is after time, the earth became not such a great place to live so the DNA became affected and people’s bodies and over time you have all these things incorporated into humanity such as disease and illness and untimely death all attributed to the fact that the climate had changed and how we treat our planet. That is a theory. Really to find out what happened, all we have to do is jump to chapter 6 where the Lord said my spirit will not contend with man forever for he is mortal. His days will be 120 years. Basically, we see that God was getting pretty tired of our man was behaving or he was getting tired of maybe the fact that he didn’t appreciate the land or appreciate life and he decided he was going to limit life to 120 years. That is what we see today. We don’t see many people living past the age of 120. So the pattern we see first in the passage is the pattern of longevity; people living a long age but really we see another pattern in there. If we were to go back and look at some of those items we would see this constant pattern where somebody is born and then somebody decides he is going to become a father of so and so and he is going to have more sons and daughters and then they die. We see that clearly. The formula we see here is so and so became the father of so and so; he had other sons and daughters; altogether he lived so many years; and then he died. That is the continual pattern we see in that chapter of Genesis. Really, it is not too much different than we see in a typical obituary today. The sad thing is you have people that live long lives, some of them well past 100, but they might only get a couple lines in an obituary. If you open up the newspaper today and you look at the obituary section, I suspect that most people just get a few lines. So and so was born here, had all those kids; those kids had grandkids; maybe the person had been involved in some form of civic organization or that sort of thing. All in all, most people get about three or four lines and that is it to sum up their whole life. As bad as it is for us, think about the people that lived 700, 800, 900 years. All they get is a line or two. Sometimes in the newspapers we see that some people get a lot more coverage. Maybe it has to do with the fact that they were a celebrity. Maybe it has to do with the fact that they were some sort of a civic leader or some sort of a big shot in the community and they get more coverage. I think that is what we are seeing here.
What is said about Enoch in verse 5:21 the writer says “When Enoch had lived 65 years, he became the father of Methuselah. After he became the father of Methuselah, Enoch walked with God 300 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether, Enoch lived of 365 years. Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him away.” Enoch gets a lot of coverage here. You think, well he should get coverage just by the fact that he lived 365 years, but really in the particular setting, we could say that Enoch died as a young man comparably speaking. Enoch actually lowered the average age. Enoch would not be considered an extraordinary person simply because of how long he lived, but he would be considered extraordinary by two other things that we see in the next section. It says “Enoch walked with God” and it goes on to repeat “Enoch walked with God; then he was no more because God took him away.” Two things that make him extraordinary.
One is that he continually walks with God and the other thing that simply he just kind of vanished. He was no more because God took him away. The first thing I want to do is consider this idea that Enoch walked with God. What I want to point out first was it says “After he became the father of Methuselah, Enoch walked with God.” It says that he had lived 65 and became the father of Methuselah and after he became the father of Methuselah, Enoch walked with God. We don’t know what happened prior to age 65, but what we do know is when little baby Methuselah shows up all of a sudden, maybe Enoch’s priorities began to change a little bit. Maybe he began to think more about God. We don’t know. We can only speculate. I think that is true of people in our culture today. We of course have teens and young adults that leave the church and go off to school and go off to college and want nothing to do with God whatsoever. They go off to college and get all these crazy ideas in their head and sow their wild oats. What happens is they meet the special someone, they get married, they come home and begin to have their own little Methuselah’s. They begin to evaluate their whole life because they see the benefit of not only the kids walking with God but they see the benefits of themselves walking with God. They begin to get their priorities changed. That is just speculation. We really don’t know what happened there with Enoch. All we know is that at some point he began to decide he wanted to walk with God. Maybe he had been walking in the world for the first 65 years and it was time to do something about it. It was time to begin to increase his relationship with God. We know that this idea of walking with God is a very significant point in this passage simply because it is repeated two times. It says “Enoch walked with God 300 years” and then down below it says “Enoch walked with God.” Anytime when you are reading the Bible and there is a repetition of a phrase you might want to pay attention because usually what the writer is doing, in this case they believe it to be Moses who wrote the book of Genesis, is trying to make a point that Enoch wasn’t walking with God and now he walked with God. As we think about what it means to walk with God, the idea that would come to mind is literally walking with somebody. Walking side by side next to somebody. Some would say maybe he was walking with a physical being there along the road. The reality is though probably the likelihood is that he is talking more in a figurative sense. There is a passage I think it is John 1:18 that says no one has ever seen God, so it is unlikely that he walked with somebody. Whatever the case, it is believed to be that Enoch actually had a good communion with God, a good fellowship with God, and a great relationship with God that gave the idea that he walked next to God. He had developed this ongoing relationship with someone such as someone who would walk through life with another person. They would get to know that person in a deeper way. They would get to know about the traits. They would get to know about the characteristics of the person. They would begin to feel this constant presence of that person. I think that is what happened with Enoch. He walked with God so much, 300 years, and he began to feel God’s presence.
