Walking With God

Grace Fellowship Church

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This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To access other sermons or to learn more about us, please visit our website at graceedmonton .ca.

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Well, if you would, I invite you to turn with me to the book of Genesis. Genesis chapter 5.

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Today we're going to be looking at the whole chapter. And as we prepare to do that,

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I want to recount a quote or a story from one of my favorite books.

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In the classic book, Knowing God, if many of you have read that book,

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J. I. Packer tells the story of one of his scholarly colleagues who got into a clash with one of his academic superiors over important matters that were related to the gospel.

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In this man's case, in this interaction, as he, a faculty member, took a principled stand for the truth, it ultimately ended in the shipwrecking of his academic career.

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And on one sunny afternoon, this man and J. I. Packer walked in the sunshine and this scholar, this professor, spoke and lamented about the mistreatment that he had endured for the sake of the gospel.

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And that even at the hands of professing believers. And as this man spoke with Packer, he pled his case and made, in the midst of it, a profound statement, but framed in a rather casual manner.

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He uttered to J. I. Packer these words, he said, But it does not matter, for I have known

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God, and they have not. At the statement, Packer was taken aback not only by the words themselves, but by the manner in which this man said these things.

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And he thought to himself, and later wrote in his book, he said, Not many of us would ever naturally say that we have known

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God. The words imply a definiteness, a matter of factness of experience, to which most of us, if we are honest, have to admit that we are still strangers.

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We claim, perhaps, to have a testimony. We can rattle off our conversion story with the best of them, but I suspect, he writes, that with most of us, this experience of God has never become so vivid as that.

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It was several years ago that I read this excellent book, and it's interesting how single sentences or paragraphs can stand out in the midst of an entire book.

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Of all that is written in this wonderful book, this is the paragraph that I most often remember from J .I.

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Packer. It is the single most memorable aspect of this book for me, and it is because of this that it forces us to grapple with a basic and yet most sobering query.

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The query is this, do I know God? Have I known

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God? Or if I can pose the question to you, brothers and sisters.

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It is not a query into whether or not you have a testimony of God's saving grace in your life.

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It is not, do you know the gospel? Or do you know how to know

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God? It's not even the question, did you once enjoy at some time in the past a blissful season of communion with God?

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No, but have you and do you presently enjoy an intimate knowledge of God through consistent and personal communion with him?

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When it comes to this question, I'm inclined to agree with Packer's damning verdict.

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He continues, he says, we need frankly to face ourselves at this point.

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We are perhaps orthodox evangelicals. We can state the gospel clearly.

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We can smell unsound doctrine from a mile away. If you ask how one may know

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God, we can at once produce the right formula. Yet the gaiety, the goodness, and the unfetteredness of spirit, which are the marks of those who have known

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God, are rare among us. Perhaps they are in some other, rarer perhaps than they are in some other

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Christian circles, whereby comparison, evangelical truth, is less clearly known and understood.

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Translation, it is possible, and it is a catastrophic claim, that even for the redeemed among us, it is possible to have all of our doctrinal

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T's crossed, our theological I's dotted, our creedal formulations in place impeccably so, to be redeemed and regenerated, to be at peace with God himself, free from his searching wrath, to believe his gospel and to seek to obey his word, and yet to be strangely aloof, distant from, and deprived of a present, personal, and vibrant relationship with God.

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Dear brothers and sisters, I ask you again, before God, it's not to me you are to answer this question, but before God, who searches every man's heart, before him alone, does this describe you?

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I must confess that the question itself nags at my own conscience. For many of us, we can testify that we have had, we have enjoyed sweet seasons of closeness with God.

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Perhaps we lean too heavily on those past seasons. But our present confession must be that for many of us, we have allowed such fruitful seasons of communion to give way to a spiritual dryness, to a barrenness of soul, to a relational lethargy that keeps us from walking in daily fellowship with our

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God. And because of some kind of, and there's only one way

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I think that we can frame this, because of some kind of sin -induced insanity, we have learned how to be content in this state.

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Some of us for weeks, some of us for months, and some of us for years.

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Dear friends, does this describe you? As we come to Genesis 5 today, we're confronted by an example.

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Probably many of you, if you've read the text in advance, or if you're familiar with it, you are anticipating where I'm going with this.

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But we are encountering the man Enoch, and the nature of his relationship with God.

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And I hope that looking at this together, it might blast you, some of you, out of your present state of spiritual apathy.

