Kootenai Church: Hebrews

We are back in Hebrews 11, and though we left for three weeks to look at Simeon in Luke 2, we didn't really leave the theme of Hebrews 11 since the theme of Hebrews 11 is the theme of faith. And really we could take Simeon and pull him out of Luke 2 and drop him right into Hebrews 11, of course not in the early part of Hebrews 11, but we could drop him in there and he would fit right in because he was a man of faith. Luke 2 says he was righteous, which meant that he was a man of faith. He was devout and careful in his obedience to the law of God, to Scripture. So obviously faith informed his obedience to the Lord. He was waiting expectantly for the hope and consolation of Israel. So that is a forward-looking trust in God's promise, that God would fulfill His promise to His people, and he was walking in the power of the Holy Spirit. So all of those elements are wrapped up with what it means to be a man of faith. So Simeon fits our context. He kind of fits our theme, though we haven't been in Hebrews 11.
So now we're transitioning to Enoch, and he is the next in our series of Hebrews heroes of the faith in Hebrews 11. Let's begin reading at verse 3 and we'll read through the end of verse 7:
3 By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible.
4 By faith Abel offered to God a better sacrifice than Cain, through which he obtained the testimony that he was righteous, God testifying about his gifts, and through faith, though he is dead, he still speaks.
5 By faith Enoch was taken up so that he would not see death; and 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.
6 And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him.
7 By faith Noah, being warned by God about things not yet seen, in reverence prepared an ark for the salvation of his household, by which he condemned the world, and became an heir of the righteousness which is according to faith. (NASB)
There is a chronological order that is given to us here in Hebrews 11. The chronology begins with Abel. He's the first example drawn from the Old Testament. And then we can trace the chronology of these first few characters very easily through Hebrews 11 as we parallel it with the first few chapters of Genesis. We have Abel and then we have Enoch and then we have Noah, and of course you can trace each one of those men in the early chapters of Genesis.
The chronological order is intended to show us that, as the argument of the author of Hebrews is, faith was required in the very beginning. It goes all the way back to the beginning. There was never a time at which men were accepted by God or pleasing to God on the basis of anything other than faith in God's promises and in God's Word. So the chronology goes all the way back to the beginning to show us that even right after the fall, God demanded that men come to Him on the basis of faith.
There's also a logical order—not just a chronological order, but a logical order to these characters in these first few verses of Hebrews 11. The logical order is this. We begin with Abel, who worshipped God, who approached God in faith. And Abel shows us that before we can even walk with God, before we can serve God, before we can do anything else with God, we have to first come to God on His terms, embracing and accepting what He says by faith, trusting that, having offered the sacrifice or having a sacrifice offered for our sin, we can come and approach God on the basis and the terms in which He demands that we approach Him and that we can be accepted on those terms. Abel worshipped in faith. His was a faith-filled worship. So even in approaching God, he had to have faith.
Enoch is a faith-filled walk. Enoch is a man who walked with God. And before you can walk with God, you first have to worship or approach God rightly through the means that God has laid out for him. Noah is a faith-filled work. See, Noah is the next one. We're going to get to him not next week but the week after that. Noah is a faith-filled work. His work was informed by his faith. So first we approach God, then we can walk with God, and then we can serve God or work for God. There's a logical order and progression of this. Abel shows us a faith-filled worship, Enoch shows us a faith-filled walk, and Noah shows us a faith-filled work.
So now Enoch, and he is mentioned to us in verse 5. He is the next example in our Hebrews Hall of Faith. “By faith Enoch was taken up so that he would not see death; and he was not found because God took him up; for he obtained the witness that before being taken up he was pleasing to God.” He is an intriguing character. Enoch is an intriguing character because something so significant is said about him, so unique. In fact, it’s so unique that this only happened to one other person in all of recorded history, that he was taken up bodily, physically, into Heaven, having never suffered death. That is very unique. Do you know anybody that that has happened to in your lifetime? You've known a lot of saints, a lot of righteous people. You don't know anybody that you could say that of. And yet so little is recorded about him that he's just an intriguing character. He did not see death, Hebrews 11:5 says. He was taken up because by faith he pleased the Lord or he walked with the Lord.
