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Fall Asleep to Enoch_ He Walked With God for 300 Years... Then He Was No More · truthunedited

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: What if the most important thing ever written about a
• 0:02
  Speaker 1: human life fit inside a single breath. He walked with
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: God and then he was not nine words that is
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  Speaker 1: the entire biography of one of the most mysterious figures
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: in all of Scripture. No miracles listed by name, no
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: battles won, no sea divided, no fire cooled down from heaven.
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  Speaker 1: Just nine words that have refused to stay quiet for
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  Speaker 1: thousands of years. And the strangest part is not the walking.
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: It is the knot to night. We are going to
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  Speaker 1: move slowly into that mystery, not to solve it, not
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  Speaker 1: to argue about it, but to feel what it might
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  Speaker 1: mean to live so close to God that one day
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  Speaker 1: the distance simply closed. Let your body settle now, let
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  Speaker 1: the day release its hold on you. Whatever you carried
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  Speaker 1: into this night, you do not need to carry it
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  Speaker 1: any further. Set it down here. It will still be
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  Speaker 1: there in the morning if you need it. The story
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  Speaker 1: of Enoch is one of the shortest in the Bible,
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  Speaker 1: and it may be the one that stays with you
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  Speaker 1: the longest. Let us begin chapter one the world before Enoch.
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  Speaker 1: Before we can understand the man, we need to feel
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  Speaker 1: the world he was born into and that world breathed
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  Speaker 1: differently than ours. Imagine waking up one morning and learning
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  Speaker 1: that your grandfather is six hundred years old, not as
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  Speaker 1: a figure of speech, not as a poetic way of saying, very,
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  Speaker 1: very old. Six hundred literal years of mornings, six hundred
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  Speaker 1: years of seasons turning, six hundred years of watching children
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  Speaker 1: grow old and die, while he was still here, still walking,
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  Speaker 1: still part of the daily texture of family life. This
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: was the world of the early chapters of Genesis. The
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: genealogy recorded in Genesis chapter five reads like something from
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  Speaker 1: another world entire Adam lived nine hundred and thirty years,
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: Seth lived nine hundred and twelve years, Enosch lived nine
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  Speaker 1: hundred and five years, Keenan lived nine hundred and ten years,
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  Speaker 1: Mahalalel lived eight hundred and ninety five years. Jerrard lived
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: nine hundred and sixty two years. These numbers are presented
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  Speaker 1: with the same matter of fact precision a scribe would
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  Speaker 1: use to record the length of a king's reign. So
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  Speaker 1: he lived this many years, he had sons and daughters,
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  Speaker 1: and then he died. Now, before we go any further,
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  Speaker 1: I want to be honest with you, the way a
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  Speaker 1: good guide should be honest at the start of a
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  Speaker 1: long journey. Scholars have wrestled with these numbers for a
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  Speaker 1: very long time. Some have proposed that years were counted
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: differently in the ancient world. Others have noted that extraordinarily
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  Speaker 1: long life spans were commonly attributed to figures of great
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  Speaker 1: importance in the literary traditions of the ancient Near East.
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  Speaker 1: The Sumerian king lists, discovered by archaeologists in the twentieth
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  Speaker 1: century record reigns of tens of thousands of years for
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  Speaker 1: rulers before a great flood, then much shorter life spans
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  Speaker 1: for rulers who came after it, a pattern that echoes
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  Speaker 1: in a different cultural register something similar to what Genesis
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  Speaker 1: is doing. Still, other scholars take the Genesis numbers at
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  Speaker 1: face value as a straightforward historical record. I am not
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  Speaker 1: going to resolve that debate to night. People far more
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  Speaker 1: qualified than I am have studied it across many centuries
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  Speaker 1: without arriving at a single answer that satisfies everyone. What
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  Speaker 1: I will do is take the numbers seriously as the
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  Speaker 1: writer of Genesis intended them to be taken, Because, whether
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  Speaker 1: they are literal or carry layers of ancient meaning, they
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  Speaker 1: are telling us something important about this world. They are
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  Speaker 1: telling us that time worked differently here. Think about what
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  Speaker 1: a nine hundred year life span would feel like from
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  Speaker 1: the inside. Not from the outside looking at a number
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  Speaker 1: in a book, but from inside a life being lived
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  Speaker 1: day by day. You would watch your children grow old
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  Speaker 1: while you were still in what felt like the middle
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  Speaker 1: of your own story. The markers we use to measure
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  Speaker 1: a human life, childhood, young, adulthood, the middle years, old age,
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  Speaker 1: would stretch into spans that would dwarf entire modern civilizations.
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  Speaker 1: A person who began walking at age one and lived
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  Speaker 1: nine hundred years would have been walking for roughly twelve
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  Speaker 1: times the entire length of American history. Now ask yourself
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  Speaker 1: a question that matters more than it might first appear.
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  Speaker 1: What does a nine hundred year lifespan do to a
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  Speaker 1: person's sense of urgency? We live in a world shaped
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  Speaker 1: by the quiet knowledge that we have at most a
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  Speaker 1: few decades. That awareness of finitude drives a great deal
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  Speaker 1: of what we do. It shapes how we make decisions,
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  Speaker 1: It shapes how seriously we take the things we believe matter.
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  Speaker 1: The shortness of human life is not only a source
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  Speaker 1: of grief. It is also strangely one of the forces
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  Speaker 1: that pushes us toward meaning. Now take that away. Imagine
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  Speaker 1: nine hundred years stretching before you, like an open plain
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  Speaker 1: with no visible horizon. What would you set aside for later?
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  Speaker 1: And keep setting aside, and keep telling yourself there was
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  Speaker 1: still time for what habits of the soul would you
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  Speaker 1: allow to drift? Because the sense of urgency that might
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  Speaker 1: otherwise correct them simply was not there. The people of
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  Speaker 1: Enoch's world had almost unlimited time, and most of them
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  Speaker 1: spent it walking in a direction that led nowhere good.
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  Speaker 1: Now Here is the paradox at the heart of this
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  Speaker 1: world that makes it so strange and so familiar. At
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  Speaker 1: the same time, the world Enoch was born into was
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  Speaker 1: not only very old, it was also very young. The
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  Speaker 1: people alive at the time of Enoch were closer to
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  Speaker 1: the beginning of everything than any generation. Since Adam was
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  Speaker 1: not a figure of ancient myth to Enoch the way
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  Speaker 1: Adam is to us by the reckoning of the Genesis genealogy,
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  Speaker 1: Adam was still alive when Enoch's father Jared was born.
