Let's read together from Genesis chapter 4, verses 17 through chapter 5, verse 3.
And then we'll have a little bit more in Genesis chapter 5.
! And then we'll flip over to Hebrews 11, which is what our sermon series is based on right now.
So there's Bibles at the back.
If you'd like one, feel free anytime to get up and grab one.
That's no problem at all.
If you'd like a hard copy of a Bible, they're just on the back table.
And if you're here tonight and you're exploring Christianity and you don't have a Bible,
please take one of those with you.
We want you to take that.
And we'll read together now from God's Word.
It's also printed in the bulletin and will be on the screen as well.
Cain knew his wife and she conceived and bore Enoch.
When he built a city, he called the name of the city after the name of his son, Enoch.
Enoch was born Erod, and Erod fathered Mahu-jael, and Mahu-jael fathered Methushael, and Methushael fathered Lamech.
And Lamech took two wives.
The name of the one was Adah and the name of the other, Zillah.
Adab were Jabal.
He was the father of those who dwell in tents and have livestock.
His brother's name was Jubal.
He was the father of all those who play the lyre and pipe.
Zillah also bore Tubal-Cain.
He was the forger of all instruments of bronze and iron.
The sister of Tubal-Cain was Na'amah.
And Lamech said to his wives,
Ada and Zillah, hear my voice.
You wives of Lamech, listen to what I say.
I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me.
If Cain's revenge is sevenfold, then Lamech's is seventy-sevenfold.
And Adam knew his wife again, and she bore a son and called his name Seth.
For she said, God has appointed for me another offspring instead of Abel, for Cain killed him.
To Seth also a son was born, and he called his name Enosh.
And at that time people began to call upon the name of the Lord.
Chapter 5 says,
This is the book of the generations of Adam.
When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God.
Male and female, he created them, and he blessed them, and he named them man when they were created.
And when Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth.
And then down to verse 18 to 24 of this chapter.
When Jared had lived 162 years, he fathered Enoch.
Jared lived, after he fathered Enoch, 800 years, and had other sons and daughters.
Thus all the days of Jared were 962 years, and he died.
When Enoch had lived 65 years, he fathered Methuselah, and Enoch walked with God.
And after he fathered Methuselah, 300 years, and had other sons and daughters.
Thus all the days of Enoch were 365 years.
Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.
And from our sermon series text, Hebrews 11, we read,
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
For by it the people of old received their commendation.
By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God,
so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.
By faith, Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain,
through which he was commended as righteous.
God commending him by accepting his gifts.
And through his faith, though he died, he still speaks.
By faith, Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death.
And he was not found, because God had taken him.
Now, before he was taken, he was commended as having pleased God.
And without faith, it is impossible to please him.
For whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists,
and that he rewards those who seek him.
This is God's word.
Thank you, Corey.
It's great to be back with you in St. Columbus,
and to get to share with you on Enoch.
Now, as Corey said, we're doing a series of sermons at the moment,
going through Hebrews 11,
which is one of the most important chapters in the whole Bible,
in making sense of what it means to be a Christian,
because the chapter begins with the definition of faith that Corey just read.
Faith is something that gives you assurance of what you hope for.
So your hope is not just wishful thinking.
It's not cognitive dissonance.
It's actually something somehow that assures you in life.
And that assurance then shapes a deep conviction in this life,
based on things that you can't see or that you haven't seen,
and yet it grounds you, that conviction grounds you
in how you live in this world of things that you can see.
And then not just that, but it gives you that definition,
and then after that it gives you example after example after example
of that definition lived out in the lives of people from the Bible,
in the Old Testament.
So last week David preached on the first of those people, on Abel.
Abel, the brother of Cain, who offered God a better sacrifice by faith,
who was murdered by his brother Cain,
and yet being dead by faith he still speaks.
But tonight we're looking at Enoch.
And we just read the verses there about Enoch who did not die,
who was taken by God.