As a side note, one of my favorite books is a book by this monk named Brother Lawrence. It is called The Practice of the Presence of God. Brother Lawrence was a monk that lived about the 17th century and he wrote this little 100-page book that basically speaks about practicing the presence of God. It was Brother Lawrence’s goal in life basically to live a life continually in God’s presence 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to figure out how to just stay within God’s presence. That is what he tried to do. In the book, he speaks about the idea that maybe we have made it too difficult. We talk about walking in God’s presence and being with God and he basically says I think we are making it too tough because a lot of times we come up with these methodologies to try to figure out how to get closer to God. What he boils down to is just keep it simple. Just simply begin to practice the love of God in everything you do. He goes on to say “Men invent means and methods of coming at God’s love. They learn rules and set up devices to remind them of that love, and it seems like a world of trouble to bring oneself into the consciousness of God’s presence. Yet it might be so simple. Is it not quicker and easier just to do our common business entirely for the love of him?” So this Brother Lawrence decided I am just going to walk around and love God. Everything I do from the moment I get up until I go to bed I am just going to constantly seek out to do everything for the love of God. That pretty much involved his whole day. Even when he was working or praying or working in the kitchen. He goes on to say “We can do little things for God. I turn the cake that is frying when it is cooking on the pan for the love of him. And that done, if there is nothing else to call me, I prostrate myself in worship before him who has given me to grace. Afterwards, I rise happier than the king. It is enough for me to pick up but a piece of straw from the ground for the love of God.” He totally said my whole day; my whole life is nothing but an attempt to live in the practice and presence of God simply by going around and doing everything for the love of God. It is a fascinating little book because you can see the struggles of man as he tries to do it.
That is kind of a picture of what I believe Enoch was trying to accomplish, but the advantage that Enoch had over Brother Lawrence is that Enoch had 300 years to figure out what it means to walk with God. Given that, you begin to think what could they have conversed about for 300 years. I imagine that it is like anything and everything. 300 years seems long to us but I suspect that it simply scratched the surface. During that time, I suspect that Enoch really wanted to know the character of God. He wanted to know his traits like his love, his holiness, his kindness. Wanted to know the idea that he is all-powerful, all-knowing. That he has existed eternally. He wanted to know what was going on during the seven days of creation. What was God going to do with the problem of sin? Answers to all the deeper questions. What is going on with man? Why are men the way they are? Just asking question after question. So really after 300 years he just scratched the surface. We did a workshop yesterday called Foundations and it was a six-hour workshop and it was basically about the foundations of our faith. A good hour we spent simply talking about the attributes of God. That was truly just the scratching of the surface. We realize how difficult it is to get a handle on the attributes of God and the works of God in such a short time. That is what Enoch was doing. He was trying to get to know God. As he got to know God eventually what that resulted in was a deeper love of God. One of the phrases we use often around here is that all theology should lead to doxology. Theology is the study of God. Doxology is the worship of God. The study of God is not just a head thing; it is a heart thing. The goal of the study about God is to develop that intimacy that ultimately results in the worship of God. That is what was going on there I believe with Enoch.