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  Speaker 1: The gap between the garden and the birth of Enoch
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  Speaker 1: was not thousands of years of accumulated distance. It was
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  Speaker 1: a handful of very long lifetimes. The stories were alive
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  Speaker 1: the way family stories are alive, not as distant legend,
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  Speaker 1: but as living memory passed from mouth to mouth among
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  Speaker 1: people who might have known the people in the story.
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  Speaker 1: The theologian John Seilhamer noted that if you trace the
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  Speaker 1: overlapping life spans in Genesis five carefully, Adam's life overlapped
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  Speaker 1: with the life of Lammek, Noah's father, the chain of
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  Speaker 1: direct human memory between creation and the flood was shorter
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  Speaker 1: than our imagination tends to picture it. Into this world,
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  Speaker 1: a child was born to a man named Jared, and
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  Speaker 1: Jared named him Enoch. The name comes from the Hebrew
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  Speaker 1: route chanoak. It means dedicated, initiated. Some scholars hear in
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  Speaker 1: it the sense of one who is trained or consecrated
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  Speaker 1: for a purpose. Others translated as a fresh consecration, something
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  Speaker 1: set apart for a direction not yet fully revealed. Whether
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  Speaker 1: Jared knew what he was naming when he gave his
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  Speaker 1: son that name, we cannot say. Parents name children for
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  Speaker 1: many reasons. Sometimes a name becomes prophetic long after it
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  Speaker 1: is given. Sometimes it is simply a name that fit
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  Speaker 1: the moment, and then turned out to fit the life
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  Speaker 1: even better. But Enoch, the dedicated one, would go on
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  Speaker 1: to live a life that made his name feel less
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  Speaker 1: like coincidence and more like a calling spoken over him
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  Speaker 1: before he could understand it. He was born into the
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  Speaker 1: seventh generation from Adam, counting through the line of Seth.
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  Speaker 1: The number seven carried deep significance in the ancient Hebrew world.
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  Speaker 1: It was the number of completion, of wholeness, of sacred rest.
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  Speaker 1: Seven was the number that said something is whole here,
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  Speaker 1: something is finished and full to be The seventh in
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  Speaker 1: a line was not merely a genealogical fact. The ancient
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  Speaker 1: writer Jude in the first century of the Common Era
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  Speaker 1: would later call Enoch simply the seventh from Adam, not
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  Speaker 1: to locate him in a sequence, but to identify him
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  Speaker 1: by his position, the way you might identify some one
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  Speaker 1: by a title, the seventh from Adam, as if the
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  Speaker 1: position itself was part of the calling. So here is
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  Speaker 1: where we are, a world that breathes slowly, a world
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  Speaker 1: where time moves differently than ours, where people alive in
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  Speaker 1: Enoch's generation carry living memories of things that feel to
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  Speaker 1: us like the unreachable past. Where the story of the
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  Speaker 1: garden and the loss of the garden and the God
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  Speaker 1: of the garden is not ancient theology but recent family history,
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  Speaker 1: passed around fires in the long evenings of very long
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  Speaker 1: lives and into this world. Into the seventh position in
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  Speaker 1: a line, long line, a boy is born with a
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  Speaker 1: name that means dedicated. He grows up, He learns the
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  Speaker 1: names of the stars. He watches the people around him
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  Speaker 1: begin their slow journeys through centuries. He sees a world
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  Speaker 1: with unlimited time, choosing almost without noticing, to spend that
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  Speaker 1: time on things that will not hold. And at some point,
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  Speaker 1: for reasons the text is about to reveal, something begins
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  Speaker 1: in him, something that will define every year he has left. Breathe.
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  Speaker 1: Let the ancient world settle around you for a moment,
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  Speaker 1: the long nights, the slow seasons, the stars over hills
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  Speaker 1: that no city light has yet dimmed. Somewhere in that world,
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  Speaker 1: a boy named Dedicated is growing up, and the god
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  Speaker 1: who will walk with him for three hundred years is
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  Speaker 1: already there waiting. Chapter two, a name in a list.
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  Speaker 1: Open the fifth chapter of Jenne and read it slowly,
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  Speaker 1: not for the theology, not for the history, just for
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  Speaker 1: the rhythm. Adam lived nine hundred and thirty years and
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  Speaker 1: he died. Seth lived nine hundred and twelve years and
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  Speaker 1: he died. Enosh lived nine hundred and five years and
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  Speaker 1: he died. Keenan lived nine hundred and ten years and
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  Speaker 1: he died. Mahalalel lived eight hundred and ninety five years
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  Speaker 1: and he died. Jared lived nine hundred and sixty two
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  Speaker 1: years and he died. Do you feel it? There is
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  Speaker 1: a drum beat in that passage, slow, heavy, and completely
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  Speaker 1: without exception. It beats the same way every single time
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  Speaker 1: he lived. He had sons and daughters, and he died.
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  Speaker 1: The ancient writers knew exactly what they were doing when
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  Speaker 1: they built a text this way. Repetition in Hebrew literature
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  Speaker 1: was not a failure of imagination. It was architecture. You
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  Speaker 1: build a pattern not because you ran out of ideas,
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  Speaker 1: but because you want the reader to feel the weight
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  Speaker 1: of the pattern before you break it. You want the
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  Speaker 1: rhythm to settle into the bones, so that when something
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  Speaker 1: disrupts it, the disruption does not just surprise the mind.
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  Speaker 1: It drops into the body like a stone dropped into
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  Speaker 1: still water. Six names, six lives, six times, the same
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  Speaker 1: ending and he died, and he died, and he died.
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  Speaker 1: Death is not presented here as a tragedy or a surprise.
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  Speaker 1: It is the grammar of human existence in this world,
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  Speaker 1: the sentence structure of every life. You are born, you live,
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  Speaker 1: you have children, and then the sentence ends the same
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  Speaker 1: way every time. The writer of Genesis chapter five is
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  Speaker 1: doing something deliberate with this repetition. He is making you
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  Speaker 1: expect it. He is making you so certain of the
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  Speaker 1: ending that you stop consciously registering it. It becomes the
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  Speaker 1: back round hum of the entire passage, enevitable, permanent, as
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  Speaker 1: fixed as the rising of the sun. Until Enoch lived
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  Speaker 1: sixty five years and became the father of Methuselah. Then
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  Speaker 1: Enoch walked with God three hundred years after he became
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  Speaker 1: the father of Methuselah, and he had other sons and daughters.