And what we're presented with there is a really strange story.
And it's different to Abel's story in obvious ways.
Abel is the story of someone who died,
and Enoch is the story of someone who did not.
Abel is the story of someone who by faith did something.
By faith he offered a better sacrifice than Cain.
But Enoch is the story of someone to whom something was done by faith.
By faith he was taken.
By faith he did not see death.
And that God took him from this life,
and he bypassed death entirely.
Now if you hear that and wonder,
is that a metaphor?
Or are you saying God really transported Enoch from earth straight to heaven?
Well, so the word that Hebrews 11 uses here,
which we have as something like taken in our English translation,
comes up in a couple of other important places in the New Testament.
Just to give you a sense of what this is really saying.
In the book of Acts,
when it's talking about Joseph,
the prince of Egypt who died there,
his bones being transported from Egypt to Canaan,
it's this word.
The bones began in one place and ended somewhere else.
Paul uses the same word in Galatians,
when he's talking about people who started off saying they believed the Christian message,
and then who ended up saying that they didn't.
They started in one place,
and they ended up in another.
And what Hebrews 11 is really saying,
is that there was a man called Enoch who started off in one place,
in this world,
in this life where we are,
and ended up somewhere else,
taken directly into the bosom of God,
bypassing death entirely.
And, of course,
Enoch isn't the first person in Hebrews 11 to make that journey.
Abel did the same thing.
Abel went from this life to the next.
Abel went from this world of sin and suffering and sorrow
into the presence of God.
But Abel made that journey through death,
and Enoch didn't.
And God simply took him.
And after telling us that,
the next verse then looks back on Enoch's life,
on the kind of character of life that he had.
And that tells us about what faith looked like in his life.
Enoch's life pleased God.
He believed that God exists,
and he believed that God rewards those who seek him.
In our culture,
when you hear,
he believed that God exists,
maybe you hear that,
and you think,
okay,
so he accepted an idea,
and a dry idea,
like something you would maybe accept
because you've been to a philosophy lecture,
an intellectual proposition,
just like saying,
I believe in gravity,
or I believe in human rights,
or I believe that white wine goes better
than red wine with chicken.
But that's,
when he says,
when it's talking about you must believe that God exists,
it's talking about something completely different.
Now,
if you read some other English translations of Hebrews 11,
maybe you'll see a translation that says,
whoever comes to God must believe that God is.
Okay?
It's a different way to translate the verse.
It's a hard verse to translate into English.
So that God is.
That's the thing that you must believe.
And it's not talking about the existence of God
simply as an idea,
as a proposition.
Instead,
what it's saying is what you find throughout the whole of the Bible
in how God reveals himself to people.
Okay?
Think back to when God reveals himself to Moses.
Moses,
the burning bush.
And Moses asks God,
who are you?
What is your name?
And God reveals his name by saying,
I am who I am.
Okay?
And Jesus identifies himself with this as well.
You know,
at one point when he's debating with the Pharisees about Abraham,
and he said something that can sound really strange
until you get that he's identifying himself
as the God who spoke to Moses
when Jesus said,
before Abraham was,
I am.
That he is who he is.
That he is God who comes to you on his own terms.
That he is not just an idea,
that he is reality.
That he is the living God.
And that is how Enoch came to God.
Wanting God on God's own terms.
Wanting the God who is.
Wanting the living God.
Wanting God.
So Enoch is someone whose life
is a life of desire for God.
And Enoch wanted God as God really is.
Knowing that everything that God showed Enoch about himself
was so good.
And so true.
And so beautiful.
That God was what Enoch wanted.
More than anything else.
And God was happy to give Enoch the one thing that he wanted.
And that is why God took Enoch directly to himself.
You see, who was Enoch?
Well, Enoch is the man in the Bible
whose wildest dream came true.
Enoch is the man in the Bible
who got everything he ever wanted.
Because the thing that he wanted was God.
As God really is.
