Enoch Walked With God

Good morning. Before we step into the passage this morning that Courtney read for us, a couple of things we want to touch upon. One of those is just to let you know we're going to be kind of taking a change of pace here, I would say over the next couple of months. And initially through the month of March, we're going to be taking a few spots to kind of touch on some of these subjects preliminarily, like right now at the beginning of the time of the message, taking a few minutes to look at it. Our main focus will be, however, to set aside for the month of April the teaching in Genesis. We'll continue on and return to it. But for studying these particular passages, which we think are important to touch upon, for the sake of the well-being and health of our church body here, just to refocus on these things. And so we'll be going through Ephesians 4, 11-16, and some selected verses out of 1 Corinthians 12, and Colossians 3, 12-17 as key passages through the month of April.

And so be looking for that and also over this next month some kind of brief preliminary points touching upon those passages in advance. I'd like at this time to ask Mike to come up because we've got a particular thing we'd like to have Mike present for us here.

Really, with thanks to Craig and Crystal, I was acquainted with this book called The Lamp. And we ordered a bunch of these. And what they were teaching these, the information in here to the children downstairs. And this book covers from the creation of Adam to the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. It's a very simple but very accurate recounting of that, and a teaching tool that is tremendous for children. So we wanted to make it available to any of you who have small children.

And we just added another one to the list here. The Hemingways will need one. And if you have grandchildren and you want a tool that can help them understand creation, sin, and the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, this is a tremendous book. So if you would like one, either see myself or Craig or Crystal. And we'd be happy to give you one. And if you're not very articulate, it comes with a CD. Thank you. OK. So please see him afterwards. Mike, come see you over here. How should we do that? Downstairs and back up afterwards. OK. OK. All right. OK.

So anyway, what you'll have to do is chase him down. I'm not sure exactly what that looks like, but I'll let you work that out. OK, now let's move into the passage. One of the things I just want to ask you about, I would, I think, be on safe ground to assume that a number of you are interested in things like history or even family history, personal biographies, genealogy, things of that sort. Is that a fair assumption for a number of you? I would think so. As we come into this passage, just that question becomes real central, and here's why.

Why are these genealogies here in Genesis? I had Courtney read just certain selected portions of it, but in fact we skipped over in that reading just sort of a cursory this one and you know lived this long and began so long. Thank you. So why are these genealogies here?

The book of Genesis has these genealogies. They started in chapter 4, which we looked at last week. Most of chapter 4 address the genealogical line of Cain, the one who killed his brother Abel. And then starting in chapter 5, which we're looking at this morning, and then resuming in chapter 10, chapter 11, we see this accounting of genealogies.

One, then the next, then the next. And that continues all the way to some of the last chapters of the book. And so we're going to keep on encountering them. They are, in some cases, as they are in Chapter 5, substantial. It's not just a couple names or the names listed. There's all the names and how long the person lived and at least some of the children are mentioned.

So why? Why chapter after chapter of genealogies? You may think, well that's a bit overdone. Well, there are some reasons. One reason is that genealogies show a connection to significant people and people groups. I would say particularly spiritually significant people and people groups. So that's one of the key reasons. We're going to look at here this morning, here's Enoch. You know, there's a whole lot we don't know about this Enoch guy, but one of the things that says twice, he walked with God. Spiritually significant man.

Genealogies talk about the reality of events. We're not in a culture that looks at genealogies as telling the reality, but let me tell you a brief missionary story that will get the point across. There were some missionaries who were thinking, you know, I need to translate just portions of the Bible to get the Bible across. And so what they did is they went through the Gospel of Matthew and translated everything in the Gospel of Matthew except the genealogy because they figured that that wouldn't be important. Well, later on they gave them the Gospel of Matthew with the genealogy and the people upon reading it said, oh you didn't tell us these are real people. They had thought it was all a made-up story because there wasn't a genealogy.

The genealogy underscores the reality. It is historically real and valid material that's being sent across here. In addition to that, they talk about things that were important to family inheritance. Who gets what? Where's the land that belongs to you? Those kinds of things. And so these are a record for those people.

In addition to that, Some of the genealogies are tied to blessings or prophecies. From Genesis 12, there to almost the end, Genesis 49, some of the people listed in the genealogies and their descendants are blessed either by God or are blessed by the fathers in the families. And so we find those. Many of those blessings also contain prophecies. And we'll be looking at that as we continue along. We've already seen some of that, a little bit.