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  Speaker 1: So all the days of Enoch were three hundred and
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  Speaker 1: sixty five years. And Enoch walked with God, and he
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  Speaker 1: was not for God took him. Read that final sentence
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  Speaker 1: one more time, and he was not for God took
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  Speaker 1: him not, And he died not, and his days came
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  Speaker 1: to an end. Not any softer version of the same conclusion.
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  Speaker 1: The pattern that had held for six consecutive entries, the
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  Speaker 1: pattern so reliable it had come to feel like a
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  Speaker 1: natural law, simply stops. The sentence refuses to end the
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  Speaker 1: way every other sentence ended. The drum falls silent in
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  Speaker 1: the middle of a beat. And he was not. In
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  Speaker 1: the original Hebrew, the phrase is built around the word
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  Speaker 1: ayin it carries the meaning of absence, pure, unadorned, unexplained absence,
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  Speaker 1: not death, which in Hebrew has its own clear vocabulary,
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  Speaker 1: not departure in any of the ways the language knows
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  Speaker 1: how to describe departure. Simply this, He was present, and
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  Speaker 1: then he was not present. The word is chosen with care.
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  Speaker 1: It does not say he vanished. It does not say
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  Speaker 1: he ascended. It does not say he was transformed. It
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  Speaker 1: says the quality of his being here changed. He was here,
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  Speaker 1: and now, at the moment of this writing, he is
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  Speaker 1: not here. What the word does not say is as
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  Speaker 1: important as what it does say. It does not say
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  Speaker 1: he ceased to exist, It does not say he perished.
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  Speaker 1: The absence it describes is an absence from here, not
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  Speaker 1: an absence from everywhere. And the second part of the
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  Speaker 1: sentence answers the question. The first part opens before any
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  Speaker 1: one has a chance to ask it, For God took him.
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  Speaker 1: The Hebrew verb is la caaq to take, to receive,
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  Speaker 1: to fetch, to carry away, to oneself. It is a
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  Speaker 1: verb of active and intentional possession, not passive disappearance. God
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  Speaker 1: did not allow Enoch to slip away. God did not
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  Speaker 1: simply fail to prevent his vanishing. God took him deliberately, purposefully,
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  Speaker 1: with the full weight of divine intention behind the action.
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  Speaker 1: This is not a man who wandered off. This is
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  Speaker 1: a man who was received. Now. I want to stay
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  Speaker 1: with the literary structure of this passage a moment longer,
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  Speaker 1: because the structure is doing something that rewards attention. The
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  Speaker 1: writer of Genesis chapter five had a choice about where
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  Speaker 1: to place Enoch's entry. The order is chronological, yes, but
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  Speaker 1: the positioning of Enoch as the seventh entry was not accidental.
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: The number seven in Hebrew thought was not just a quantity,
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  Speaker 1: It was a quality. It signaled completion, wholeness, the point
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  Speaker 1: at which something has become fully what it was meant
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  Speaker 1: to be. Seven entries, and the seventh one breaks the pattern,
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  Speaker 1: not the eighth, not the tenth, The seventh, the one
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  Speaker 1: that in the grammar of Hebrew, symbolic thinking signals that
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  Speaker 1: something has reached its fullness and is ready to be transcended.
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  Speaker 1: And there is one more detail worth pausing on. Every
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  Speaker 1: other person in this genealogy is described with a verb
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  Speaker 1: that means lived. Adam lived nine hundred and thirty years,
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  Speaker 1: Seth lived nine hundred and twelve years. The word is
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  Speaker 1: the same throughout, but Enoch's entry does not use that
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  Speaker 1: word for the core of his existence. It says he
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  Speaker 1: wood with God. For every other person, the primary verb
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  Speaker 1: describing their time on earth is lived. For Enoch, it
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: is walked with God. The very structure of the sentence
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  Speaker 1: has been altered to accommodate a different kind of existence,
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  Speaker 1: not simply a life that lasted three hundred and sixty
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  Speaker 1: five years a vulk a sustained, directional, companioned movement through
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  Speaker 1: those years. Living is something every person in the list did.
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  Speaker 1: Walking with God was something only Enoch did. And the
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  Speaker 1: difference between those two verbs is the difference between a
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  Speaker 1: biography and a calling. Now, one more thing about the
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  Speaker 1: number three hundred and sixty five before we move on.
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: Every other person in Genesis chapter five lived for a
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  Speaker 1: number of years that has no obvious symbolic pattern, nine
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  Speaker 1: hundred and thirty, nine hundred and twelve. The numbers feel
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  Speaker 1: like records, the kind a careful historian preserved because they
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  Speaker 1: are true, not because they are tidy. And then Enoch
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  Speaker 1: three hundred and sixty five years, the number of days
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  Speaker 1: in a solar year. Scholars hold different views about whether
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  Speaker 1: this is significant or coincidental, and I will not pretend
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  Speaker 1: the question is settled. But when you are reading a
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  Speaker 1: text written by people for whom numbers carried meaning as
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: well as quantity, a number like three hundred and sixty
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  Speaker 1: five in this particular entry does not feel accidental. It
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: feels like a marker placed by a writer who wanted
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  Speaker 1: us to pause here. This life was complete, the marker says,
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  Speaker 1: not in the sense of lasting the longest, in the
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  Speaker 1: sense of being exactly what it was meant to be,
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  Speaker 1: down to the last day. Breathe six times, the drum
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  Speaker 1: beat six times. The sentence ended the same way. And
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  Speaker 1: then Enoch and the drums stopped, and the sentence refused
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  Speaker 1: to close. Not because he was the most powerful, not
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  Speaker 1: because he performed the most impressive feats, because he walked
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  Speaker 1: with God. That is the only explanation offered, the only
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  Speaker 1: thing that separates his entry from every entry surrounding it.