And maybe at this point though you're wondering,
well how do you know all that about Enoch
just from this verse in Hebrews 11?
Because it doesn't say that much about him.
How does, what was his actual life like?
How does whoever wrote Hebrews 11
know what Enoch's life was like?
And the answer to that is way back early on
in the book of Genesis.
And it's why we read those verses
from Genesis 4 and Genesis 5.
So the Enoch that we're talking about,
and you may have noticed that there were two Enochs
in those readings.
Two separate people, same name,
they're actually cousins.
But the Enoch that we're talking about
in Hebrews 11 is the Enoch from Genesis 5,
from the family tree of Seth.
And where we find him in a really strange genealogy.
And the story of Enoch there in Genesis 5
is a hard one for people to make sense of
in our culture because the details that we get about him
come to us in a genealogy.
And it's a strange one for us to read
because the genealogy focuses on people's ages.
And the ages seem almost impossible for us to imagine.
People living to be 900 years old.
And the details of his life in the midst of all of that
aren't obvious.
Genesis 5 does not tell us
what did Enoch do as a job.
It doesn't tell us who he was married to.
It doesn't give us any stories
of things he did in his life.
So for people from our culture,
it'd be really easy to read Genesis 5
and think, well, we don't really know anything about Enoch
or what his life was actually like.
Because we find him in a genealogy
where all we see is names and numbers.
But if that's what you do,
the good news for you is you're doing it wrong.
And what I want to show you
is that if you want to make,
that we can make a lot of sense of Enoch
as we find him in Genesis 5.
But the way that you have to do that
is by reading Genesis 4 and Genesis 5 together,
side by side, the tale of the two Enoch's.
One who lived by faith and one who didn't.
And when you do that and you see them there,
you see that the stories are family trees,
each with an Enoch, as I said, these cousins.
And you see the shape of a life defined by faith,
a life of walking with God,
and you see a life that is the opposite.
And it's in that contrast that you start to see
what the Enoch who lived by faith was really like.
So let's start off in Genesis 4 though,
with the faithless Enoch.
So Genesis 4,
Corey read from the part where Cain has a son.
But Genesis 4 before that,
just to give you a really short summary,
it starts off in the background with Adam and Eve.
They begin in the Garden of Eden.
They're there in paradise.
They walk with God.
And they're led astray by a lying serpent.
They try to replace God.
And they sin against him.
And they're cast out of the garden.
But as God does that,
he gives Eve a promise
that one day,
one of her descendants will come
and will undo the fall.
And the paradise will be restored.
The paradise that has been lost.
But the promise also has a key detail,
which is that from now on,
the descendants who come from them,
the human race, the world,
is going to be divided into two groups.
And one group will believe the promise
that has been given to Eve.
And the other group will side with the serpents.
And they will live by his lies.
And then what happens at the beginning of Genesis 4,
as you'll know if you were here last week,
is that this is immediately the case
with their first two sons, Cain and Abel.
And that Cain believes that the serpent's lies
and Abel lives by the promise given to Eve.
And then Cain kills Abel.
And then God sends Cain out into the world
to be someone who walks,
but who walks as a loner.
He's a wanderer and a vagabond.
And he's someone whose own parents walked with God,
but he's the ultimate loner in the world.
And that then is where we pick up the story
in Genesis 4 where we read,
because what comes from there on
into the rest of Genesis 4 is a family tree.
It's what happens next with Cain and his family.
Because Cain then,
and it's a much easier family story,
genealogy for us to make sense of,
to read than what comes in Genesis 5.
So Cain has a son,
and he names his son Enoch.
And Cain is a rootless person
who's wandering away from God,
wandering away from humanity's true home,
but he doesn't want his son Enoch to feel like that.
So look at what he does
to try and make his son Enoch feel rooted somewhere,
like he belongs somewhere,
like he has a paradise to call his own.
He finds a city,
and he names the city Enoch.