Enoch is only mentioned in three places in all of Scripture. He's mentioned back in Genesis 5, where we're going to turn to here in a moment. He's mentioned here in Hebrews 11. And of course, he's mentioned in Jude 1:14–15, where Jude records a prophecy that Enoch spoke. Jude says this:
14 It was also about these men that Enoch, in the seventh generation from Adam, prophesied, saying, “Behold, the Lord came with many thousands of His holy ones,
15 to execute judgment upon all, and to convict all the ungodly of all their ungodly deeds which they have done in an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him." (NASB)
Apparently Enoch loved that word ungodly. It must have characterized somebody that he had in mind when he spoke those words. But Jude's quotation of Enoch, his mention of Enoch, raises an entirely other issue that is perplexing to us, and it is this, that Jude calls him a prophet, but back in the book of Genesis we have no words that are recorded from the mouth of Enoch. We don't have any record of anything he said in the book of Genesis, and yet Jude cites him as a prophet.
And even more perplexing and disturbing is the fact that Jude quotes a prophecy of Enoch contained in an apocryphal book, 1 Enoch. Now we have 1 Enoch available to us. You can download it. You can read it. I downloaded it this last week, and I plan on reading it at some point. I didn't read it this last week, obviously. But it is a book that is available to us. It is not a book that either the Jews or the early Christians regarded as Scripture. It is not quoted authoritatively as Scripture by Jesus or the apostles. Jude cites it or mentions it, but he doesn't quote it as if he is quoting Scripture. He quotes it as if he's simply quoting another historical document known as 1 Enoch.
So here's the perplexing question. Should we regard 1 Enoch as a canonical book that belongs in our Old Testament? I would argue that we should not regard 1 Enoch as a canonical book. And you might be thinking to yourself, Jim, 1 Enoch, that kind of implies that there is a 2 Enoch. Yeah, and there is a 2 Enoch. Now the fact that there is a 2 Enoch does not necessarily imply or indicate to us that there is a 3 Enoch, but there is. There's 1, 2, and 3 Enoch. Now 3 Enoch does not necessarily imply to us that there is a 4 Enoch, and as luck would have it, there is no 4 Enoch, at least not that we have. But we do have 1, 2, and 3 Enoch. So here are three books that are apocryphal. They're outside of our canon. They're not included in the Old Testament. They're not included in our New Testament. And yet here we have these books which were allegedly written by Enoch or record the prophecies and the life of Enoch, those three books. One of them is quoted by Jude. That's really perplexing, isn't it?
Here's what we would say about that. And I want to dismiss this because it's intriguing and it raises kind of an interesting thing that we have to think through as Christians. Just because Jude quotes a historical book that records the words of a prophet of God who spoke that does not mean that Jude regarded that historical book as inspired. It simply means that Jude regarded what was said about Enoch as accurate, and by inspiration of the Holy Spirit, Jude is recognizing that what this other historical writer said in 1 Enoch was an accurate representation of something that Enoch actually said. And Jude includes it, and therefore we can be confident that Enoch said these words and uttered this prophecy even though the prophecy that he uttered is in a book. Though recorded accurately, the book itself is not inspired, infallible, or inerrant. And so we don't include it as Scripture.
Now will you please turn back to Genesis 5? And though we're only going to be here for a few moments—actually probably longer than that. But we are going to be coming back to Hebrews 11, so don't lose your place there, as if it's possible for you to lose your place in Hebrews because your Bible just falls open to Hebrews by this point. But turn back to Genesis 5. And we're going to look at this genealogy, of course not all of it because I don't enjoy preaching on genealogies per se. In Genesis 5, there's a genealogy that starts with Adam in verse 1 and takes us all the way through Noah in verse 32. In fact, I want you to notice that. Notice the pattern of how Moses records this genealogy in Genesis 5. “This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day when God created man, He made him in the likeness of God. He created them male and female, and He blessed them and named them Man in the day when they were created” (vv. 1–2). It just all harkens back to Genesis 1 and 2. Moses is simply summarizing what he taught there regarding the creation of man and two genders, male and female.
Verse 3:
3 When Adam had lived one hundred and thirty years, he became the father of a son in his own likeness, according to his image, and named him Seth.