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And as we see his life, I want to challenge you with this truth, that one of, and perhaps the primary defining characteristic of the true people of God is this.

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It is a close walk with God. And I believe this text shows us that the greatest way that we can spend our lives,

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I hope with God's help to reconvince you of this, for those of you who need convincing, that the greatest way that we can spend our lives is to know, is to pursue, is to walk with God as our soul's only lasting reward.

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So we have our Bibles open to Genesis 5. We're going to read the full chapter.

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And this will give us a thought back and forth about this, but it will give us a sense of the pattern that we see in Genesis 5.

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I'll give you a bit of advance notice. I want you to look with me as we read, and see how it is, almost as if Moses has copy and pasted the same paragraph ten times in this chapter, except for one paragraph.

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So let's look at it together. Genesis 5, verse 1. This is God's word.

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This is the book of the generations of Adam. When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God.

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Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them man when they were created.

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When Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness after his image, and named him

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Seth. The days of Adam after he fathered Seth were 800 years, and he had other sons and daughters.

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Thus all the days that Adam lived were 930 years, and he died.

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When Seth had lived 105 years, he fathered Enosh.

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Seth lived after he fathered Enosh 807 years, and had other sons and daughters.

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Thus all the days of Seth were 912 years, and he died. When Enosh had lived 90 years, he fathered

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Kenan. Enosh lived after he fathered Kenan 850 years, and had other sons and daughters.

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Thus all the days of Enosh were 905 years, and he died. When Kenan had lived 70 years, he fathered

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Mahalalel. Kenan lived after he fathered Mahalalel 840 years, and had other sons and daughters.

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Thus all the days of Kenan were 910 years, and he died. When Mahalalel had lived 65 years, he fathered

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Jared. Mahalalel lived after he fathered Jared 830 years, and had other sons and daughters.

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Thus all the days of Mahalalel were 895 years, you can probably finish the sentence, and he died.

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When Jared had lived 162 years, he fathered Enoch. Jared lived after he fathered

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Enoch 800 years, and had other sons and daughters. Thus all the days of Jared were 962 years, and he died.

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When Enoch had lived 65 years, he fathered Methuselah. Enoch walked with God after he fathered

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Methuselah 300 years, and had other sons and daughters. Thus all the days of Enoch were 365 years.

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Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him. When Methuselah had lived 187 years, he fathered

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Lamech. Methuselah lived after he fathered Lamech 782 years, and had other sons and daughters.

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Thus all the days of Methuselah were 969 years, and he died. When Lamech had lived 182 years, he fathered his son and called his name

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Noah, saying, Out of the ground that the Lord has cursed, this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the painful toil of our hands.

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Lamech lived after he fathered Noah 595 years, and had other sons and daughters.

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Thus all the days of Lamech were 777 years, and he died.

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After Noah was 500 years old, Noah fathered Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

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So we have looked at this passage. You have already begun to see the pattern. What I want to do,

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I will not take you through a 32 -verse, verse -by -verse exposition of this chapter.

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But what I intend to do is to take you through a survey. We are going to look at a brief survey of the chapter in itself in the next few minutes, and then

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I want to hone in together on verses 22 -24 and look at the life of Enoch.

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Now as we enter into chapter 5, in the first three verses, we see a brief summary of the first four chapters of Genesis.

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Here Moses takes us back to the garden, and he introduces us to the second of ten

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Toledots. You have heard that word before in the book of Genesis. You will remember from our earlier studies in Genesis that the pattern in this book is one of narrative,

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Toledot, narrative, Toledot, and so on and so forth.

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This word Toledot is a Hebrew term that can be translated as, these are the generations of, or the generations of this particular person.

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So we looked at that first Toledot, these punctuating words that make their way through Genesis, in Genesis 2 -4, dealing with the generations of the heavens and the earth.

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And now in chapter 5 in verse 1, we come to our second, recounting the generations of Adam.

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Now if we can see this together, we'll see right away that the shape of this chapter will just fall open before us, that we are introduced to this

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Toledot, and then in verses 4 -31, we find the ten generations of Adam, this

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Toledot expounded or expanded upon, unrolled before us. Now, I had initially planned to do a bit of a deep dive into the lengthy lifespans of these men.

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And it's interesting for those of you who have experience preaching, you know that sometimes it is a travesty when you do a great deal of work, and then you just have to set it aside.

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I had a good ten minutes or so on the lifespan. That would have been very distracting for us.