And that the message that this Enoch hears
from his own father is,
this world is yours.
It has your name on it.
Most of you will know who the artist Banksy is.
He paints things on walls that just appear.
For a while, Banksy had a rival artist
who would turn up whenever Banksy
had just finished a painting,
and the rival artist would add his own name to it
to take credit for it.
Team Robo, apparently.
I'm not sure if Team Robo is still doing this,
but this is what Cain does for his son Enoch
by stamping his son's name on this world.
Ownership.
This is yours.
This is the place that will satisfy your desires.
So Enoch, this Enoch grows up there
in a city named after himself,
and he has a family,
and in the chapter is his family tree,
and in that family he has a descendant called Lamech.
And by this point,
the unbelief that their family is based on
really grows into its final boss form.
It's really fully arbed at this point.
Because Lamech was a complicated man.
He has three sons,
and they are exceptionally talented in different areas,
in music, technology, agriculture.
Enoch Lamech, this guy,
is the first man in the Bible to take two wives,
Ada and Zillah,
against the will of God.
He confesses to being a murderer,
like his ancestor Cain.
He controls his wives through fear and intimidation.
He's talented with words.
So when Corey read the chapter there,
and Lamech starts saying,
hear my voice,
wives of Lamech, Ada and Zillah.
And he boasts about having killed a man.
It's a piece of poetry.
It's a song.
It's a lyric.
And he uses that gift to control people
through the power of fear.
And above all that,
what you can see from his poem
is that this Lamech,
this descendant of the faithless Enoch,
he does not believe or live by
the promise of forgiveness
that was given to Eve.
And you can see that because he said,
if Cain's revenge is sevenfold,
and maybe, incidentally,
when Corey read that,
you just glossed over it.
Cain's revenge.
But actually what you see here
is the lie that they live by.
Because this is the family's origin story,
as Cain has told it to his own descendants.
That Cain wasn't the aggressor.
That Cain did the right thing.
That he was just taking revenge.
That it was actually Abel who started it.
That Abel had it coming.
That Abel was really the one
who was in the wrong.
So they live by this lie.
And then if that revenge for Cain
was sevenfold,
Lamech's will be 77fold.
He does not believe in forgiveness.
He believes in exponential vengeance
and violence.
You see, he believes in revenge
rather than forgiveness.
And he lives by a cycle of retribution,
not grace.
And his life is all about
clinging to power
in this worldly city
by whatever means necessary.
And the family's values
are actually so opposite the gospel
that this is what Jesus was referring to
when he taught in forgiveness.
And he said to his disciples,
if someone wrongs you,
forgive them 77fold.
Jesus is saying,
we must be the opposite
of the family of Cain and Lamech
and that other Enoch.
So you see,
there is an Enoch in the Bible
before the Enoch that we meet
in Hebrews 11.
And this is the world
that that Enoch creates
and the family that comes after him.
And it's a world where desire
is disordered left, right, and center.
And you don't have to spend too long
looking at Genesis 4
to see that we're still in that world.
And that the world of Cain
and his son Enoch
and his descendant Lamech
is still the world that we live in.
Is it hard for you to imagine
a world of petty egos,
of power being worshipped,
or women being treated as objects,
or good things like art
and music being misused
for terrible purposes,
where human beings stamp their own names
in their tiny patches of this world
as though they own the whole thing,
and where we all expect
something in this world
to satisfy our ultimate desires?
So that Enoch is really relatable.
But showing you the other Enoch
is harder work.
That's what we're going to try and do.
See, when Genesis 4 comes to an end
and that first Enoch's family tree ends,
we find another new character
being introduced,
and that is Seth.
So this is another brother
to Cain and Abel.
So Adam and Eve have this third son, Seth.
And Seth, like Abel,
believed in the promise
that had been given to Eve.
He's someone who looks for God.
He prays.
He calls on the name of the Lord.
And those who come after him
and his family do the same.