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  Speaker 1: He walked, and the walking changed everything? Chapter three, What
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  Speaker 1: does it mean to walk with God? Four words he
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: walked with God? We have said them several times now,
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  Speaker 1: and each time we say them they should feel a
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  Speaker 1: little different than the time before, not more familiar, more weighted,
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  Speaker 1: the way a word in another language begins to carry
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: real meaning only after you have lived inside it long
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: enough for the meaning to stop being a translation and
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: start being a feeling. But what do those five words
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: actually mean? Because it would be easy to read them
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: and nod and move on. We are all familiar enough
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  Speaker 1: with religious language that a phrase like walked with God
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: can slip past without leaving a mark. We hear it,
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  Speaker 1: and we think, yes, a godly man, a faithful man,
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  Speaker 1: and then we continue without stopping to feel what the
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  Speaker 1: phrase is actually carrying. The writers of Scripture were not
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: careless with their words, and this particular phrase, in the
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  Speaker 1: way it sits in the Hebrew text, is doing something
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  Speaker 1: more precise than a general statement of religious character. The
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: Hebrew verb translated as walked here is halach, but it
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: does not appear in its simple form, it appears in
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: a grammatical construction called the hit paiale, which carries a
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  Speaker 1: reflexive and continuous quality. A closer translation would be something
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  Speaker 1: like he kept walking or walking with God was the
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: ongoing and uninterrupted condition of his existence. This was not
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  Speaker 1: a single act, not a moment of spiritual breakthrough preserved
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  Speaker 1: as a credential for the rest of his life. This
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: was a practice, a wetton, a way of move through
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  Speaker 1: every day that did not pause and did not reverse
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  Speaker 1: for three hundred years. Three hundred years of continuous walking.
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  Speaker 1: Now think about the image of walking itself and why
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  Speaker 1: the Biblical writers chose this particular metaphor to describe the
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  Speaker 1: deepest possible relationship between a human being and God. Walking
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  Speaker 1: is not dramatic. It is not the act of someone
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  Speaker 1: performing on a stage. Walking is the most ordinary form
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  Speaker 1: of human movement. It is what we do when we
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: go from one place to another in the ordinary course
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  Speaker 1: of a day. We walk to the kitchen, we walk
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  Speaker 1: down the street, we walk through a field in the
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  Speaker 1: early morning, without thinking about the walking at all. And
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: that is precisely the point. The relationship between Enoch and
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: God was not described as a series of encounters, not
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: as a collection of mountain top experiences that punctuated an
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: otherwise ordinary life. It was described as the texture of
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: the life itself, the way he moved, the pace at
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: which he went from one year to the next. God
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: was not the destination Enoch was walking toward. God was
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: the one he was walking with. There is a profound
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: difference between those two things. A destination is something you
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: reach and then stop moving toward. A companion is some
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: one who is present for the whole journey, for the
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: ordinary stretches, as much as the significant ones, for the
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: mornings when nothing of note is happening, as much as
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: the mornings when everything changes. Enoch walked with God the
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: way you walk with someone you trust, without needing to
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: think about the trusting. Not beside them for special occasions,
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: beside them for the whole road. Now. The phrase walks
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: with God appears in only two places in the entire
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: book of Genesis, applied to a specific individual, here with
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: Enoch and later with Noah. Genesis Chapter six says that
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation, and
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: that Noah walked with God the same phrase. Two very
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: different men, two very different circumstances. Enoch walked with God
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: before the flood, in a world declining but not yet broken.
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: He walked in what might be called the long slow
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: autumn of a civilization, when the leaves had begun to
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: turn but the trees were still standing. Noah walked with
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: God during the flood, in a world that had reached
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: its breaking point, building a boat that would have seemed
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: impossible to explain to anyone watching, maintaining his direction, not
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: in a world that was fading, but in a world
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: that was ending. Both walked. The circumstances around them could
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: not have been more different. The faithfulness inside them pointed
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: in exactly the same direction. What this tells us is
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: something important about the nature of the walking itself. It
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: is not a condition that requires favorable circumstances to survive.
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: It does not flourish only when life is peaceful, and
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: collapse when life becomes difficult. Both men kept walking through
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: entirely different kinds of hard Now let us look at
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: one more dimension of walking that modern readers can easily miss.
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: In the culture of the ancient Near East and in
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: the Hebrew tradition, specifically, the act of walking beside someone
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: carried social meaning that went beyond physical proximity. To walk
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: with someone was to be identified with them. To share
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: their pace was to share their direction, their values, their commitments.
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: The Book of Amos asks a question that has echoed
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: through centuries of careful reading, Do too walk together unless
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: they have agreed to do so? The question assumes something
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: the culture understood immediately. Walking together implies agreement, a relationship
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: of genuine alignment that the walking makes visible. When Genesis
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: says Enoch walked with God, it is saying something about
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: his inner life, yes, but it is also saying something
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: about the quality of the relationship. This was not a
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: man who held a general belief in the divine from
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: a respectful distance. This was a man who had agreed
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: with God, whose direction and God's direction had become the
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: same direction. He was a walker with God, not a
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: believer from a distance, not an admirer at the edge
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: of the crowd, a walker present, moving side by side
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: through three hundred years of ordinary and extraordinary life. Now
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: I want to ask you something, and I want you
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: to let the question rest rather than rushing toward an answer.
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: Is there some one in your life with whom you
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: have walked in this way, not some one you admire
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: from a distance, some one you have actually walked beside,
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: some one whose presence has become part of the texture
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: of your ordinary days, some one who has been there
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: not just for the significant moments, but for the quiet ones,
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: the ones no one else would remember. If you have
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: known that kind of walking with another human being, you
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: have felt something of what Enoch knew with God. And
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: if you have never quite known it, perhaps to night
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: you can feel the shape of the longing for it.
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: Because I do not think that longing is accidental. We
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: were made for this kind of companionship, not the kind
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: that shows up for important events, the kind that walks
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: beside us through the ordinary ones. Enoch found it with God,
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: and the text does not present that as a miraculous
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: exception reserved for ancient patriarchs. It presents it as the
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: description of a life, a human life with a father
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: and a son, and children, and years that accumulated into centuries,
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: a man who chose a direction and kept choosing it.
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: One more thing before we move forward, walking is slow.
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: We live in a world that prizes speed above almost
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: everything else. Slowness feels like failure. Stillness feels like waste.