Not only that, but because he developed this love of God, the natural outcome would be a deeper faith in God. We think about faith and say I have faith. If somebody says what is your faith like? You say well I go to church. I give my offerings. I serve and that sort of thing. That is my faith. We find very clearly in I believe Hebrews 11:1 where the writer pretty much describes what faith is. He says “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for.” Here faith is really defined but it is a very difficult word to get your hands around because it basically says being sure and certain of what we do not see. But if we were to look at the underlying words, which we can’t do today, we would see that it has a real significance here. The idea of being sure of what we hope for and certain is the idea of bringing substance to something that is invisible. That is the direct result of faith. As we exercise faith in the unseen realities, it is as if those realities, which are already real, then become real into our life. They take substance. Then what happens is we become sure and certain and those realities begin to grow inside of us and get substance with us. He goes on to say that is what the ancients, the people that lived way back when before the flood, were commended for. They were commended for this particular faith. They were commended for it so much so that, like Rahab, Enoch ended up in the Great Hall of Faith that we find in the rest of chapter 11. It goes on to say in Hebrews 11:5 that “By faith Enoch was taken from this life, so that he did not experience death. He could not be found because God had taken him away. For before he was taken, he was commended as one who pleased God.” Here we get a little bit more information about Enoch. We see clarity regarding his departure. You could read Genesis and say well he said he was taken by God but we use that terminology all the time. We say so and so when they died they were taken by God. It says right here he did not experience death. That is an exciting thing to think about. We are going to talk about it in a second. But what I wanted to point out in this particular passage is not only did he not experience death, but he was commended as one who pleased God. We go through life trying to please all sorts of people. We go through life trying to please teachers, employers, spouse, and children. Some of us go through life trying to please people that aren’t even alive anymore. What we find out is that some people are just impossible to please. They really are impossible to please. The good news here is it is possible to please God. That is what Enoch was commended for. He was able to please God. He was able to do this in this very corrupt and unstable environment that was just full of violence and bitterness and hate and just sin. It was out of control. He goes on to describe the situation if you look back at Genesis chapter 6. He describes what was going on and how the Lord responded. He says “The Lord saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become and that every inclination of his heart was evil all the time.” If we had time we could unpack it a little bit more and compare it with today’s culture. This fits. Don’t you think? If we could pull back the hearts of man, we would see that every inclination of the thoughts of the heart is bent towards evil. This was the environment that he walked in. Not only did he walk in it, he lived in it and was still able to please God; to give God pleasure. The reason he was able to do that goes back to this idea of faith.
If we were to go back to Hebrews and we would see “Without faith, it is impossible to please God because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists, and he rewards those who earnestly seek him.” We just talked about the idea that faith is in some sort of invisible reality out there that by exercising our faith we give substance to in our lives. Now we are talking about without faith it is impossible to please God. Basically, he is saying that faith is the prerequisite or foundation to be able to please God. But he gives us a little clue too of what that requires. At a minimum, it requires that anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him. Think about the existence. I suspect most of you believe in the existence of God, but we know there are people out in the world that don’t believe in the existence of God. Those people would be called atheists. Atheists don’t believe in God so it means, by this passage, they are not able to please God, which makes perfect sense because the question is why would they even want to please God if they don’t believe in him? That is pretty basic. What makes it difficult is that you have Christians out there who are basically practicing atheists. They come to church on Sunday. They drive around town and listen to Christian music. They even watch pastors on TV. They read the Bible but the rest of their day they basically act as if God does not exist. He does not enter into their life. He has no effect on their family. He has no effect on their finances. No effect on their behavior whatsoever. For all purposes, the atheist and the Christian who is acting as if God does not exist are pretty much one in the same. We have a situation here that it is impossible to please God unless first of all you have faith that he exists and you make him part of your life.
If you have faith that he exists that is the one thing, but the next thing you have to believe is that he rewards those who earnestly seek him. Rewarding is another one that is a little difficult to unpack, but we think of a reward as God giving us something based on something we did; our merit or something like that. We think that if we pray the right prayer or say the right things, God is going to bestow on us all sorts of neat blessings and all these material things we want and that sort of thing. I don’t think that is what he is talking about here. Enoch is living at a time where material things probably weren’t that big of a deal. He also was living at a time when he wanted to experience more of God’s reality. What I think happens here is as Enoch was walking with God and began to please God what happened is he began to see more of God. In other words, God revealed more of himself to him. He began to show him in a greater way and Enoch began to experience a greater presence of God. It is all because he earnestly sought him. He didn’t give up. He looked around. He constantly was on the lookout for God. Trying to get to know God. Going after God with a hunger and a thirst to get to know him in any way he could. That is basically a picture of Enoch.