And that then takes us into Genesis 5,
which is another family tree.
And that's where we find the Enoch
who comes up in Hebrews 11.
Now Genesis 5
is one of the hardest chapters
in the Bible
for people from our culture
to make sense of.
And that makes it hard
for us to understand Enoch.
Like I said before,
it's a list of names.
And we didn't read the whole chapter,
but if you remember what Corey read
or if you have the Bible
in front of you,
it's a list of names.
There are 10 generations,
10 names.
So 10 names,
each with three dates.
So the age that this patriarch was
when he became a father,
and then the number of years
that he lives for afterwards,
and then the third number
is the total number of years
of his life.
So it's a really different way
to tell a family story
than what you find in Genesis 4,
which is, you know,
narrative and gritty details
and songs.
But it's a really important difference
to grasp.
And there are some things
that are a strange parallel
to Cain's family,
because Cain's family
is centered on Cain,
an Enoch,
and a Lamech.
And Seth's family
also has a Seth,
well, it begins with a Seth
instead of Cain,
but then also another Enoch
and another Lamech.
But they're completely
different people,
because the thing
that they live by
is completely different.
So the resemblances
are really superficial.
But when you get into,
try to read Genesis 5,
it's really hard to make sense of,
because we're talking
about such huge numbers.
You know,
it's where Methuselah
is 969 and so on.
And I think
in our kind of culture,
we don't really know
how to read a text like this.
Because in our culture,
numbers are things
we use to talk about quantity.
So if I tell you I'm 43,
that is entirely
a description of quantity.
It's just the number of years
that I've been alive for.
But,
and it's an exact number,
I can prove it to you,
I can give you
my birth certificate,
we can do all kinds
of measurements,
we can track the age
by the second
as my life goes on.
But,
it tells you nothing
about the quality of my life,
because we don't use numbers
in that way.
We use numbers for
quantity instead of quality.
And in our culture,
what do we say?
Age is just a number.
Right?
But in the world
of the ancient Near East,
the early chapters of Genesis,
age isn't just a number.
And numbers have
distinct significance
in terms of the qualities
that they convey.
So we're immediately
getting into a very
different culture
of thinking about
ages,
numbers,
and how numbers
tell a story
to the kind of culture
that we're in.
But in a way,
that shouldn't really
surprise us
when we get into
an ancient text like this.
It's only really
in the 17th century
that it became normal
to expect that everyone
would think about their age
is something that everyone
should know in an exact sense.
So if you go back
to your own medieval ancestors,
if you're from European descent,
very few of them
would be able to tell you
exactly how old they were
because they just didn't
think in those categories.
That wasn't their experience.
If someone was from
a really privileged background,
maybe someone would have
written down somewhere
the year of their birth.
Most people would just
wouldn't know
how old they were.
I was born the spring
after the river flooded.
I was born,
or they would explain
their age in life stages.
I'm obviously a child
or I'm a man
or I'm elderly.
But if you go back
much further
into a very different culture again,
to the world
of the early chapters
of Genesis,
people had a very different
way of thinking
about numbers
where numbers
can denote quality
rather than just quantity
like in our culture.
So what do I mean by that?
Think about it like this.
In our culture,
some numbers
can denote something
like a quality.
They have a symbolic meaning.
Lots of hotels
don't have a 13th floor
because some people
think that the number 13
symbolizes bad luck.
But we have very few
numbers like that.
You know,
212 is just quantity.
Nobody is probably thinking,
oh, 212,
that symbolizes something.
Right?
It's just that they're
212 of something.
And in our culture,
if we want to get
to those symbolic meanings,
we tend to use words
rather than numbers.
But if you're an ancient Hebrew,
you're from a different
kind of culture.
And for you,
every letter of your alphabet
has a numerical value.
It's not really the case for us.
And numbers
have a symbolic meaning to you.
And you actually see this
throughout the Bible.
You'll realize this
retrospectively
if you know the Bible a bit.