4 Then the days of Adam after he became the father of Seth were eight hundred years, and he had other sons and daughters.
5 So all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years, and he died. (Gen. 5:3–5 NASB)
Now that pattern is followed for each one of these patriarchs in Genesis 5. For each one, the author tells us how long he lived and then he had this son and then after he had that son he lived x number of years, and he does this for every last one of them, picking up with the previous one that he mentioned, giving us the lifespan, how long they lived, he had a son, etc. That's the pattern that he follows all the way through here. Unmistakably the intention of the author is to give us a chronology of the universe. He starts in Adam.
And these long lifespans, don't let that bother you. That shouldn't disturb you at all. If you have a biblical worldview and understand what sin has done and how we are created perfect, the idea that there were long lifespans after the fall before the flood should not disturb you whatsoever. These long lifespans, 800 years, 100 years, 150 years, 969 years for Methuselah, those are not allegorical, they're not metaphorical, they're not symbolic, they're not whatever else that you might put in there to try and soften that up to make it palatable to the modern age. They're none of those things. This is history.
And just so you're all clear, there is no point in Genesis that I do not regard as history. From Genesis 1:1, this is the history of the universe all the way through. So the author is intending to give us, to date for us, these events, and he gives us a chronology beginning at Adam, taking us all the way through to Noah to the flood. And after the flood, there is a precipitous drop-off in the lifespan of the patriarchs. And here's why. The entrance of sin into a perfect creation caused mutations in the genetic code as people were dying and people began to decay. And that took a long period of time when the genetic mutations were few and far between and people had a lot of other people to choose from. And even though Cain would have married his sister, yes, there were not the genetic mess-ups that are in our genetic code today.
But what you have happening at the flood is you have a genetic bottleneck where all of these mutations come together and they're condensed down into these eight people. So then you do not have the dispersion of all of these different kinds of genetic variations. Instead, you have those variations and those genetic copying mistakes that take place in our human DNA. They begin just compounding at that point and the lifespans drop off. I don't think it has anything to do with the topography or the geology or anything regarding the world before the flood and after the flood. It's a genetic bottleneck that takes place at the flood where those copying mistakes are then just boiled down and condensed into eight people. And that's all the genetic material you have to go with.
So when you start looking at the lifespans of these people in Genesis 5, there's a few interesting details that I think are essential for us to understand in order to appreciate who Enoch was. Enoch was the great-grandfather of Noah. I'm not going to read through the whole genealogy, but you can do this on your own time. Enoch was the great-grandfather of Noah. Now, Noah never would have known Enoch because Enoch was taken up before Noah was born. So Enoch and Noah would never have known each other.
Noah's lifespan overlapped all of the other patriarchs in Genesis 5 except Adam and Seth. Noah's lifespan overlapped all of the other people listed in Genesis 5 except Adam and Seth. Adam's grandson Enosh, his lifespan would have overlapped Noah's for a hundred years. Seth, who was Adam's son, died only sixteen years before Noah was born, and Adam died only a hundred and twenty-six years before Noah was born. Noah could have known Enosh, Adam's grandson. So you had Adam, Seth, and Enosh. Noah could have known him. Now if you do the math and you figure it out going backwards through Genesis 5, you would find out that Enosh, Adam's grandson, was the great-great-great-great—one more—great-grandfather of Noah. And Noah and Enosh, their lives would have overlapped by a hundred years.
Do you think it's possible that Noah and Enosh, Adam's grandson, could have known each other? Possible, isn't it? We don't know for sure if they did or not because Scripture doesn't say that they did. But if you knew for the first hundred years of your life that your great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was alive and he was the grandson of Adam and could give you a merely secondhand account of what life was like before the flood, would you not take some time to go visit your great-great-great-great-great-grandfather and hear those stories? You probably would.
And listen, it becomes even more intriguing when you get past the flood and you start to look at the rest of the patriarchs in Genesis 11. There's another genealogy that's given in Genesis 11 that traces us from Noah all the way through the line of Shem to Abraham. And here is something interesting. Shem and Abraham overlapped their lives by 150 years. Shem died only twenty-five years before Abraham died. That is Shem, the same one who was on the ark, Noah's son. He died only twenty-five years before Abraham died, which means that their lives overlapped by 150 years. Noah died only three years before Abraham was born. That means that Abraham could have received from Shem details that Shem would have got—let's be really super generous and say from Noah, and Noah could have gotten those from Enosh, Adam's grandson. So you're covering a long span of human history, but because of the lifespan, these people's lives overlap by sometimes centuries, and we need to keep that in mind.