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But I want to take us through and maybe answer a couple of questions. Did these men really live this long?

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I think that when we look at the vocabulary and the grammatical construction of the passage, it leaves us with no option but to accept that these men lived these very, very long lives.

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The average life expectancy amongst these ten men, when we average it out, was 912 literal years.

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And the question is, how can this be? First, it is because God expressly permitted it.

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You might recall that men and women, man and woman, were made to live, to eat from the tree of life, and not from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

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And yet, because of sin, death entered the world. And if we were to look at Genesis chapter 6 and verse 3, we can begin to gather that there,

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God actually places a limit upon their lives. And so it is by divine decree that they lived as long as they did.

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But there might be a natural explanation for this. And some people have sought to do just that.

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People have looked at, for instance, before the flood, was there an increased amount of water, layers and layers of moisture, in the atmosphere, blocking out the harmful radiation of the sun?

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I looked at, in some great degree, the regeneration of cells. You can see

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I went down this rabbit hole quite deep. And yet, we don't have to go that far.

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And simply suffice it to say that God, according to His plan, enabled men to live that length of time.

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And it might seem like an outrageous claim, but we can go to sources even outside of the Bible that corroborate this.

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If we were to go to one of the oldest ancient documents in the world, the

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Sumerian king list, a document from ancient

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Mesopotamia, we can trace it back to the second millennia

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BC, where we find not a list of ten figures, as we see in Genesis 5, but a list of eight, rather close, men who lived extensively long periods of time, who enjoyed reigns as kings even in the thousands of years.

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Now, it's very likely, when they're telling the stories of their kings, that they're going to exaggerate it, but there was an expectation that men prior to the flood, are post -Diluvian fathers, are fathers before the great deluge, lived a very long time.

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And, if I can find my place in this chapter, as we look at these ten generations of man, the descendants from this line of Seth, we see this distinctive pattern, as I've already noted, that they are born, that they have children, that they live and then that they die.

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In fact, the pattern is so consistent, as I mentioned, it is almost as if Moses created a carbon copy document and simply filled in the names and the years as they took place.

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And I believe the question we might ask is, why would Moses do that? Have such a uniform structure and then highlight one individual in the passage.

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I believe it is because Moses is taking a highlighter of sorts in his authorship and he is highlighting verses 22 through verses 24, because it is different.

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That one of these things is not like the other and it points to the man, of course,

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Enoch. And for the remainder of our time, I want us to look at what was so unique about Enoch and what it teaches us as Christians today.

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Now, the first characteristic of his life that we see is this, that Enoch had, if I can put it this way, a

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Godward life. That the orientation of his life was directed

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Godward. That he existed, he lived and moved and had his being in relation to and in fellowship with God.

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In verses 22 and 24, we read about the defining mark of Enoch's life.

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We are told, Enoch walked with God. Now, some commentators,

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John MacArthur is included in this camp, have said that there is really only one other person amongst the pre -deluge fathers who walked with God and they would point to Noah in Genesis chapter 6 and verse 9.

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You can look there with me for a moment. This is in fact why my wife and I named our firstborn

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Noah. Because we read there, these are the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation.

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Noah walked with God. But there is in fact another reference that we might be tempted to miss or inclined to miss if we don't recall what has gone before us.

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If we think back to Genesis chapter 3 and verse 8, as Adam and Eve heard the footsteps of God in the garden and hid themselves, we see that distinctive language that he came walking in the garden.

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This no doubt demonstrates that God came to Adam and Eve in a manner that would have been expected, or sorry, in which he would have expected to find them without any hindrance, walking in the garden.

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So we see a recapitulation here of Adam and Eve walking in the garden, of here now

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Enoch walking with God, and in the future of Noah walking with God as well. Now what does this all mean?

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That Enoch, like Noah, or like a pre -fall Adam, walked with God? Well this

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Hebrew verb that is used to describe walking denotes a state of ongoing intimacy with God.

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It speaks to a consistent pattern of undeterred devotion.

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And there is an interesting literary device, it's interesting how you can read things and miss them after even having read them who knows how many times, that in fact there is a repetition that occurs that I did not note until my study this week.

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At the beginning of verse 22 we read that Enoch walked with God, and then again in verse 24 that Enoch walked with God, and he was not.

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We're not merely told once that Enoch walked with God, but there is this use of repetition to convey something significant, a significance that should not be lost on us.