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: But walking is slow by nature. You cannot walk and
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: also be in a hurry. Not really walking has a
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: pace that belongs to the human body, a pace that
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: allows you to see what is at your feet and
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: above your head at the same time. It is the
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: speed at which real conversations happen, the speed at which
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: something like genuine companionship becomes possible. Enoch walked with God
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: for three hundred years, not sprinted, walked one foot and
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: then the other, one day and then the next, for
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: three centuries. Whatever you are carrying into this night, the
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: image of Enoch is not an image of some one
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: who arrived quickly at something impressive. He walked, and the
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: walking itself was the relationship. You do not have to
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: have everything figured out before you take the next step.
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: You do not have to feel the presence before you
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: start walking toward it. Enoch walked, and God walked with him,
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: and after three hundred years the distance between them had
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: become so small that one morning it simply closed. Rest
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: Now the question of how that walk began, what happened
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: to ignite it, what changed the morning everything shifted? That
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: question is waiting in the next chapter, and it begins
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: not with a vision or a burning bush. It begins
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: with a baby. Chapter four, the moment everything changed. There
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: is a detail in Genesis chapter five that most people
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: read right past, and it may be the most important
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: detail in the entire account of Enoch's life. The text
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: does not say that Enoch walked with God from the beginning.
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: It does not say he was born with an unusual
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: closeness to the divine, or that he was set apart
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: from childhood in a way that made his later life inevitable.
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: The text says something far more specific. It says that
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: Ko walked with God after he became the father of Methuselah,
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: after one small word carrying an enormous amount of weight.
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: The walking did not come first. Something else came first.
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: A child came first, a birth came first, a morning
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: came first. When Enoch held a newborn in his arms,
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: and something inside him shifted in a way that would
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: change the direction of every remaining year of his life.
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: He was sixty five years old. In the world of
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: Genesis chapter five, sixty five was not old. The men
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: in Enoch's genealogy were living well past nine hundred years.
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: His own father, Jared would live to nine hundred and
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: sixty two. In that world, sixty five was roughly equivalent
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: to what we might feel at seven or eight years
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: of age, young enough that the vast majority of life
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: still lay ahead, young enough that the choices made at
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: sixty five would echo through centuries. And at sixty five
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: something happened. Methuselah was born, and Enoch walked with God.
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: Now I want to be careful here. The text does
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: not explicitly tell us that fatherhood caused the change. It
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: places the two facts next to each other and leaves
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: the connection for the reader to bring their own humanity
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: to This is one of the places where Scripture trusts
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: us rather than explaining everything to us. So let me
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: ask you to do exactly that. Think about the moments
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: in your own life when something shifted, not gradually, not
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: through slow accumulation, but suddenly, the way a landscape changes,
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: when clouds break and light falls on things you had
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: been looking at without truly seeing. Think about the moments
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: when you looked at something or some one and understood
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: with a clarity that was almost physical, that you could
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: not continue being the same person you had been the
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: day before. For many people, one of those moments is
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: the birth of a child. There is something about looking
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: at a newborn for the first time that dismantles certainties
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: you did not know you were carrying, the smallness of
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: the child against the vastness of the world that child
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: has just entered, the complete vulnerability of a new life
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: that has no defenses, no strategies, nothing at all except
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: the love of the people holding it. The weight of
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: responsibility that settles on youans I not as a burden exactly,
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: but as a seriousness, a sudden understanding that the stakes
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: of everything have changed in a way you cannot fully measure.
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: Parents often describe this as the first time they truly
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: understood love as something that exceeds calculation. You did not
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: decide to love this person after weighing the evidence. The
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: love arrived before you had a chance to think about it,
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: and with the love came a vulnerability unlike anything you
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: had known before, because now there was something in the
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: world that mattered to you so completely that its loss
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: would be a loss you could not survive intact. Enoch
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: held Methuselah, and perhaps in that moment he felt for
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: the first time the full weight of what it means
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: to be a finite creature in a world that does
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: not always protect the things you love most. Perhaps he
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: looked at his son and thought about the world this
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: child was going to grow up in the direction things
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: were moving, the slow drift away from the God who
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: had made everything. And perhaps that clear eyed seeing, the
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: seeing of a father who suddenly needed something more than
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: himself to face what was coming, was the beginning of
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: the walking. Or perhaps it was something else. Perhaps Enoch
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: received something in that moment er vord an understanding that
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: settled into him the way truth settles when it arrives
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: not from outside, but from somewhere deeper than thought. We
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: will discuss shortly how the name Methuselah may carry within
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: it a prophecy. If Enoch named his son with that meaning,
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: then the birth of Methuselah was also the moment when
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: Enoch understood something about the future, something frightening to carry,
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: something that would require a resource far beyond anything he
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: could generate from within himself, and so he walked toward
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: the only one who could carry it with him. Now
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: Here is something about this moment that matters for any
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: one listening to night who has experienced their own version
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: of it. We often imagine that faith is built gradually
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: through steady effort, and there is real truth in that.
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: But there is another kind of beginning, the kind that
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: comes not from discipline, but from encounter, from a moment
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: when life hands you something too large for your own hands,
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: and you discover, sometimes to your own surprise, that you
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: have reached for something outside yourself. That reaching is not weakness.
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: It is one of the most honest things a human
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: being can do. Enoch reached not from a position of strength,
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: from a position of holding a new born child in
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: a world heading somewhere dark. And what he reached for
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: did not withdraw. It walked beside him and kept walking
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: beside him for three hundred years. Now, let me say
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: something about those first sixty five years that deserves to
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: be said plainly. We do not know what Enoch was
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: like before Methusla was born. The text gives us nothing
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: from those years, just a name and a number. He
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: lived sixty five years, and then his son was born,
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: and he walked with God. Whatever those first sixty five
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: years contained, the text does not hold it against him.
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: It does not say he wasted his early years or
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: arrived late at something he should have found sooner. The
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: text simply says that after his son was born, he walked,
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: and the walking is what the text remembers, not the
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: sixty five years before the three hundred years after. There
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: is a grace in that accounting that deserves to be
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: felt rather than rushed past. The measure of a life
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: is not the moment you began walking in the right direction.
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: The measure is that you walked the faithfulness of the
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: movement itself, however late it started, however unexpected the beginning.
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: If you are carrying a sense to night that you
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: started too late, that the years before some turning point
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: in your own life feel like wasted ground. Enoch was
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: sixty five when he began, and the text does not
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: call that late. It calls that the beginning breathe Enoch
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: held his son, and something changed. The direction of his
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: life found its compass point, and then he walked in
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: that direction for three hundred years, through a world becoming
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: more difficult and more dark with every passing decade. What
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: those three hundred years actually required, that is what the
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: next chapter is going to ask. The answer looks nothing
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: like heroism and everything like one ordinary morning, choosing to
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: continue Chapter five. Three hundred years say the number slowly.