Now, Enoch was the seventh from Adam. He was the seventh from Adam. That's what Jude says in Jude 14, that he was the seventh generation from Adam. And that sets him apart from another Enoch that is mentioned in Genesis 4:17, and he's the son of Cain. So that is Jude's way of telling you which Enoch that he is talking about who was the prophet. This is the Enoch who is the seventh generation from Adam. His father in Genesis 5:18 is named Jared. “Jared lived one hundred and sixty-two years, and became the father of Enoch. Then Jared lived eight hundred years after he became the father of Enoch, and he had other sons and daughters. So all the days of Jared were nine hundred and sixty-two years, and he died” (vv. 18–20).
Here's the entire account of Enoch's life in Genesis, beginning at verse 21: “Enoch lived sixty-five years, and became the father of Methuselah.” And Methuselah is the one who lived 969 years. Any one of these patriarchs you could say this about, but Methuselah is one of those guys that you just wish you could have the compounding interest of his life, right? Invest say $1,000 when you're 10 years old and then just watch it compound until you're 969 years old. You could buy the ark. You could buy all the materials for the ark if you could do that. He lived 969 years. In fact, Methuselah died the year that the flood came.
So Enoch is Methuselah's father. Methuselah had Lamech, and Lamech had Noah. So Enoch is Noah's great-grandfather. And again, Noah would not have known Enoch because Noah was not born until after Enoch was taken up. Enoch lived a relatively short life. It says at sixty-five years old he fathered Methuselah, who then went on to live 969 years. His was the oldest lifespan recorded in Scripture. Methuselah died the year that the flood came.
Then after three hundred years, it says that Enoch was taken up, and he was walking with God. Verse 21: “Then Enoch walked with God three hundred years after he became the father of Methuselah, and he had other sons and daughters.” We do not know how many sons and daughters he had, but he was a family man with a wife. He had a family. And he walked with God for three hundred years. By the way, that is a walk you can have with somebody who would never get old. I could spend three hundred years with a lot of people in this room, and honestly, it would get old after a bit—probably everybody but my wife. It would get old after a bit. But you could—even with my wife, I think maybe after a thousand years or so, there might be nothing else to kind of talk about.
But with God, you can walk with God for three hundred years and you never get tired of that fellowship. You can never get tired of that company. You and I are going to stand face-to-face with the Lord for all of eternity. And we are going to learn of Him and learn about Him and learn from Him. And there will never be an end to that because He is an infinite Being. All of His attributes are perfect and infinitely perfect, and so there is no ability to pursue any one of God's attributes and ever get to the point where you think, OK, I've learned everything I can learn about that attribute. The only thing that makes us bored with such things is our limited intellect, our limited ability to appreciate those things. That's the effect of sin.
The fact that Enoch walked with God you'll notice is mentioned twice in the text. Verse 22: “Then Enoch walked with God.” Verse 24: “Enoch walked with God; and he was not, for God took him.” The “was not” there is just a reference to he was found not. The author of Hebrews says he was not found, indicating that they may have looked for Enoch and then didn't find him or he was taken away and people searched for him, but they did not find him.
From the book of Jude, again, we find out that Enoch was a prophet. He prophesied. That’s Enoch in the seventh generation of Adam. He prophesied about ungodly sinners and a judgment that was to come, a judgment that would be accompanied by angelic hosts upon ungodly sinners over their ungodly ways for all the ungodly things that ungodly people did amongst the ungodly. Remember the repetition of the word ungodly? Enoch was a prophet who spoke the truth in his own generation, and the judgment that he prophesied was probably the flood.