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And an Old Testament commentator, Kael and Delitzsch, or two commentators I should say, spell this out, they say that this represents the closest communion with the personal

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God, the personal God of the Bible, a walking as it were by the side of God.

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And this is what is happening. Last week we heard our brother Sam preach on the difference between the offspring of Cain and the offspring of Seth.

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You might recall this. This has been a theme that we have looked at again and again and again. Two lines that the offspring of the serpent, the offspring of the woman, the lineage of the

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Messiah, and the lineage that would die out in the flood. And as Moses continues this chapter, what he is doing is he is comparing and contrasting these two groups.

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Cain's lineage was made of murderous, rebellious, and worldly men.

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While Seth's lineage was made up of those who called upon the name of the

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Lord. And more than that, we see now those who enjoyed intimate fellowship with God, exemplified, is a better word, by Enoch.

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What this means is that to belong to the people of God is not merely to call upon the name of the

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Lord. It is more than that. It is to walk with God.

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And to neglect such a walk with God is a character quality not of the righteous, not of the people of God, but of the unjust, the unrighteous, and those who are not right with him.

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To use Sam's language from last week, those who do not walk with the

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Lord, it is to belong to the world rather than to the Lord.

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And we see that this kind of relationship was not reserved only for Adam, pre -fall, excuse me, or for Noah, or for Enoch, but throughout our

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Bibles it is carried on. So that in Leviticus chapter 26 and verse 12, we read these words.

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The Lord says, And I will walk among you, and will be your God, and you shall be my people.

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Or if we were to fast forward to John chapter 14, we find that this walking with God finds its climax in the person and work of the

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Lord Jesus Christ, in his finished work. In fact, this is the very purpose for which we have been saved.

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It is characteristic of salvation. To possess salvation, both to know and to walk in communion with God.

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John 17 .3, our Lord prays this. He says, And this is eternal life.

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What is eternal life? Living forever? Is that it merely? No. And this is eternal life that they know you, the only true

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God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. So brethren,

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I come to you again, and I ask you before God, do you know this

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God? Or is it the case that you have been in a state, not of knowing

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God and of walking with God, but in a state of backsliding, where a personal acquaintance with him has become, at best, a thing of the past?

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I say this to you, heart to heart, as one who was... My prayer for you down this hallway was that the

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Lord would work on you as he has worked on me in my study of the text this week. We cannot allow ourselves, brethren, to be anesthetized by our lukewarm,

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Western Christian culture, to a culture that places almost no emphasis, no value at all in having a personal, living, vibrant acquaintance with God.

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But if we are to align ourselves with the Bible, as opposed to the culture, then we must be those who pursue an intimacy with God that far surpasses what it is that we see in the world around us day to day.

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Far surpasses what we see in the church around us from week to week.

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To be distant from God is to be contrary, it is completely contrary to our very identity as blood -bought

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Christians and, as Scripture calls us, friends of God. And sometimes the clearest way to show you this is to not compare ourselves to the people of today, but to go a few generations back and compare ourselves to those who maybe had something of a different experience with him.

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Now, as I was reading this, and I realize I forgot my book, I'm going to step out of the pulpit for a moment.

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As I was reading this passage and thinking about how

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I might illustrate the life of Enoch in something that was a little bit more current, perhaps,

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I thought of a man who, to me, strikes me as probably the closest one to a modern

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Enoch. This is the life and diary of David Brainerd, a young man who walked with God and then was not.

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Now, he died unlike Enoch, and we'll talk about that, but I want to share with you some of his example of what it means not to be an old man, he died at the age of 29, but to be a young person, what describes many of you in this room, to be a young person and yet to have a serious, mature relationship with God.

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Now, the life of David Brainerd, if some of you may have heard of him, may know of him, we will hear about his brother,

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I think, in great detail at the conference in a couple of weeks, but he was born in 1718 in America, in Haddam, Connecticut, and as a young man, he aspired to the pastoral office, and so he did what all young men who aspired to the pastoral office did, in that time and place, he enrolled in Yale College to begin studying to be a pastor, and as he was studying, he encountered, as we sometimes do, a member of the faculty that he did not agree with, and speaking some ungracious words about him, he found himself expelled from Yale College, and being cast out of Yale College, he had only one dream, only one ambition for his life, that was to preach the gospel, and looking at his options, it was clear at this time that he could not serve as a pastor in the

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Presbyterian Church, and so he chose the next best thing, and said, I will go and be a missionary to the

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American Indians, the First Nations people of that northeastern region of the

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United States, and going there and working amongst the

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American Indians, he endured some tremendous hardships, but also some tremendous blessings, some wondrous results as he ministered the gospel, men and women being saved, young First Nations people around the fire, praying with tears in their eyes that the

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Lord would make them holy or strike them down dead so that they would never sin again, and in the midst of this people ministering to them, he contracted tuberculosis, and as he contracted tuberculosis, in God's kind providence, he had a friendship with a man further down,

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I believe it was in Massachusetts, if I'm not mistaken, Northampton, and went down to his friend's home.

