My favorite Old Testament character is Enoch. We know so little of him yet we have so much to learn from him. Enoch made it into the Hall of Faith in Hebrews 11:5!  The record in Hebrews tells us he was “pleasing to God.” He was so pleasing to God that God “took him” to be with himself and together they enjoyed fellowship in heaven unobstructed by the effects of sin.

Enoch lived in a wicked world and yet still walked with God. What exactly does it mean that “Enoch walked with God?” Over the years I have come to appreciate older expositions of Scripture. It seems that men of an earlier generation had more time to contemplate the fullness of the scripture record and expound the text. One such exposition of the short Enoch in Genesis is by Marcus Dods. In his exposition titled The Book of Genesis, Dods expounds the phrase “Enoch walked with God; and he was not, for God took him” (Gen 5:24). He writes,

The phrase is full of meaning. Enoch walked with God because he was His friend and liked His company, because he was going in the same direction of God, and had no desire for anything but what lay in God’s path. We walk with God when He is in all our thoughts; not because we consciously think of Him at all times, but because He is naturally suggested to us by all we think of; as when any person or plan or idea has become important to us, no matter what we think of, our thought is always found recurring to this favorite object, so with the godly man everything has a connection with God and must be ruled by that connection.

Enoch reminds us that it is possible to live a godly life in a sinful world.

Categories: Christian living, God