Though the indications from the text seem to indicate that the judgment that he talked about was the flood, which would be seen within a few hundred years after he was taken up, beyond that there is another judgment that is to come that they would fit in really well with. In fact, Jude says that Enoch was speaking of these men, the people in Jude's own day, when Enoch said that these people would be judged, indicating that Enoch's prophecy was probably not just of the flood, the judgment that was to come at the time of the flood, but also a prophecy describing the ultimate judgment of which the flood is only a picture. See, the global flood in the Old Testament just reminds us how God feels about sin and that no sin goes unpunished and that God keeps a reckoning of all the sin, and it reminds us that God is going to judge the world again. Next time it's not going to be by water, it's going to be by fire, but there is a judgment that is to come. And so Enoch's prophecy probably had a double fulfillment. So that's all we get about Enoch from the book of Genesis in chapter 5.
Now turn back to the book of Hebrews, chapter 11. I wanted you to read of Enoch in his context and understand a little bit about him and his lineage. Hebrews 11, and we're going to be back in verse 5. The focus of the author of Hebrews in the life of Enoch is on Enoch's faith and the role that it had in him walking with God. Again, verse 5: “By faith Enoch was taken up so that he would not see death; and 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.” And here's why the author of Hebrews is citing Enoch. Enoch's faith is notable because it was a faith that pleased God. This is something of which God was pleased.
He obtained the witness, verse 5 says, that he was pleasing to God. And the idea of a witness, that theme, is something we see all the way through Hebrews 11, particularly here in the early verses. Remember it's the idea of a martyr or a testimony, one who bears witness to something. Who is the one who is witnessing that? In verse 2, these heroes of faith gained approval, they gained the testimony. Verse 4 says Abel obtained the testimony, God testifying about him that his gifts were acceptable. Who is the one who does the testifying in Hebrews 11? Who's the one who gives witness or accreditation to that? It's God.
When God embraced Abel and his gift as opposed to Cain, it was God testifying concerning Abel's gifts that they pleased Him. When God walked with Enoch, it was God's testimony that Enoch's faith pleased Him. When God preserved Noah, it was God's testimony that Noah's faith preserved him and that what Noah was doing was an act of faith. These men were righteous, and God's embrace of these men, His walking with these men, His acceptance of these men, was in fact the testimony that God was giving that their faith pleased Him, just as it had always been faith that pleases God. And these men are evidence of that.
The language that he pleased God is not taken from Genesis 5. Genesis 5 says twice that he walked with God, but you'll notice that the author says, “He obtained the witness that before his being taken up he was pleasing to God” (Heb. 11:5). That's different language because the book of Genesis doesn't say that Enoch was pleasing to God. It says he walked with God. So why does the author of Hebrews change the wording to say that he pleased God when Genesis says he walked with God? Is there a difference between those two things? Not in the minds of those who translated the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Old Testament that the author of Hebrews was familiar with. He's quoting here the language that the Greek translation of the Old Testament used. The Septuagint translates that idiom “walking with God” as “he pleased God.” So he's simply citing the Greek translation of the Old Testament, and he's using the language “God was pleased with Enoch” rather than “Enoch walked with God.”
Now I ask you this: Is it possible for anybody who does not please the Lord to walk with the Lord? Does the Lord walk with those with whom He is not pleased? Does God lend His intimacy and His fellowship and His faithfulness and His blessing to those who are at enmity against Him, who are at odds with Him, who live in their sin and walk in darkness? Does the Lord do that? Does the Lord draw near to those who are far from Him? He doesn't. So the very fact that Enoch walked with God is an evidence that he pleased God. And that's the take that the book of Hebrews says, that he pleased God. His faith was pleasing to the Lord. So the Lord extended His friendship and His fellowship, His intimacy, gave Enoch joy and delight in his walk with God.
And these things, this intimacy, this fellowship, the faithfulness between these two persons, Enoch and the Lord, that cannot exist apart from faith that pleases the Lord. Because verse 6, which really gives us a comment on Enoch's example, says, “Without faith it is impossible to please Him.” You could read that as “Without faith it is impossible to walk with God.” Because he who comes to God—in order to walk with Him, you have to come to Him. In order to come to Him, you must believe that He is. That makes sense, right? You don't come to people that you don't think exist. None of you go to the Easter Bunny. None of you go to the Spaghetti Monster. None of you go to a troll beneath a bridge. You don't think these entities exist, so you don't approach them. He who comes to God must believe that He is and believe that He is the rewarder of those who seek Him. People who do not believe that God exists or do not believe that God rewards with blessing and joy and delight and eternal life those who seek Him, they don't walk with Him. And Enoch did. Enoch was somebody who not only believed that God existed, but he believes as an action of his faith that God rewards those who seek Him. And so it is on the basis of faith that Enoch walked with God.