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His friend's name was Jonathan Edwards, and there he lived out the final months of his life, and Jonathan Edwards took all of his diary entries and put it together into the

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Life and Diary of David Brainerd by Jonathan Edwards, and he spent his last few months there before, until in October of 1747, about five months after he arrived, he died there in Jonathan Edwards' home, and in this biography of David Brainerd, we read some of the most remarkable things about this man's walk with God.

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This was in fact the most remarkable aspect of his life, that he was a man that walked with God.

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He was a man of unceasing prayer. His diary reads like an anthology of some of the most commanding and earnest prayers in the

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English language. There was nothing in this world that David Brainerd desired more than communion with God and likeness to God, and yet because of his own sin and the resulting separation that he often felt, he had a name for this experience that he often encountered.

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He called it his pleasing pain. In one of his journal entries, he writes this,

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Oh, for more of God in my soul. Oh, that I might not loiter on my heavenly journey.

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Jonathan Edwards would often hear Brainerd's earnest prayers through the walls of his

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Northampton home as he prayed aloud in these extended times of fellowship with God.

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Of these prayers, Edwards writes this, he says, there was something remarkable to be observed in the matter and manner of his prayers.

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Dear friends, you may not be a David Brainerd, but is there something remarkable about the matter and manner of your prayers?

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Or have you sunk down to the lowest ebb of our

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Christian culture in which we live, where you have become satisfied with something of a mediocre relationship with God, a lukewarm walk with him.

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Some of us need to come to grips with the fact that we are in a state of spiritual unhealth that needs to be addressed and changed immediately.

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We are not walking as those who belong to the Lord, but as those who belong to the world.

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And I could tell you, brothers and sisters, leave here today and pray more. Just do it.

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Go and do it. Will it. Go and pray more, and the Lord bless you. But what

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I would like to do is provide some practical encouragements. Because some of you, if you are like me, as I've been studying this text, are thinking to yourself, my walk with the

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Lord must improve. It cannot. It must not remain as it is now.

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So a few practical helps I want to give you. Just three.

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Number one, make a tenacious commitment to daily walk with God.

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For many of us, our problem is this, that we simply expect a near and intimate walk with God to materialize out of nowhere based solely on good intentions.

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But if I have, and likely if you have learned anything about yourself, about myself, it is this, that a vigorous prayer life does not arise out of feelings of spontaneity, but out of a committed plan to walk with God each day.

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And so my exhortation to you is this, make an appointment with God each day and keep it.

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I agree with the words of Albert Edward Day. He said, we Protestants are an undisciplined people.

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Therein lies the reason for much of the dearth of spiritual insights and serious lack of moral power.

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Many of us, and I recall a time when I realized this for myself, that the reason why

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I was not praying as I ought to was not because I did not want to, but because I simply did not organize my life in a manner that facilitated that praying to God, that facilitated that walk with God.

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And so dear friends, determine before the Lord, go home tonight and do this.

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Determine a time and a place. Have a prayer closet in your house.

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If you live with your parents and you have a room, make it your room, make it your car, make it somewhere that you can go each day and spend time with Him.

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Sometimes we over spiritualize this, but I have, and I'm not afraid to admit it, and I've counseled others to do the same.

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We'll set an alarm on my phone for 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes. I am going to pray this long and I will not stop until the alarm rings.

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And I will pray that length of time and the most remarkable thing happens 99 times out of 100, the alarm rings,

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I turn it off and I keep praying because I have prayed and I have entered in and I am enjoying communion with God and I do not want it to end.

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Arrange for prompts throughout the day. How many of us watch the lights, the shimmering screen on our phones when we brush our teeth or wash our dishes and how we might be able to redeem that time by simply putting that face down and saying,

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Lord I will pray for the nations when I brush my teeth. Or Lord when you wake me in the night

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I will pray for those in our church who I know are suffering and are experiencing ill health.