What makes it really extraordinary is the fact that Enoch lived before the time of any of the writing of the Old Testament and the New Testament. He did not have the Ten Commandments. He didn’t have any of the Jewish Law. How did he know what to do? How did he even know how to approach God? I think it boils down to the fact that God had placed something in his heart. God had placed some knowledge in his heart; something that is available to every human that walks this earth. God has placed the idea that God exists and he is out there in every person’s heart. There is a passage that speaks of this in Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes 3:11. This is speaking about God it says “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men.” I love this passage because to me this answers the question where people say how can God condemn somebody if they don’t know about God? If they have never heard and live out in the middle of the jungle or whatever and they never heard about God. Just point to this passage. I believe that God has placed the knowledge of him in the DNA of people. I believe that basically people are born with the knowledge of God. It may be small, but enough knowledge to know that this is not all there is. There has to be something. The desire in me is so great. Every human being has the desire to live past this life and into eternity. I don’t care if you are an atheist or not. Nobody would admit that they would like this to be the end. God has placed eternity. That means that God has initiated himself in you. Every person that has walked this earth whether they heard of Jesus or not, they have an intimate knowledge of God. I believe that God placed that DNA in Enoch. The difference between Enoch and anybody else who gets that seed placed into them is that Enoch chose to act on it. Everybody has the knowledge but a lot of people just don’t act on it. They just let it sit there. Enoch took that first step to walk with God. At that time, it was just a clunky step. He probably didn’t even think about or know what he was doing and didn’t even know how to talk with God and felt weird and everything else. As he began to walk down a road and talk with God people thought he was probably nuts. He knew that God was out there. He believed it so he was seeking him in whatever way that he could do at that time. Over time, what happens is he became closer to God. He began to feel God’s presence. He began to hear God speak to him through all sorts of means. What happens is he began to feel the presence of God in an amazing way. Over 300 years he did this. Frankly, that is why I think he went away the way he did. Going back to the passage that talks about he didn’t experience death. It says that “By faith Enoch was taken from this life so he did not experience death.” Again this is an extraordinary thing. There are only two people in the whole Bible that didn’t experience death. The first one was Enoch and who is the second one? Elijah. If there is any fear we have or any concern we have it is that in the back of our minds we worry about the experience of death. We just don’t know how it is going to happen. It could be a car crash like the two young women who died last week. It could be like that. It could be a plane crash. It could just be our heart stops. It could long and painful or it could be slow and quick. We don’t know what the death experience is going to be. Enoch and Elijah had quite an advantage. The passage that speaks about Elijah is in 2 Kings that says “As they were walking along and talking together, suddenly a chariot of fire and horses of fire appeared and separated the two of them. And Elijah went up to heaven in a whirlwind.” It is a phenomenal picture of chariots of fire coming down and swooping him up and taking him away. Everybody is looking around wondering what is happening. The difference between Elijah and Enoch is at least with Elijah we have more information. We can see the chariot coming down. We can envision it. We can sing songs about it. Enoch just was there and then he was gone. We don’t know what happened. We have no idea what happened. We can only speculate.
So I did a little speculation this past week. I began to think what might that look like. This is just Chuck’s speculation but I don’t think it is too far off. Going back to the idea that Enoch walked with God on a regular ongoing, unbroken relationship as a friend to a friend, a husband to wife, it is a constant, unbroken relationship. He was with and at his side. As he went along again and as God spoke to him, he really wanted to please him. As he pleased him he got to know him better. What happened is God began to reward him and give him more information. As he traveled along, the presence of God became overwhelming. So much so that I think at some point, the ripe old age of 365, God said you might as well be in heaven. You are just about home. So he made this seamless transition from one realm to the other and all Enoch probably experienced is like something is different now about the environment or whatever but one thing he knew for sure was that he was now fully in the presence of God. That is my theory. I think God just said why are you wasting your time on earth? You are already experiencing my presence. So why don’t you just go and experience it to its fullest?