Now I think that that is an encouragement to you and I. One of the things that we have seen all the way through this section, the end of chapter 10 and into chapter 11, about faith is that the faith that the author is talking about that is evident in the lives of the patriarchs that he is listing in Hebrews 11, it's the same faith that saves you and sanctifies you and secures you. Remember, it's not a different faith. If you and I were to read that Enoch pleased God because of his natural abilities, because he was born less of a sinner, because he was more pious, because he didn't sin as much, he was less depraved, he was less fallen, he had some natural talents, some great spiritual gift, some ability that he had to please God, if that's what we read and we thought our walk with God and being pleasing to God is going to be dependent upon some natural capacity that we have, you and I would have cause for despair because we could say, well, then we're not like Enoch. I can't have that kind of a walk with God because I don't have Enoch's natural talents. I don't have his abilities. I wasn't born into a privileged family. I couldn't go back and talk to my great-great-great-great-grandfather and hear about life before the fall. I didn't come from a godly lineage like Adam and then Seth and then Enosh and the rest of that line. I didn't come from them. Therefore, I can't have that kind of a walk that pleases the Lord.
But if you and I understand that the walk that Enoch had with the Lord was on the basis of his faith and that it was this faith that pleased the Lord, then you and I can have hope, can't we? Because the faith by which Enoch was saved and the faith by which Enoch walked with God and pleased God is the same faith that saves and sanctifies and secures you everlastingly. It's the exact same faith. You might be tempted to read of Enoch's faith that pleased the Lord and think to yourself, I need the secret recipe to that faith. Right? Is this a super-secret, special type of faith? No. The same faith that brought you to Jesus Christ, the same faith that God has granted to you so that you might know Him, is the same faith by which you walk with Him. It's the exact same faith. There's no secret to it.
His nearness, Enoch's nearness to God, was such that God took him. That's the record of Scripture. He walked with God and he walked from this world into the next. That creates some theological questions for us, some serious ones. This is unprecedented because nobody else did this. There was another person who was taken up into Heaven without dying and it was Elijah in 2 Kings 2. Elijah was taken up. He didn't die. He was taken up in a flaming chariot and Elisha saw that. So there's only two people who it is recorded have gone into Heaven without suffering physical death. This testimony is not made of Paul or Peter or John or Daniel or Isaiah or any other saint in all of Scripture.
So if your hope sitting here today is—you're thinking to yourself, If I walk I walk with God close enough, I won't have to suffer death. I'll just be sucked up into Heaven. Now, I happen to believe that the church is going to get sucked up into Heaven at some point. It's called the rapture. But I don't think that that is the function of us walking with God in nearness really closely. This is a very unique situation that Enoch enjoyed. He did not see death. He never walked through death. He never laid down and had his grandchildren gathered around the foot of his bed, watching him pass from this life into the next.
He was translated at the age of 365 years, which by the way is a comparatively young and short life compared to the other patriarchs. His son, Methuselah, lived 969 years. So that means that basically Enoch was taken up having lived only a third of the life that his son lived. So for us, that would be like one of us being taken up into Heaven at the age of 35 or 40 years old, something like that. He was relatively young; 365 years doesn't sound that young to you, but it was young comparative for Enoch.
Now, the fact that he was taken up into Heaven in his body without suffering death, this raises a few theological issues. Let me give them to you. What happened to him? What happened to his body? That's the big issue. What happened to Enoch's body? Was he taken up to Heaven in his body? Well, we know that he didn't leave his body behind because when people are taken to Heaven and leave their body behind, we have a word for that, right? We call that death. All of us are going to do that, so Enoch isn't unique by that measure. So we know that he didn't leave his body behind. We know that his body was taken up into Heaven.
So then this is another theological question. Is he still in that same physical body that he walked the earth in here? Does he have that physical body in Heaven now? Or did he go to Heaven and then die in Heaven and something happened to his body in Heaven? Did Enoch die in Heaven eventually? The author of Hebrews says he didn't die. And do people die in Heaven? That doesn't seem right, does it?