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Put a note on your computer. Set reminders on your phone. We have so much technology and frankly we use it for such poor purposes.

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The second way that we can maintain communion with God is to maintain a clear conscience.

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Nothing short circuits our daily communion with God like a bad conscience.

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Make, and this is a key word, specific. Make the specific confession of all known sins a vital part of your daily prayer life.

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Not simply Lord forgive me for my sin today but Lord forgive me for that harsh word that I spoke to my wife, to my sister, to my mother during breakfast time.

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I said this and that was vile and I never want to say it again.

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Oh Lord I confess it to you trusting that you have, that you will forgive me and Lord cleanse me from this unrighteousness.

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Keep short accounts with God throughout the day. If you find yourself in the act of sin, it is possible to stop in that moment and confess it even then.

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You do not have to finish. You do not have to put yourself into the dog house for a day or a week or a month but bring it to God then.

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And if I can say number three make time for extended periods of concerted prayer.

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When was the last time you took a day off to run errands? Now let me ask you when was the last time you took a day off to spend that day just with the

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Lord? To say I'm going to have a plan for the day. I'm going to read a large chunk of scripture.

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I'm going to go there with my Bible and my notebook alone and before him bring all of my needs to him.

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Commune with him. Hear him speak from his word. Respond in prayer. Albert Martin, if any of you are familiar with him, he has in one of his books entitled

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You Lift Me Up. Such a piercing example of this. He says that we are like sailboats in the ocean.

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And if any of you have ever owned a sailboat well I'm going to talk to you afterwards but if you are acquainted with sailboats in the ocean, they accumulate barnacles on the bottom of the boat.

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And what will often happen in a sailboat is this. That as the sailboat accumulates barnacles, the mast can be up the wind can be blowing and yet there is drag in the water and the captain of that boat realizes what is going on.

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That the sail is fine, that everything is as it should be and the reason why it's going so slow is because of the friction in the water.

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And Martin says what we need to do from time to time is dry dock our sailboats.

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To dry dock our spiritual lives. To remove the barnacles as it were.

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He says this. We need times in a spiritual dry dock to scrape from our souls the spiritual barnacles impeding our walk with God.

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If we are not concerned enough about this issue of maintaining spiritual maintaining our spiritual figure to occasionally block out everything from our schedules other than intense and serious dealings with God sooner or later it is most likely the case that we will begin to suffer one or more of the manifestations of backsliding in our lives.

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Make time in the next month to have a day or to have half a day or if you are a busy parent to have two hours where you go and simply be before the

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Lord and to walk with Him. Now that is my longest point

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I promise. The second characteristic that we find in Enoch is this.

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A God pleasing life. Walking with God consists of more than just an active prayer life.

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It consists of a faith filled and faithful walk of life.

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A life that seeks not only to know God but to please God. Now this has been argued in many different ways from this text.

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But we'll start with the big picture. We'll narrow in. Now firstly it has been argued that the years of Enoch's life hold some kind of spiritual significance.

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That Enoch's span of life was 365 years and there is a theological mathematician

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I know of numerology and other studies but I didn't realize they were mathematicians of theology.

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Who through the ages have represented this 365 as representing a whole period of time and thus a whole life.

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Now I don't think we should put our eggs in that basket. Where should we go?

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Secondly it has been argued that Enoch's birth order, that he is the seventh generation of man.

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That this speaks to his importance in the biblical narrative. It highlights him in the genealogy of Adam and it holds him up as an exemplary man of righteousness.

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Now, we have to give some credence to this. And the reason we need to is because the

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Bible does the same. If we were to look in Matthew chapter 1 and verse 17 let's go there for a moment.

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In Matthew chapter 1 and verse 17 we find the genealogies or the genealogy, excuse me, singular of Jesus.

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And as we go through chapter 1 and see that genealogy, in verse 17 we see actually a summary that breaks it up into 7 -ish types of generations.

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So that all the generations from Abraham to David were 14 generations 7 multiplied by 2 and from David to the deportation to Babylon 14 generations 7 multiplied by 2 and from the deportation to Babylon to the

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Christ 14 generations, 7 generations multiplied by 2. Now, you might say,

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Shane, that's still a bit of a stretch. If we were to go to Jude verse 14 single chapter and in the 14th verse we read that Enoch was, and they highlight this,

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Jude highlights it specifically, was the 7th from Adam and speaking to, quoting actually from 1st

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Enoch an extra biblical book, Behold the Lord comes with 10 ,000 of his holy ones.