Some of the prophecies have yet to be fulfilled, but they will be. Just as a rule of thumb, and this is, by the way, not in your handout, there are about 10,000, if you itemize them, 10,000 prophecies in the Bible. About 5,000 of those have been fulfilled. So about half. That's a lot. If you're talking about fulfilled prophecies, 5,000 of them already fulfilled. We're waiting for 5,000 more to be fulfilled and those will begin with the rapture onto the end of this present heaven and earth. Then the other 5,000 will be fulfilled.

A number of the genealogies that we're going to see get focused increasingly on the nation and people of Israel, on the descendants of Jacob. And so that's going to be an important focal point as we go through the book of Genesis. Some of the most important reasons, however, for the genealogies are these. The genealogies show how God fulfilled promises.

See, God is the promise keeper. God made promises, and how God fulfilled those is spelled out here in part in Genesis, and many of those He is still fulfilling. You may ask, why doesn't the Lord just kind of wrap things up here on planet Earth? I mean, after all, you've got a whole bunch of people saved, and Christ came, and why doesn't He just kind of wrap it all up and say we're done? Key reason?

God made promises that He intends to fulfill. And until those are fulfilled, he's not done. That's why God is faithful. God is ever faithful indeed. And that's why we talk about the 5,000 prophecies yet to be fulfilled. It's because God's faithful. That's why things are not done here on planet Earth.

The genealogies also show a connection to the birth of Christ. We saw back in Genesis chapter 3 verse 15. There is a connection there to Christ who would be the one who would fulfill those prophecies and many others. If we look at the first six verses, and Courtney started off with those, what we find is that those verses are a summary, in just a matter of a few verses, of all the material in Genesis from the end of chapter 1 to the end of chapter 4. What those verses do is they hit the high spots, the key points made in those chapters, summarized in those verses.

It says there that God made mankind in His own likeness, male and female, blessed them, calling them mankind. I think some of your translations may say calling them Adam. Why would we have that apparent conflict? The Hebrew word for Adam and for man, meaning mankind, is the same word. And so your King James there says Adam. In the original language, there's no conflict whatsoever. And that's the reason. It's even said that all this took place in one day. That's right there in the beginning of Genesis 5.

So that last statement there of one day, the sixth day, is underscored there in that verse. The fall of Adam is not particularly described or included in that, but there are consequences that come from that that are included in those verses, and that is Adam died physically at 930 years of age. Not sure how they put things on the gravestone, but it might be 0 to 930, I don't know. So here we have the summary of the end of chapter 1 of Genesis all the way to the end of chapter 4 spelled out in just a half dozen verses there.

One of the things that also comes out in that passage is there's the use of this word book. Now interesting, we think of a book and of course nobody has any real question, well what's a book? But a bound book with pages bound on one side, none of the Bible authors likely ever saw one of those. because things were not written in that form until just years after John the Apostle, the author of the Book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible, years just after he died. That's when they first started coming up with bound books.

Before that it was scrolls, it was clay tablets, it was pieces of broken pottery, and writing on kind of random pieces of papyrus, the reed paper. So when we look at the word book there, so there's a written record of some kind. The oldest things that we have, and it may come to what preserves well, and clay tablets preserve pretty well. The oldest things that we have are these clay tablets with little stylus markings, cuneiform writing, and it may well have been of that kind.

What's stated here in the other information we have in Genesis points to this. There is the implication, and I'll leave it at that level of implication, that Moses wrote Genesis from documents which existed from before his time. Some of those documents may even have been taken on the Ark of Noah that we'll talk about in chapters to come here. And some of them may even have been written while Adam was still alive. So, anyway, those are some things we'll point out as we go through. Now, Genesis 1-11 and conventional accounts of history and prehistory.

We're going to revisit this and one of the reasons are because you are often going to encounter, if you have not many times already, an apparent conflict between the secular history that you will see on TV shows, movies, documentaries, magazines, books, school classrooms, an apparent conflict between the history and prehistory that is presented in all those different media and environments that presents that there was this tens of thousands of years of prehistory of human beings And I think a key point that we need to get is that all that is based on assumptions that if there is a God, that that God is of no real consequence and not subject to any verification by science. And that our knowing anything is by human discovery. That's the perspective that is assumed. It is not the conclusion from the facts. It is the assumption.