So that is the story of Enoch. Enoch is an extraordinary person any way we look at it. What are the lessons we can learn from this? There are a few lessons. Hopefully you picked them up by now. First of all, God desires to walk with us. Every person in this room. God loves walking with his children. Just like we like walking with our children, God wants to walk with us 24/7 if he could. He is there ready to walk with us. Every single person. I direct my comments right now to the men of the church. Men have a problem walking with God. I know because I have a problem walking with God. It is a hard thing for men to walk with God. It is a hard thing for men to come to church because it seems less manly to go to church. We think praying, singing, and worshipping is a feminine thing. Be honest. It is true, but you know what, the wives don’t think it is. The wives think it is a manly thing. In fact, they know it is a manly thing based on Jesus who was fully God and fully man. He was the complete man. He was the man’s man. Unlike the people in the world that you might be modeling your life after, model your life after Christ and you are going to solve half your marriage problems. How many women would like to be married to a Godly man? Is that a priority? It is a lot. I will tell the ones that aren’t married, especially the teenage girls, don’t settle for less than a Godly man. First on your list. First. I don’t care if he has 12 legs and looks like one of the guys from Duck Dynasty. It doesn’t matter. That has to be your priority. Woman, when the men try to walk with God in their own clunky, dumb, stupid way like I do when I am singing in the basement not a lick on pitch, she doesn’t say stop it, she supports it. We don’t know how to do it because it is clunky for guys to do it, but we are to do that. It is a manly thing to love God. The sooner you find that out, the sooner you are going to fix your marriage. I am being a little bit vulnerable here. In my first marriage I was married to my first wife, Dana, who passed away in 2001. I have been blessed to be married to two Godly women. Like many marriages do, in your first few years of marriage, you have problems. One day in frustration I said what is going to take to get closer to you? Her answer was get closer to God. I am here today because of that comment. I just started on a journey. I had no idea where it was taking me. I decided I wanted to be close to my wife so I was going to be close to God. If you want to be close to your wife and your wife is a Godly woman, and even if she is not, you need to take the stance that you are going to be a Godly man. Again, you women need to support that. I got a little off track there, but again Enoch was a person who had no qualms about walking with God. Brother Lawrence was somebody who didn’t care. He would lay flat on a road in front of people in worship of God. That is the kind of men we need in the world. Those are the kind of men that are going to transform it. As you walk with God, God begins to reward you. Not with more stuff, the cars, the planes, the trains, but with a deeper revelation of him so you can begin to have clarity in all aspects of your life. You can see how he is working. You begin to understand him. You begin to experience him in a deeper way. You begin to walk in a fullness of his presence. The foundation is faith. If you don’t have faith, then you might as well forget it because it is impossible to please God and God wants to find pleasure in you. At a minimum, believe that he exists and live a life as though he exists. When you do that, God gives you a deeper revelation of him and a fuller presence.
In close, this is not something that is just for the super-spiritual, the monks, the pastors, or like that. No, it is for everybody. I will say it again and everybody in this room I think knows it is true. Something inside of you says there is a God that wants that. That hopes for that. There is not a person in the world that would not hope to live in eternal presence with the creator. So what is faith? Faith is the substance of things hoped for. Faith is the thing that is going to put legs to this invisible thing out there. You do that and everybody has that seed within them. The only requirement is to say I am going to take that step. I have no idea where I am going but I am just going to take that first step and I am going to keep walking and I am not going to look back no matter what happens. When you do that, not only will you have the rewards that come from it, not only will you enjoy the fact that God takes pleasure in you, but you are going to probably have a different sort of death experience. We are not going to be able to maybe experience the departure as Enoch did, but I suspect that if you are somebody that lives your whole life bent on pleasing God, living in his presence, when you get to your deathbed wherever that might be in whatever situation you may find yourself and that heart monitor goes flat and you take that last breath and your eyes close down, the next time you open your eyes you are going to be sitting in God’s presence. Can I get an amen for that!? That is what I am hoping for. You are going to get that if you already begin to walk in the full presence of God. The last passage up there speaks to the idea. “If we seek him we will find him.” Speaking of why God created people Paul says in Acts 17:27 “God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him; though he is not far from each one of us.” Let us pray.