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Speaking of those who are going to come and judge the wicked. Now, there is something to be said for this number 7, that Enoch had a role as the 7th generation starting with Adam.

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R .C. Sproul says biblical genealogies are selective in order to reinforce theological motifs or to aid readers in memorizing the genealogical data.

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But that, we are not going to put all of our eggs in that basket either. Thirdly, and most importantly,

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Enoch as the 7th generation stands out as the,

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I guess total antithesis, I'll say, of the 7th man in Cain's line through Adam.

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We heard last week in chapter 4 of Lamech. You remember, he killed a man for wounding him.

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Now, if you were to go through the genealogy, what you would find is that Lamech, the man that we just heard of, was 7th in line when we include

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Adam. Just as Enoch is 7th in line when we include

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Adam. And what we are seeing here is that everything that Cain was not,

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Enoch was. As one commentator puts it, this line is clearly presented as an alternative to the line of the 7 generations of Cain.

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Where in Cain's line leads to a killer in the 7th generation, the comparable generation in Seth's line produces

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Enoch who walked with God and who did not die. And even in Enoch's name, it means to dedicate.

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That it was a life dedicated to God. Cain himself had a son that he named

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Enoch and he dedicated the city, a city that was founded based on his son's name.

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So we have one man who is dedicated as it were to the world or in relation to the world and Enoch here, a man dedicated to God.

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Matthew Poole says he lived as one whose eye was continually upon God, whose care and constant course and business it was to please

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God and to imitate Him and to maintain acquaintance and communion with Him as one devoted to God's service and wholly governed by His will.

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He walked not with the men of that wicked age or as they walked, but he boldly owned

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God and His ways in the midst of them. Now we don't have time to go through it but we see that this plays out in various places in the

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Old Testament where I want to show you that Enoch lived a life that pleased

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God. If you'll tolerate one more reference is to Hebrews chapter 11 in verse 5.

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In Hebrews chapter 11 in verse 5 we read this

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By faith by faith Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death and he was not found because God had taken him.

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Now before he was taken he was commended as having pleased God. Faith that pleased

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God and here it is. In verse 6 we often don't think of this verse in relation to Enoch and without faith it is impossible to please him.

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For whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.

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That Enoch not only lived a life of prayer, but Enoch lived a life of pleasing

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God by faith in God. It was a faith in God that led to action, a life of obedient faith.

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And the question I again ask you is do you walk with God in this manner?

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I fear that many of us we do not walk with God in this manner, but we limp alongside or behind or before or in some manner under the sun.

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And if I could turn again to the life of David Brainerd to use him as an example When he was cast out of Yale College he had the opportunity to live for the

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Lord, to continue to pursue him or to live for the world as our brother said last week.

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When his dreams were crushed what did he do? But he got on a horseback and he went out into the villages of the northeastern colonies of America to preach the gospel.

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And one of the things that he said in one of his prayers was this There's nothing in the world worth living for but doing good and finishing

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God's work. I see nothing else in the world that can yield any satisfaction besides living to God, pleasing

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Him and doing His whole will. Brethren, when we think about our walk with God are we walking with God in that way?

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Seeing that there is nothing in the world worth living for besides Him.

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Of walking with God in obedience to His word. Of giving Him as we said a few weeks ago our first and our best.

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And the third characteristic that we see in the life of Enoch perhaps the one that is second to walking with God is the most evident in the pattern and it is this an eternal life.

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So we have seen a Godward life, we have seen a God pleasing life and now an eternal life number three.

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In the middle of his life the Lord took Enoch and the question might be how did

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He take him? Why did He take him and where did He go? And we saw from Hebrews chapter 11 and verse 5 that when

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God took Enoch it says that He spared him from death and so like Elijah who we read about in 2nd

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Kings chapter 2 he did not merely die as Moses did at the top of a mountain and then go to be with the

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Lord but the Lord in fact took him to himself. Theologians have used the term to translate him that he was translated as opposed to dying as opposed to resurrecting as opposed to coming to him he was translated and it's interesting to note that Enoch's life was the shortest of all of the life spans in that genealogy, the genealogy of 10 that we find in chapter 5 and then entering into chapter 6.

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We have, for those of you who are close friends with the Parkers, you're familiar that they recently lost a young son and I could not get him out of my mind as I was thinking about this.