Now, key point here, the Bible conveys actually no prehistory. If we define prehistory as the time before things were recorded and written down, the Bible really doesn't describe that, does it? Here we have in chapter 5 the first mention of a book, and that starts with Adam. So no prehistory is what Scripture seems to assume.

It assumes rather than a God who cannot be known, a God instead who has deliberately and intentionally revealed himself. Things that we could not discover on our own. If it was simply up to us to discover them, we would never know them. Scripture assumes that God has revealed himself and has that basic assumption built in. You notice as you open the pages of Genesis. You don't come in starting off with a proof of God's existence. Here are all the philosophical and other reasons for God's existence. No, it is an assumption built into scripture that God deliberately revealed himself. The secular and Bible accounts of prehistory and history differ in the assumptions rather than the facts. They differ in the assumptions rather than the facts. Let me ask you this question.

Has science proved that there are no miracles? No. Science cannot prove that. That is not the character of science. What many people who are scientists assume is that there are no miracles and that's as far as it goes. They can never prove it. It's not the nature of science to be able to prove it.

In the earlier chapters of Genesis, you may have noticed, people lived a long time. Adam lived 930 years, that's a long time. Those who lived their full lifetimes before the flood, by that I mean the exceptions being Enoch, we'll talk about him, and also Lamech. It's tough to die short in life, only 777 years, a little short. But the others all lived over 900 years. As a matter of fact, if you take out Enoch and Lamech, it's about 912 is the average. Methuselah, 969 years.

After the flood of the days of Noah, it's interesting, the lifetimes don't just drop off entirely, they slowly drop off and decline. They begin to drop off. And the Bible doesn't actually say why. People lived a long time and then the ages started dropping off. Some likely reasons, and again this is not from what the Bible says, but just from an understanding of what are the things that impact our lifetime. A very likely reason is the environment, and a part of that is the various kinds of electromagnetic and radiation impacts changed after the time of the flood. And fewer mutations prior to that time, but more mutations afterwards. So those would be some of the probable reasons.

We have some charts here. There are copies of them on the cabin to the right as you exit. Feel free to take one of those if you're interested. We can get more out there and we'll make an effort to do so next week. One of the things we point out on that is we've got Enoch was taken away, pointed out, in the time of the flood after which the lifetimes begin to decline.

There are also key people pointed out on that chart. We have Adam, Enoch and then Noah and his son Shem and then towards the end there Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Anyway that chart is available. There's another couple that are interesting and that is it shows the overlap of the lives of these patriarchs before the flood and so feel free to take hold of the chart and study it.

Fascinating things in there. You begin to realize that Adam's lifetime and Noah's lifetime almost overlapped. Adam lived a long time and so did Noah. Their lives almost overlapped. One of the other things that comes out of this as well as you start looking at it, you start thinking about it, now wait a minute, these people are like 500 years old and they're still having kids.

Now, I just could hardly imagine that. This would be phenomenal. This would really be phenomenal. Now, one other thing to ponder is how many kids you could have. Ooh, wow. Okay. That begins to get a little frightening. Anyway, amazing things to think about. And feel free to take advantage of those charts. We'll also provide some other charts as time goes on here.

One of the questions that comes out as we begin to look at these questions of science, and what does science know, and those who hold to assumptions that fit modern secular science, and we begin to look at what does scripture say, we get into pivotal questions like this.

Is he a God who we cannot know about? Science can say nothing about God. Or, is He a God who wants us to know Him? Here's what's amazing. Scripture makes it abundantly clear, in this very passage we looked at this morning, that God made mankind for us to be able to know Him. That is his very intent. Science, though it can tell us many things, cannot provide this kind of information. Science just cannot go there.

And so one of the big questions as we look at this Is this all there is right here on planet Earth? Is what we see, touch, hear, feel, is that all there is? When this life is done, are we through? As this picture somewhat strangely and also humorously makes it, you know, as if we could look up from the grave and see our own burial. When we're done here, are we done or As scripture says, are there eternal issues at stake while we walk this planet?

You see, the ultimate answers, and I don't mean to say that we shouldn't be investigating things or discovering things through science. I don't at all believe that. But the ultimate answer is not found by, as I put it here, quibbling over old bones or quoting old biologists, but in our knowing God who is an eternal. You see, science can never get there. And the assumption of science, as a matter of fact, science was founded initially, modern science was founded by Christians. The assumptions of science will never get us there. We must, must have knowledge from God's revealing things we could never No. To answer those eternal questions.