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: Three hundred years, not three hundred days, not three hundred weeks,
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: three hundred years of choosing the same direction every morning.
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: Three hundred years of a relationship that the text never
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: describes as a dramatic series of spiritual peaks, simply a walk, continuous,
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: unbroken through ordinary life in an extraordinary world. Let the
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: number find its actual size in you before we try
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: to understand what it contains. Three hundred years ago from
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: the time I am writing this, the year was seventeen
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: twenty five. There was no United States of America. The
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: Industrial Revolution had not yet begun. Most of the cities
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: that define the modern world did not exist in their
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: current form. The landscape of human civilization was different in
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: ways that are genuinely difficult to comprehend from in side
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: our own moment. Now add another hundred years to that distance,
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: and you are still not at three hundred years of
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: life actually lived, three hundred years of mornings, actually woken
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: into seasons, actually felt in the body, children raised, and
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: grandchildren born, in the world shifting around you decade by decade,
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: without stopping to ask if you are keeping up. Enoch
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: lived that, and he walked with God through every year
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: of it. Now, the first thing I want to say
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: about those three hundred years is something easy to overlook
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: because we are so focused on the extraordinary ending of
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: Enoch's story. Those three hundred years were not extraordinary, not
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: in the way we usually use that word. They were
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: not filled, as far as we know, with visible, dramatic events.
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: Enoch did not part a sea, he did not defeat
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: an army, he did not call down fire. Genesis chapter
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: five gives us exactly the same description of Enoch's daily
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: existence that it gives to every other person in the genealogy.
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: He had sons and daughters. That is it. That is
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: the entire account of three hundred years of ordinary life
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: lived in the presence of God, family, daily work, the
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: unremarkable texture of an existence that looked from the outside
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: very much like everyone else's existence, except that he walked
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: with God through all of it. This is one of
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: the things I find most quietly revolutionary about Enoch's story.
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: We live in a world that constantly tells us the
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: significant life is the visible one. The faith worth having
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: is the faith that produces impressive and measurable results. Enoch's
• 37:40
  Speaker 1: three hundred years of walking with God produced, as far
• 37:43
  Speaker 1: as the text records, sons and daughters, ordinary life, faithfully
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: lived in the presence of God, and it was enough,
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: more than enough. It was the thing that made his
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: name outlast the names of kings. Now, let us think
• 37:59
  Speaker 1: about what three hundred years of anything actually requires from
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: the inside. Not three hundred years of spiritual heroism, three
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: hundred years of choosing every single morning to continue doing
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: the thing you chose the day before. Three hundred years
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: of returning to the same direction when circumstances pulled you sideways,
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: of continuing to walk long past the point where the
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: novelty of a new direction has faded and the walk
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: has become simply what you do because it is who
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: you are. Here is the question I want to press
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: into the center of this chapter. What about the year
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: when the choosing felt impossible. Not the first year, when
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: the newness of a direction carries its own energy, Not
• 38:42
  Speaker 1: the tenth year when the habit is established and the
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: direction feels settled. What about the year when the walk
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: felt like dragging yourself forward through fog, when the presence
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: you had known in the beginning seemed remote, and the
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: direction you had chosen looked less certain from the inside
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: than it had looked when you first chose it, when
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: you got up in the morning, and the reasons for
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: continuing felt thin and distant, And you chose to continue anyway,
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: because the direction was still the direction, even when the
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: feeling was gone. Every honest person who has walked faithfully
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: in any direction for a long time knows that year
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: for Enoch stretched across three centuries. That year may have
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: come more than once. We do not know what year
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: one hundred and twelve felt like from the inside. We
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: do not know what year two hundred and seven cost him.
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: We only know that he kept walking. And the keeping
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: is what the text preserves, not the easy years, not
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: the years that felt warm and close and certain, the
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: entire span of them, all together, described by a single
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: continuous verb, he walked. Now. There is something about Enoch's
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: three hundred years that most readers miss entirely, because it
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: requires looks looking outside of Genesis. Enoch vas a prophet.
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: The Letter of Jude, written in the first century of
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: the Common Era, quotes a prophecy attributed to Enoch about
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: the ungodly people of his time and the judgment that
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: was coming. This means Enoch was not insulated from the
• 40:18
  Speaker 1: world around him by his walk with God. He saw it.
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: He saw the world with the particular clarity that belongs
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: to people who have walked long enough beside God that
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: they begin to see what God sees. And what he
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: saw was not comfortable. He saw a world choosing destruction
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: with the calm confidence of people who do not believe
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: the consequences are real. He said so for three hundred
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: years he carried that seeing and that saying, not from
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: a protected distance, from inside the world with a family
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: in it, with all the ordinary vulnerability that belongs to
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: a person who loves people in a broken place. The
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: walking produced the sea, and the seeing could not stay silent.
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: Faithfulness is not a feeling. It is a direction maintained
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: over time. Regardless of the feeling, and the direction Enoch
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: maintained for three hundred years, through the easy years and
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: the years that required everything he had, through the seasons
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: of closeness and the seasons of fog, was the same
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: direction on the last day as it was on the first,
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: one foot, and then the other one morning, and then
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: the next one, returning to the direction when the night
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: had made it temporarily unclear, and then another returning until
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: the returnings became who he was breathe. Here is what
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: I want you to carry from this chapter into the
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: rest of to night. You do not measure a walk
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: by how it felt on any particular day. You measure
• 41:51
  Speaker 1: it by where it was still going on the last day.
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: And the walk of Enoch was still going, still pointed
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: in the same direction, still companioned by the same presence
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: on the day it simply continued somewhere else. That is
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: what three hundred years of walking with God looks like,
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: not a sustained state of spiritual excellence, a direction kept
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: one ordinary morning at a time. Chapter six, The Prophet
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: in the Ancient World picture a cave in the desert
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: of Judea, not a metaphor, a real cave cut into
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: pale limestone cliffs above a narrow valley called Wadi Kumran,
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: a few miles from the northern shore of the Dead Sea.
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: The year is nineteen forty seven. A Bedouin shepherd, a
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: teenage boy, is searching for a lost goat in the
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: rocky hills above the valley. He picks up a stone
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: and throws it into a dark opening in the cliff face.