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Sometimes the most merciful thing that the Lord can do for His people is to take them when they are still young.

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We in fact read about this in Isaiah 57 and verse 1 where it says the righteous man perishes and no one lays it to heart.

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Devout men are taken away while no one understands. We ask why. And then he says for the righteous man is taken away from calamity.

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Matthew Henry as he's commenting on this he says, God often takes those soonest whom

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He loves best. The time they lose on earth is gained in heaven to their unspeakable advantage.

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The next time we see a young faithful man or woman on their deathbed we can say the

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Lord must love them first and best. He must desire something more for them that is to their advantage.

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And through this passage we see two realities at play. There is a consistent pattern of death.

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Though these men are of the line of Seth and are representative of the seed of the woman or the offspring of the woman and leading to the royal lineage of the

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Messiah, they still die as a consequence of their sin. And yet in the midst of all of this death, death as we read after death, after death, after death, there is a reminder that God's people have a lasting dwelling place that outshines this world in the pangs of death.

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Kenneth Matthews, a fantastic Bible commentator, says in this point Enoch's transport, his translation, yet says more for the broader salvific plan of God.

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It is signal confirmation of God's merciful designs to fulfill his promises of life and blessing.

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So much so, in fact, that the psalmists picked up on this and in Psalm 49, we won't go there, but you can write the reference down.

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Psalm 49 and verse 15. But God will ransom my soul from the power of Sheol, for he will receive me.

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He is going to take me. Or in Psalm 73 and verse 25, you guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me.

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He is going to take me where Enoch is, where he is, I will be with him also, so that all those who are in Adam will die.

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Looking forward to Christ, all those who are in the Lord Jesus Christ shall all be made alive.

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So brethren, we not only walk with God in prayer, we not only have the opportunity, the joyous blessing of communing with the living

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God, we not only have the opportunity to walk with him, to please him with our lives in obedience to his word, but brothers and sisters, we are walking to a destination.

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There is something at the end of this trail that we are on, at the end of this path, and it is everlasting as we sang just a moment ago, everlasting life with him.

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There we will rise to meet the Lord, and we will be with him forever and ever and ever.

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And the walk continues. To lean on Brainerd one last time, he lived this short life, walking with God.

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If you haven't read the biography, I commend it to you. I have the copy here, I'll lend it to you.

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He walked with the Lord through his life. He died an agonizing death. As he was preparing for death, he said to Jonathan Edwards in one moment, and he wrote it down, he said, and this quote is, it's simple but striking.

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He said, it is another thing to die than people imagine.

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That his lungs, as they filled with fluid, he said, it hurt so much that it was impossible with words to describe the pain that he endured as he died.

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He was only 29 years old, and he could have, in that moment, uttered up, like Job's wife, curse

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God and die! But what did he do? September 19th, 1747, in the final days of his life, he fought for breath, and he spoke these words.

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He said this, my heaven is to please God, and to glorify

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Him, and to give all to Him, and to be wholly devoted to His glory.

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That is the heaven I long for. That is my religion. That is my happiness.

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My heart goes to the burying place. It seems to me to be a desirable place, but to glorify

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God. I do not go to heaven to be advanced, but to give honor to God.

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It is no matter where I shall be stationed in heaven, whether I have a low seat, or a high seat there, but to love, please, and glorify

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God is all. This is a 29 year old man.

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Then he says, Lord, make this our prayer. He says, had

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I a thousand souls, if they were worth anything, I would give them all to God.

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He is not Christ. He is not the perfect exemplar, but how do we measure up even to this young man?

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How do we measure up to the example that we find in Enoch? Brethren, I ask you a third time.

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Is this the manner in which you are walking with God? That if he gave you a thousand souls, that you would give each one to him, one after a time, one after another, after another.

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Jesus said, I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet he shall live.

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And everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?

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That this is the trajectory of the Christian, that we have every reason, whether in good providences or in contrary providences, to be filled with joy, to have a smile on our faces, to long for that God, and while we are living yet in this body, to walk with that God.

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Christ died for this very purpose, that we might walk with him.

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Let's pray. Thank you for listening to another sermon from Grace Fellowship Church.

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If you would like to keep up with us, you can find us at Facebook, at Grace Fellowship Church, or our

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Instagram, at Grace Church, Y -E -G, all one word. Finally, you can visit us at our website, graceedmonton .ca.