So is it possible then that Enoch's body was taken to Heaven and that he was translated on the way to Heaven and that his mortal body became an immortal body, that he was transfigured as we will be someday when we see Christ at the resurrection and we're given resurrected bodies? So did Enoch then get taken up to Heaven and then his earthly, natural body became a spiritual, heavenly body so that he has a resurrected or a glorified body now in Heaven? Is that possible? If that's what happened, then Jesus Christ is not the firstfruits of the resurrection, Enoch is. That's a problem.
So what do we do with Enoch, and Elijah for that matter, because there happens to be two Old Testament saints who went into Heaven without suffering death. Enoch and Elijah. I'm not going to start a new denomination over this, but this is possible and it's been suggested that those two, Enoch and Elijah, will come back during the Great Tribulation and they are the two witnesses mentioned in Revelation that end up dying. And then therefore they will end up dying at some point. Their body is being preserved in a natural state now in Heaven, but they will die at some point, and then they will be just like the rest of us. “It is appointed unto man once to die, but after this the judgment” (Heb. 9:27 KJV). So they will end up suffering death as well. That's possible. Once again, I'm not starting a denomination on it. I don't think it's all that big of an issue.
Here's the short answer to the question. We don't know. We don't know what happens to their bodies. We don't know what's going to happen. That's going to be fun to find out, but at this point we just simply do not know. I do think that we can assume that they didn't leave their bodies behind. I think we can assume that they didn't die in Heaven. And I think that we can assume that their bodies were not translated on the way to Heaven, which means that, if you eliminate all the possibilities, the one you're left with is the answer, which means that they must be in Heaven right now with the same bodies that they lived in on this earth. And for every atheist and agnostic who might hear those words, they think, “Man, you guys are all a bunch of looney tunes. You're all crazy to believe something that absurd.”
From the book of Jude, we gain another detail about Enoch's life, and it tells us a little bit more, that he prophesied of a judgment that was to come and he spoke of ungodly sinners doing ungodly deeds in an ungodly way and being judged for their ungodliness. The fact that Enoch prophesied that tells us a little something about the times in which Enoch lived. Remember, his grandson was Noah. By the time Noah gets on the boat, there's eight people on the face of the planet, amongst millions, who believed. I think Enoch lived in some very dark times. In fact, I would suggest to you that probably the days in which Enoch lived were darker than the days in which you and I live. So you can never use the excuse, “I can't walk with God in a world like this.” Yeah, he walked with God for 365 years in a world like this. In fact, I would suggest that he walked with God in a world that was worse than the world that we live in. In many ways, we are shielded and protected from some of the wickedness and by the restraining influences from some of the wickedness that I think Enoch would have had to live through.
Like his great-grandfather, Noah, he was a preacher of righteousness. Noah was called a preacher of righteousness in 2 Peter 2:5. Noah preached repentance and faith toward God and turning from sin. All the while when he was building the ark he was mocked and ridiculed by the people around him who remained in unbelief. Noah was simply following in the tradition of his great-grandfather, Enoch, who also preached of judgment. He prophesied of the judgment that was to come, I think probably warning about the flood and eventually warning also to us about the judgment that is also to come upon this world still yet.
And you and I are called to do this very thing. And I think this is encouraging for us and for the audience of Hebrews. See, he is mentioning Enoch here. Enoch was a man who prophesied and preached the truth and confronted the sin, the hostility, the rebellion, the wickedness, and the ungodliness of his age, and he did so faithfully for 365 years. I promise you that God is not calling you to do that in this world for 365 years. At best, He might be calling you to do that in this world for 100. If Enoch did it for 365, you can do it for 100. And the audience to which the author of Hebrews is writing, these were people who had already experienced a great hostility, a great conflict of suffering over their faith. These were people who were standing in the midst of a hostile and unbelieving world, and they were called to go out and proclaim the truth and to stand strong in the face of that opposition and to be unbending and unyielding and unwavering in their faith. What a perfect example Enoch is of that very thing.