The number 7
symbolizes perfection,
completion,
seven days of creation,
and so on.
12 symbolizes
a different kind of completeness,
12 tribes,
12 apostles.
40 symbolizes trials,
40 days of reign
on the ark,
40 years in the wilderness,
40 days in the wilderness.
And 500 symbolizes
completion
in a different kind of way
as well.
And the numerical value
of the last letter
of the Hebrew alphabet
is 500.
Think of the temple.
How wide is it?
500.
How tall is it?
500.
So numbers,
if you're an ancient Hebrew,
you live in a world
where numbers
convey something to you
that numbers
don't really convey to us.
But if you know
the Bible a bit,
you'll recognize
at least some
of these numbers.
numbers.
And here's the thing.
If you were a native
in that culture,
you would simply
look at and see numbers
and see things in them
that we don't.
Significances
and symbols.
And when you start
to see Genesis 5
like that,
this genealogy
where Enoch appears,
you start to see
some hints of this.
The Enoch
in this family tree
is the seventh person
in his genealogy.
This place of
significant symbolic
perfection.
The Lamech
in this family tree
when he died
was 777.
Okay?
Threefold perfection
and completeness.
And you know
who's number seven
in the other family tree
in Genesis 4?
It's the
other Lamech.
Okay?
And there's a 777
there as well,
but it's the opposite
symbolically.
What did he say?
It's the seventh person
in his family tree.
If Cain's revenge
is sevenfold,
Lamech's will be
77 folds.
Okay?
And in the Genesis 5
family tree,
when Noah has
his three sons,
he is 500.
Again,
a different kind
of completion
like the temple.
So even for us
at such huge
cultural distance
with how we think
about numbers
and what they can tell us,
some of the numbers
in this family tree
stand out even to us
from our really
foreign culture,
although the meaning
of most of the numbers
is lost on us.
I'm trying to think
of the best illustration
for this from our culture,
and I think it's like this,
that it's a bit
like computer code.
If you're coding,
you can write code
with letters,
and you can have words
that if you know
nothing about coding,
you can look in
and make a little bit
of sense of.
But behind all of those,
you can write code
always in numbers,
and that's really
what it comes down to,
all ones and zeros.
I know almost nothing
about coding,
and I've told you
pretty much everything
that I know about it already.
So if I'm looking at code
and it's all numbers,
it's all lost on me
because I don't know
what I'm looking at.
But if you have
an expert coder
who's looking at
all these ones and zeros
in their order,
someone who knows the code
can look at it,
and then they see,
oh, this is doing something.
These things have meaning.
This is all put together
in a really complex,
beautiful, meaningful way,
and they see things
that I can't see.
So here's what
I'm trying to say,
that people from our culture
look at Genesis 5,
at this genealogy,
and think,
what a stupid chapter.
What kind of idiots
would read this stuff?
Who would care about Enoch
in the middle of that?
But do you know what?
If you knew how to code,
you'd look at it
and you would take
a deep breath
and you would say,
wow.
Compared to the people
in Genesis 4,
the people in Genesis 5
have the most
numerically beautiful lives.
For all of these numbers
and these symbols
speak to us about
how in a world
that is broken
and ruined by the fall,
somehow these people,
person after person,
are symbolized
by completion,
by repair,
by perfection
perfection in the middle.
And place number seven
in the middle,
they have Enoch.
Somehow they are restored
and that theme
recurs in their lives
generation after generation.
And like I said,
in the middle of it all,
there is this uniquely
beautiful person
in Enoch
whose life is so pleasing
to God
that God takes him
from life
straight into his presence
without death.
Enoch in this chapter
who in every way
is the polar opposite
of the Enoch
in the chapter before.
You know,
if you want to compare
these two Enoch's,
the thing that makes them
different is desire.
Cain's son Enoch
is the son of a wanderer
who is alienated
from God.