And that's what God's Word is. It is God's intentional revelation because He loves us. It's His intentional revelation about Jesus Christ who died for us because He loves us. It's His intentional revelation about Jesus Christ who rose again so that we might live because He loves us.

Remember Hebrews 12.2, for the joy set before him, Christ endured the cross. It is that love for us that doesn't just look at what we do here as human beings as just some sort of an experiment. God didn't just create us and walk away and let's see what happens.

Years ago, on my folks' ranch, I occasionally had times when I was not working, pounding in fence posts and milking cows and splitting wood and things of that sort. And so one of my very strange recreational activities during the summer was to go down towards the lower end of the property where there were some large colonies of ants. And as I would go to those colonies of ants, I had various questions. Being an inquisitive sort, I thought, what would happen if I take a whole bunch of ants from this colony and dump them on the ants of the other colony? Well, of course, it couldn't leave a question like that unanswered, right? And so I go and I take the ants and I dump a bunch of them over and I found out what happens.

I won't tell you, but anyway, that's the sort of thing that we might ask about. God is not playing ant games with us. He is not doing little experiments to see what happens. That's not the character of this life here. God is doing things that He is doing, has done things that He has done, and will do things All by intent, everything that he has done, everything that he has revealed comes out of his character. Central to that being love and his relationship with us is not incidental, but a key part of what he is doing. He created us for relationship. Science, however, as an objective approach toward discovery about the physical universe, has absolutely no conflict with scripture.

That's not where the problem lies. It's not a question of science versus the Bible or science versus religion. It's a question of the conflicted assumptions. Conflicted assumptions, not the facts of science, not even the scientific method. That's not where the conflict lies. The conflict lies in what do you assume? It says here, as Courtney read for us, Enoch walked with God. There are two places, and we'll be looking at the next one next week, in Genesis.

It says that a person walked with God. This is, of course, the first. The second is with Noah. But what's interesting is here, the first place it really shows up in Scripture, twice. Enoch walked with God. Oh, and by the way, Enoch walked with God. This is a point of emphasis. This guy really walked with the Lord. He walked in fellowship with Him.

Now it's interesting, if you look at the genealogy there that's right in front of you in chapter 5, some of the names, it just says this person was born and they lived so many years and they had a child at such and such years and it lists them and then that's it. That's all you get. Enoch went through all those things. You see that. But notice the huge difference. Twice, Enoch walked with God. He's the only one whose life was short. You know, tragically short, right? 365 years. All the other people that we see listed died.

Even Adam. Even Methuselah. of Enoch, it says, God took him. God took him. And I often wonder, because it doesn't really say, why did God take him? Why did God take him? Might you want to think, here's this guy, he walks with the Lord. I want all kinds of people to see that, right? Why did the Lord take him? The Scripture doesn't say it, but I often wonder as I look at that, maybe the Lord just says, I've just got to have that guy here.

The fellowship with him is so great, he's just got to come home. His fellowship with the Lord was that kind of a walk. And it was real and it was lived out. And he had a wife and kids and normal life. But he walked with the Lord in a way that was so evident that here's this book. And this happened at least 6,000 years ago. So this is a long time. So here's this guy.

And he is walking with the Lord so notably that thousands of years later, in what may be the only writing of its time that we still have, this is recorded. Enoch walked with God. Oh, and by the way, Enoch walked with God. The only thing that's at all similar to it in the whole Old Testament is the taking up of Elijah, and you can read that for yourself in 2 Kings chapter 2. These two events, however, have one thing that has some kind of a similarity in the New Testament, and that is the rapture of the church, the taking up of those who believe from Acts 2 until the day the Lord takes us home. This will take place in the future. I hope that it is a very near future. I hope it's today. I hope we don't get to finish the service. But the Lord intends to take the entire church body home with him.

It's interesting as you look at the person of Enoch, there are a couple of New Testament passages that bring up what this fellow Enoch did or said. Hebrews 11. Verse 5, By faith Enoch was taken up so that he would not see death. And this confirms that he wasn't just saying God took him as a euphemism for he died, but that he would not see death. Taken up to be with the Lord while he's alive. He was not found because God took him up for he obtained the witness that before his being taken up he was pleasing to God by faith. By faith. It's interesting that as you look at Enoch, You might say, well, boy, you know, that's a great relationship with the Lord. But you know what? It's by faith. You know how we have a relationship with the Lord? By faith.

