The Heroes of Faith (3)

We read in Genesis 5:22 that “Enoch walked with God after he begat Methuselah three hundred years.” We understand that this was not a physical walking, such as walking down the street with a friend. It means that in his heart was the fear of the Lord. After Methuselah was born, Enoch walked in the fear of the Lord all his days. Every morning he awoke with the love of the Lord in his heart. This man did this for three hundred years. Oh, we may believe that when he awoke, he prayed to the Lord, “Lord, keep me near Thy side today. May I be kept from sinning against Thee today, and may I walk in Thy fear.” That was his life, my friends. He did not say it of himself. There are many people who, when you listen to them speak, say those things about themselves. That proud and sinful self always seems to come to the foreground. Enoch did not say that he walked with God. No, the Lord said it about him. What is most important in our life is what the Lord says about each one of us personally.

Did Enoch always walk with God, even from his youth? No, but there are people who have feared the Lord from their youth. I had an aunt like that. The people in the village where we lived said that she feared the Lord from the womb. There was never a change in her life; from the very beginning she feared the Lord. When I was very young, I heard people say that she was in great darkness. She lived for months and months in darkness, weeping before God because the devil said that she had no beginning. She could not answer the devil that her beginning was when she was ten, twenty, or fifty years old. Her beginning was at the beginning of her life. So we see that there are people like that, but this was not the case with Enoch. We read in the Bible that Enoch was sixty-five years old when Methuselah was born, and then he feared the Lord for three hundred years. The Bible does not say how he was converted, but it seems that, when his first child was born, this man saw that a soul was added unto his family. He was sixty-five years old when he was converted.

Children of the Lord, maybe he was stopped in the same way that you were. Do you remember the time when you were stopped on your way to eternity? Do you remember the time when you could not work through the entire day without reading from the Word? That was the time when you had to bow your knees often, saying, “Lord God in heaven, I am a sinner; but if it is possible, come yet to save my soul.” Enoch was awakened and came to know the great breach that lies between God and a sinner. He did not know that much about Jesus, Gethsemane, and Golgatha. He had not much knowledge about those things, but he did know that God had promised seven generations earlier that a way would be opened from heaven to save a sinner. You might say that he knew so little, yet he was enabled, by faith, to embrace the salvation that lies in Another.

“Enoch was translated that he should not see death.” Do you know that all of us are going to die? Death will come to each one of us, one by one. Not everyone will become old. Some will die young, some in middle age, and some when they are old. If the world stands, then not one of us will bypass this dying. We are all walking toward the end of a lifetime. Do you ever mink about that? Do you ever pray about that, saying, “Lord, take me not away by an untimely death, but prepare me for that day”?

We read of Enoch that he also came to the end of his journey here below. He was a young man when the Lord translated him. A young man at three hundred sixty-five years old? Yes, because in his time the Lord enabled the people to live nine hundred years. When we compare it to our present time, then Enoch lived to about thirty or thirty-five years old. “The Lord translated him.” In other words, he went, soul and body, from this life into eternity. There is only one other person in the Bible to whom this happened. The Bible speaks in a clear and decisive manner about the way that Elijah departed this world. There came a time for him also that he was not found here below anymore. Where did he go? He went with God, to be in heaven with Him.

My friends, we all will experience what Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5, “For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved....For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ.” All of us will come to the Jordan of death. Sometimes it is a very wide river. When standing before that river, the heart can be filled with fear. I do not know when you will have to pass through it, I will leave that to the Lord, but I want to warn you that after passing through that river you will come before the Lord as Judge. If you have never walked with God here below, you will not walk with Jesus hereafter. You will then have to continue your walk with the devil into a never-ending eternity. Is this not a serious thought?

How is it in the life of God's people? I remember an old mother who spoke of the night when the Lord came and put His arms around her and assured her that there was a Refuge for her soul. She said, “Lord, may I come now? May I be delivered now?” When God's children are in that embrace, then they may long to be with Him and not to sin anymore. Then they may say by faith, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” All has been swallowed up in Jesus Christ. But, when they walk so far away from Him, then the river Jordan seems so very wide and terrifying.

“Before his translation he had this testimony.” Before the Lord came and translated him, he had this testimony: he pleased the Lord. His life was such that, by the grace of God, his walk and his speaking were to the honor of the Lord. He did not live to please the world and his fellow man; no, he lived for the Lord. By his walk, he testified to his fellow man about the judgments of God upon sin and iniquity.

To what did he look forward? Did he look only as far as Noah and the flood? I think not. I think that he looked at the promise of the Lord and the coming of Jesus Christ for His church. Did he do this in his own strength and wisdom? No, because he also was born in trespasses and in sins. He had this testimony because of what the Lord had wrought in his heart and life.

What will be the testimony of your life before you die? Will it be that you walked in all the ways of the world? Is it that you had plenty of piety with your outward religion? These are all too short to meet a holy and a just God after you cross the river Jordan. Or, are you a missing person in the congregation, who is seeking after the ways of the Lord? Are you a poor sinner seeking after a rich Savior? Do you hate and flee from sin and iniquity, cleaving to the footstool of the Lord? That is pleasing unto the Lord. Do you know why? Because it is the work of His own hands. A good testimony reveals itself in the life of a sinner who is struggling to know the Surely, pertaining to the salvation of his soul for eternity. Oh, my friends, that sinner is weeping unto the Lord for the washing and cleansing of his sins. That is a testimony that is pleasing unto the Lord.

— to be continued —

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