But Seth's son Enoch
is someone who walks
with God
in this life
and who walks
straight out of this life
without even
going through the gates
of death.
He walks with God
in this world
as though he was
still in Eden.
Cain's Enoch
directed all of his desire
into what he could find
in this world.
Seth's son Enoch's desire
was too big for this world
to satisfy.
And God gratified
that desire
by giving him himself.
And the big question
that comes to you then
when we look at
Genesis 4
and Genesis 5 together
and faithless Enoch
and the Enoch
who lived by faith,
the question that comes
to you is
which family tree
do you want to be yours?
Which Enoch
do you want to be
the one that you belong to,
the one that you line up with?
Like I said,
in Cain's family,
the seventh person
in the row
is Lamech.
And his life
is the perfect expression
of the lie of unbelief
that the family
starts off with.
Do you know what?
The generation,
in his family tree
it stops at generation
number seven.
It's not life going on
and flourishing
exponentially forever.
It hits rock bottom.
And do you know
who number,
and I said number seven
in Seth's family tree
is Enoch.
But he's not the end.
It goes on
down to a tenth generation
and that's also
a symbolic number.
And Enoch's descendants
go on and on.
And the symbolic things
we're told about them
are that their lives
are marked by integrity
and wholeness
even in this broken world
living side by side
with the family
from Genesis 4.
But the thing
that is so striking
is this.
That if you
are descended
from that Enoch
in Genesis 5
by coming after him
and his family
what you get
is life in abundance.
Okay,
you get all these
numbers of perfection
and completion
generation
after generation
after generation.
But in the midst
of that all
of life in abundance
for the descendants
of Enoch
in the midst of it all
the exceptional person
in the middle
is someone
whose life
in this world
is cut short
as a young man
in comparison
to all of the others.
Enoch in Genesis 5
is taken from this world
at the age of
three, six, five.
And in that way
don't you see
that Enoch
in Genesis 5
is a type
of Christ
that he is
that everything
about him
points forward
to Jesus
as the truly
perfect person
who at the age
of 33
and the prime
of life
the one
who lived
a perfect life
who desired God
perfectly
with everything
in him
for every second
of his earthly life
someone who
truly deserved
to bypass
death entirely
and to have
all of his wishes
granted
and to be received
victorious
before his father
that this Jesus
dies
that he does
the thing
that Enoch
doesn't do
and that this Jesus
does that
for you
so that if you
have faith in him
that you will
not perish
but have eternal
life
and that you'll
be like the people
who come after
Enoch in Genesis 5
that you receive
life in abundance
life everlasting
so you see
when I'm asking you
which Enoch
do you want
to belong to
really what I'm
asking you is
do you believe
the promise
that was given
to Eve
or do you live
by the lie
that was given
by the serpents
the most compelling
reason to want
to belong to
the family
of Enoch
from Genesis 5
and not the other
Enoch
of course it's not
Enoch himself
it is the Lord
Jesus Christ
whose life
is prefigured
let's pray
our father in heaven
we praise you
for the gospel
for this glorious
hope that we have
that the promise
that you gave
to Eve
has come true
in Jesus Christ
we thank you
for all those
heroes of the faith
who came before
him
whose remarkable
lives in different
ways were fulfilled
in Jesus
and we thank you
that Jesus
is the true
and the better
Enoch
more perfect
still in every
way
the true
777
for us
and the one
who
although he
deserved
to be taken
from one place
to another
from this world
of darkness
that he came
into his light
deserved to be
taken
into light
and glory
with you
that he nonetheless
did what Enoch
didn't do
and that he
endured the
ultimate
darkness of the
cross
the ultimate
forsakenness
and that he
endured that
for the joy
that was set
before him
so Lord
please
convince us
afresh
to belong
to Enoch
from Genesis 5
from Hebrews 11
but not to
Enoch alone
but to be
those who are
united to
the Christ
who fulfilled
everything that
we see in him
in Jesus name
Amen