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: He is not looking for anything, He is just throwing
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: a stone, and instead of the sound he expects the
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: dull thud of rock hitting rock, he hears something else, entirely,
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: the sound of breaking clay. He climbs into the opening,
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: and in the darkness he finds what no living person
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: has seen for nearly two thousand years, large clay jars,
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: sealed and intact, standing quietly in the back of the cave,
• 43:17
  Speaker 1: as if some one had set them there carefully and
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: fully intended to come back for them. Inside the jars,
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: wrapped in linen to protect them from the dry desert air,
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: are scrolls of ancient text that have been waiting in
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: the dark through twenty centuries of silence. The boy had
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: found the Dead Sea Scrolls, one of the most significant
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: archaeological discoveries in all of human history, found by accident
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: by a teenager looking for a lost goat. Now here
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: is why I am telling you this. Among those scrolls,
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: copied not once but in multiple versions, was a text
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: that serious scholars of the first century Jewish world already
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: knew well, a text that the community at Kumran considered
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: important enough to copy and preserve and hide in clay
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: jars before fleeing the approaching Roman army. The Book of Enoch,
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: not the four verses in Genesis, a full text, a
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: collection of ancient writings attributed to the Man who walked
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: with God, found wrapped in linen, hidden in yas, preserved
• 44:20
  Speaker 1: in a desert cave for two thousand years until a
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: teenage boy threw a stone into the dark and heard
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: something break open. The words of the Man who Walked
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: with God were found in a clay jar, in a cave,
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: still there, still intact, still waiting now here is what
• 44:38
  Speaker 1: the existence of those scrolls tells us about Enoch that
• 44:41
  Speaker 1: the four verses in Genesis cannot tell us alone. Enoch
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: was not a minor figure whose story began and ended
• 44:48
  Speaker 1: in a genealogy. He was a figure whose memory and
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: whose words had been preserved and treasured and passed down
• 44:55
  Speaker 1: through many centuries of Jewish tradition. The community at Kumran
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: did not consider the Book of Enoch a curiosity. They
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: considered it worth protecting with their lives, worth sealing in jars,
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: worth hiding in limestone cliffs on the chance that someone
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: might find it. After the danger had passed, they hid
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: the words of the Walker, and the words survived. Now
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: let us go to the New Testament to find where
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: one of those words appears in the canon of scripture itself.
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: The Letter of Jude, a small and often overlooked document
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: near the end of the Bible, does something remarkable in
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: its fourteenth and fifteenth verses. It quotes Enoch directly, not
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: as a legend, not as a tradition mentioned for historical color,
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: as a prophet whose words carry weight for the community.
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: Jude is writing to. Jude writes this Enoch the seventh
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: from Adam prophesied, saying, behold, the Lord comes with ten
• 45:53
  Speaker 1: thousands of his holy ones to execute judgment on all,
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: and to convict all the ungodly of all their deeds
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: of ungodliness that they have committed in such an ungodly way,
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: and of all the harsh things that ungodly sinners have
• 46:06
  Speaker 1: spoken against him. A prophecy spoken in the ancient world
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: before the flood, preserved through the long centuries of Jewish tradition,
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: found in scrolls at Kumran by a boy looking for
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: a goat, and quoted in the New Testament. The thread
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: running from Enoch to Jude spans the entire Biblical library. Now,
• 46:28
  Speaker 1: let us think about what Enoch was actually saying in
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: that prophecy, because the content matters as much as the
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: fact of it. He was speaking about judgment, about the
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: Lord coming with his holy ones to hold the ungodly
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: accountable for the things they had done and the things
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: they had said. He was describing a reckoning, a day
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: when the direction that so many people around him were
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: choosing would finally meet its consequence. Remember the world Enoch
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: was living in, a world in which, according to Genesis
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: chapter six, the wickedness of humanity had become great on
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: the earth, A world in which the thoughts and intentions
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: of the human heart were described as only evil continually,
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: a world heading, though most of its inhabitants did not
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: know it, toward a catastrophe that would reset everything. Enoch
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: saw it coming, and he said so. He did not
• 47:21
  Speaker 1: stay quiet because saying so was uncomfortable. He did not
• 47:25
  Speaker 1: soften the message to make it easier for his neighbors
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: to hear. He opened his mouth and said what the
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: God he was walking with had revealed to him. This
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: is the part of Enoch's story that receives far less
• 47:36
  Speaker 1: attention than it deserves. We celebrate the walking, we are
• 47:40
  Speaker 1: moved by the mystery of the translation, but we sometimes
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: forget that walking with God in a world heading toward
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: judgment required a specific kind of courage. The courage to
• 47:51
  Speaker 1: see clearly when the people around you were choosing not
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: to see, the courage to speak truthfully when the truth
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: was not welcome. Prophets in the Biblical tradition were almost
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: never comfortable in the short term. Isaiah was told that
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: the people would hear his message and not understand it.
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: Jeremiah was thrown into a cistern for what he said.
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: Amos was told to go back where he came from.
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: The message of a prophet was not designed to make
• 48:17
  Speaker 1: people comfortable. It was designed to make people truthful. Enoch
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: did this work in a world that predated all of them,
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: speaking the hardest possible truth into the oldest possible darkness.
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: And here is the thing about prophetic speech that Enoch's
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: story illustrates more quietly than almost any other. The speaking
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: and the walking were not two separate activities. Enoch did
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: not walk with God and separately function as a prophet,
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: as if the two things were distinct parts of his life.
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: The walking produced the seeing. The intimacy of the companionship
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: opened his eyes to what the God walking beside him saw.
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: You cannot spend three hundred years genuinely walking with someone
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: without beginning to see them world the way they see it,
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: without the things that grieve them beginning to grieve you.
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: Enoch walked with God, and God saw a world in trouble,
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: and Enoch began to see it too, and the seeing
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: could not stay silent. The prophecy was the overflow of
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: the walk. Now I want to say something honest about
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: the Book of Enoch before we leave this chapter. The
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: Book of Enoch is a fascinating and important document in
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: the history of Jewish and early Christian thought. It elaborates
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: on what Enoch saw during his walk with God, visions
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: of heaven and angels, and the deep structures of creation.
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: It was clearly influential in the first century world that
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: produced the New Testament, but it is not part of
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: the biblical canon for most Christian and Jewish traditions. The
• 49:49
  Speaker 1: question of its authority and its relationship to the Enoch
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: of Genesis is one that careful scholars continue to discuss.