So then what does it mean to walk with God? Don't you wish that Scripture would give us a better description of that, even from Genesis 5? I can tell you generally what it means. We know that Enoch approached God by faith and that he was righteous, that he was justified, that he came to God in the same way that Abel did, believing that on the basis of a sacrifice that his sins would be covered and that he could have a fellowship and a relationship with God. He walked in obedience to God, faithful to speak the truth in a hostile world. And there is obviously an intimacy and a fellowship and a joy that is part of walking with God.
But see, all of that is just general stuff. That's not specific details. You and I, we want the details, don't we? I want to know what time Enoch got up every morning to spend time with God. Was it four? Was it four thirty? Was it five? How many hours before work did he get up to pray? How long did he pray? How long did he spend reading his Bible? Did he read it once a day, twice a day, morning, evening? See, I want the secret sauce. Did he have family devotions? What did those look like at every stage? I want to know that. Did he pray with his family? Did he sing with his family? How many times a week was he in church? In what ways did he serve the Lord? How did he serve the Lord? I want the details of this, right?
I promise you that if I were to write a book called The Walk of Enoch or Enoch's Walk or The Secret to Intimacy with God from the Life of Enoch, I could sell millions of copies of that book. Not to anybody here because there would probably be some cerebral palsy–crippled YouTube celebrity somewhere who would call me out for making a big deal out of just a few little scant passages of Scripture somewhere. But I promise you that books have been written on far less biblical detail than we have of the life of Enoch. So I could write Enoch's Walk or The Walk of Enoch, and the title would need to be worked a little bit, and I would have to work everything in between as well, but I could write that title and it would sell across evangelicalism—the secrets to intimacy with God—because we want the details of that.
I think Scripture gives us all the details that we need, not necessarily the details that we want but the details that we need. We know that Enoch was a family man, right? He had sons and daughters. So if you think that you can't walk with God because you have small children or because you don't have children or because you have lots of children, Enoch would say differently. Yeah, I can't walk with God because I have a spouse and this requires too much. I have a job. I'm too busy. Enoch would say differently. I think what we see in Enoch is he had a right relationship with the Lord. He trusted God and His Word. He spoke the truth to others. He was faithful in his generation.
And honestly, a walk with God for every saint is going to look different. For every person in this room a walk with God is going to look different than from every other person in this room. If you don't have children, your walk with God looks different than the family with young children. If you have young children, your walk with God looks different than a family with older children. For a family with older children, your walk looks different than it will from the grandparents in your life. Your walk with God is going to look different at every stage of your life, depending on what your background has been and how you grew up and what your level of understanding is and what your job demands are and what your physical capabilities are. It's going to look different for every person.
See, it would be wrong for me to say these are the secrets to intimacy with God and then to give you some pattern to fill, some recipes, some secret sauce, some secret to intimacy. It doesn't work that way. We approach God with faith. We believe God and His Word. We take Him at His Word. We serve Him in our generation faithfully. We do what He asks us to do. We walk in obedience to Him, believing His Word, trusting that He will use us in our day and in our time, and we walk in humility with the Lord. That is what it means to walk with God. You want to know why you don't know what it looked like for Enoch specifically? Because it wouldn't matter if it gave you all of the details, if the author gave you all of the details of what that looks like, all of the specifics. It wouldn't necessarily apply to your life specifically.
We do know this, that without faith it is impossible to please the Lord, to walk with Him, because we first must believe that He is and that He rewards those who diligently seek Him. And then it is up to us to diligently seek Him, given everything that we have to deal with, and to walk with Him faithfully and to be faithful to Him, to be obedient. The same faith that brought you to repentance and trust in Jesus Christ is the same faith that keeps you there. It's the same faith by which you walk with Him each and every day. Colossians 2:6: “As you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him.” How did you receive Him as Lord? By faith. Guess what? That's the secret to your walk, by faith. I believe that God is, I believe that He will reward me, and so I will diligently seek Him. Because you and I must trust that what we do not see is actually true, and we must live with the confidence that what is unseen to us and intangible now, what is only in promise form now, is a reality in the future and a reality in eternity. And we live in light of that. That's what it means to walk in faith. That's what it means to walk with God. The person who does that, whatever that looks like in your life, that is what pleases the Lord. With that faith, God is well pleased.