Galatians 2.20, There's no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life that I now live, I live by faith in the Son of God. We can walk with the Lord by faith. I can't promise you I'll have your name inscribed on some genealogy that will go down to ancient times that way. But the Lord takes note of those who walk with him. Did you see that? The Lord takes definite note of those who walk with him.

Jude 14 and 15 is another one. Interesting that this one talks about Enoch in a context that points to his yet to be second coming. This is one of those 5,000 prophecies that have yet to be fulfilled. And it says the Enoch was pointing to that second coming of the Lord. Now we've got the names Methuselah and Noah here. The meaning of Methuselah's name was rather ominous. When he dies, it comes. Or another alternate reading on that is when he dies, judgment. Either way, uh-oh. I tell you what, if I was living then, I'd be keeping an eye on that guy. The worldwide flood began shortly after his death.

Noah's name meant rest or comfort, which was given in the hope that the end of long labors would finally be over. You imagine, here's Adam who was told, by the sweat of your brow, you'll get food from the ground and thorns and thistles are going to come up. But you know, none of us have had to go through 900 years of crop farming. Oh boy, that must have been something. Really tiring, you know. Oh boy, here's another harvest, right? Can you imagine crop farming for nine centuries? That's a long time.

In the account in Genesis, we find that Noah is the tenth in the line from Adam, although their lives almost overlapped. Noah is the pivotal person, as we'll see in the next several chapters, the pivotal person bridging the world from before the flood to the world afterwards. Certainly, there's Noah's wife and his three sons and their wives, so a total of eight. But Noah is this pivotal person. Basically, we see his name mentioned here. It's going to continue on for the next several chapters.

Noah is about to build what may well have been the first of its kind in its day, certainly seems to be the picture. What we know of more recent history, though, is that it took many, many centuries for anything like the Ark of Noah to be built. It has only been in very recent centuries that anything that size has been built. It was a huge structure, even compared to the things that we have today. One of the key things that comes out of this passage, though, is Enoch and Noah both walked with God. This word walk is an interesting thing. It shows up early here in Scripture. And it continues on into the New Testament.

We saw it as we were doing our study recently in Galatians 5.25.

And it has to do with a continual ordering of one's life, step by step. It's more of an individual ordering of one's life. And this walking isn't just about doing the right thing, however. on planet Earth. It's not just doing the right thing. There's more to it. It's about living out that relationship with the Lord. It is about an ongoing fellowship with Him. It's about an intimacy with Him. After all, God created us for relationship with Him.

It is easy in the course of our lives to get caught up in there's stuff to do. You and I all have things to do, don't we? There's this to be done, and that to be done, and this to be done. Plenty of things to do. The things that we have to do, certainly many of them, probably most of them, need to be done.

But in the midst of that, what is the Lord looking for? Relationship with Him. Intimacy with Him is the key. And we see it from the very earliest chapters of the Bible. walking in fellowship with Him. That's what the Lord created us for. And you know, when all this that we see and touch and feel is all gone, that's what's going to matter. It's our relationship with Him.

Believe it or not, there will come a time when the things that my body isn't doing right won't matter. Because that will be past. That will be done. The things that occupy our minds and our thoughts and draw our attentions and the kind of the daily cycle that we go through. All those things will be history, but our fellowship with the Lord will be central. That is what will occupy eternity.

And what Scripture lays out is don't wait for that. That's for now, for right now. Fellowship and relationship and intimacy with Him. That's what Scripture says is most important. So critical that here's this guy Enoch. We have a half-dozen thousand years ago, but it would save him twice. Enoch walked with God. Let's pray.

Lord, as we look at this passage here, it would be easy to look at just the genealogy and crank through the generations. But yet in this passage, from the beginning to the end, what we see is relationship with you is what is noted. Relationship with you is what we're created for. Relationship with you is what will be when this earth is all gone, when these bodies that we're in now will be done away with. Thank you, Lord, for the marvelous hope we have. Thank you for knowing a purpose, a purpose that you very much intended for us from now until eternity. In Jesus' name, Amen.