By faith Enoch was taken from this life, so that he did not experience death: “He could not be found, because God had taken him away.” For before he was taken, he was commended as one who pleased God.
Hebrews 11:5 (NIV)
Praised Before He Was Taken
The strip of grass between two driveways belongs to nobody, and this morning one of the neighbors is mowing it. The man on the other side had surgery in the spring, and he watches from the front window. He has thought of four ways to bring it up, and none of them has sounded right.
Genesis 5 is a chapter people skip. A name, a number of years, sons and daughters, and then he died, and the next name starts the same way. One of them stops short of that ending.
The writer of Hebrews takes Enoch up for a chapter about faith. Before he was taken, he was commended as one who pleased God. Whatever pleased God had already happened by then, in years Genesis sums up in a sentence about walking with God. Genesis gives Enoch no speech and no rescue of anybody.
People remember Enoch for the disappearance, and the writer doesn’t hold that up as the thing to aim at. He says instead that without faith it is impossible to please God, and that a crowd of these same people died without receiving what was promised.
This week of yours will go to work and to getting a kid to the orthodontist by four. No one around you is writing down the morning you prayed with nothing coming back, and Hebrews says God rewards those who earnestly seek him. For one man, the whole of what pleased God happened in exactly that stretch of years, and the taking came afterward.
He could not be found, because God had taken him away. Genesis says only that he walked faithfully with God and then was no more. Somebody must have gone looking, because a man isn’t missing until people start checking for him.
He got the window open on the second pass and called something out through the screen. The mower didn’t stop and the man behind it lifted a hand, and that was all of it. Whatever day God took Enoch, it started out about like that one.
A Prayer to Remember
You commended Enoch for the years before you took him, and Genesis puts those years in one sentence about walking with you. Give me this week the same way, with you in it from the alarm clock to the light going out at night, whether or not there’s an hour in it that’s worth telling anybody about.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