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: Without a single settled answer, not going to tell you
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: that everything in it is historically reliable, because the honest
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: answer is that we do not fully know what I
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: can tell you? Is this The tradition of Enoch as
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: someone who saw things, who received understanding on the long
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: walk with God, who carried knowledge that the people around
• 50:18
  Speaker 1: him did not have access to, is very old, old
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: enough to have been alive and vital in the world
• 50:25
  Speaker 1: that Jesus and his apostles inhabited, Old enough that Jude
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: felt no need to introduce Enoch when he quoted him.
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: The readers would know. They would know that this was
• 50:35
  Speaker 1: the walker the seventh from Adam, the one who saw
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: what was coming and said so, the man who walked
• 50:42
  Speaker 1: so close to God for so long that one day
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: the walking continued into a place the rest of us
• 50:47
  Speaker 1: have not yet been. His words were found in a
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: cave in the desert, wrapped in linen, placed there by
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: people who believed they were worth protecting. They were right. Breathe.
• 50:59
  Speaker 1: Let that image rest in you for a moment. A
• 51:02
  Speaker 1: teenage boy in nineteen forty seven, looking for a lost goat,
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: throwing a stone into a dark opening in a cliff
• 51:09
  Speaker 1: and hearing the sound of something ancient breaking open, the
• 51:12
  Speaker 1: words of the walker still there after all this time rest.
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: Now the next chapter is going to go somewhere quieter
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: than anywhere we have been tonight. We are going to
• 51:24
  Speaker 1: stop moving entirely. We are going to sit in the
• 51:28
  Speaker 1: silence at the center of this story and discover that
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: the silence is not empty. It never was. Chapter seven,
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: the silence at the center stop, not to move to
• 51:42
  Speaker 1: the next idea, not to transition smoothly into the next
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: piece of information, but to genuinely stop, to sit in
• 51:50
  Speaker 1: the middle of this story and acknowledge something that all
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: the learning and all the careful reading of ancient texts
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: cannot touch. We have covered a great deal of great tonight.
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: We have stood in the ancient world before Enoch was
• 52:04
  Speaker 1: born and felt the slow rhythm of centuries. We have
• 52:08
  Speaker 1: watched his name appear in a genealogy and felt the
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: drum beat of death stop on the seventh entry. We
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: have looked carefully at what it means to walk with
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: God in the continuous and habitual sense the Hebrew verb carries.
• 52:21
  Speaker 1: We have imagined the morning Methuselah was born and tried
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: to feel what shifted in a sixty five year old
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: man holding his first born son. We have sat with
• 52:31
  Speaker 1: three hundred years of faithful, ordinary life and tried to
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: feel what that kind of faithfulness actually requires from the inside.
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: We have followed the words of the Walker from the
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: ancient world into a clay jar in a desert cave,
• 52:45
  Speaker 1: and out again into the letter of Jude. We have
• 52:48
  Speaker 1: learned a great deal, and now I want to put
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: all of it down, because here is what all of
• 52:54
  Speaker 1: that learning cannot give us. We do not know what
• 52:57
  Speaker 1: it felt like. We do not know what en Knox's
• 53:00
  Speaker 1: mornings were like from the inside. We do not know
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: how he prayed, or whether what he did could even
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: be called prayer in the way we use that word.
• 53:09
  Speaker 1: We do not know if he heard a voice, or
• 53:11
  Speaker 1: felt a warmth, or simply moved through his days with
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: an orientation so interior and so personal that no language
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: has ever found a way to describe it accurately. From
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: the outside. We do not know if there were years
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: when the Walk felt like dragging himself forward through fog,
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: years when the presence he had known in the beginning
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: seemed remote and the direction he had chosen looked less certain.
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: Than when he first chose it. We do not know
• 53:37
  Speaker 1: if he was ever afraid. Scripture gives us the outline
• 53:41
  Speaker 1: of this life and withholds the interior of it almost completely.
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: Four verses in Genesis, a quotation in jude a confirmation
• 53:50
  Speaker 1: in Hebrews. And that is all the inside of Enoch's
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: walk with God is for us. Silence. Now, I want
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: to suggest something that matters more than anything else I
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: could say in this chapter. The silence is not a
• 54:04
  Speaker 1: failure of the text. It is not a gap waiting
• 54:07
  Speaker 1: to be filled with speculation or tradition or imaginative reconstruction.
• 54:12
  Speaker 1: The silence is part of what the text is saying,
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: and if we are willing to enter it rather than
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: immediately trying to fill it, it will tell us something
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: that the words surrounding it cannot. It says this. Not
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: every walk with God needs to be documented, Not every
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: intimacy needs a description. Not every season of a faithful
• 54:33
  Speaker 1: life needs to produce visible evidence that can be examined
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: and presented to the world as proof that the relationship
• 54:40
  Speaker 1: was real. Some of the most real things in human
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: experience are the ones that leave the fewest external traces.
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: Think about the people in your own life. Whose love
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: you are most certain of not the people who have
• 54:52
  Speaker 1: said the most eloquent things about loving you, the ones
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: whose love you simply know the way you know the
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: ground is solid beneath your feet, not because you are
• 55:02
  Speaker 1: thinking about it, but because you have walked on it
• 55:04
  Speaker 1: long enough to trust it. How would you describe that
• 55:07
  Speaker 1: certainty to someone who had never felt it. You would
• 55:10
  Speaker 1: reach for words, and the words would fall short. You
• 55:14
  Speaker 1: would eventually arrive at something like this. You would have
• 55:17
  Speaker 1: to have been there. The knowing is in the walking,
• 55:21
  Speaker 1: not in the description of it. Enoch walked with God
• 55:24
  Speaker 1: for three hundred years, and the inside of that walk
• 55:27
  Speaker 1: is silence. Because some things are too interior and too
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: real for the outside of them to carry the full
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: weight of explanation. Now Here is the thing about this
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: silence that I find most worth holding. In the relationships
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: that have gone deepest and lasted longest, there comes a
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: point where words are no longer the primary medium of communication,
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: not because there is nothing to say, because the relationship
• 55:52
  Speaker 1: has grown past the need to constantly articulate itself. You
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: can sit with someone you love in complete silence, and
• 55:59
  Speaker 1: the silence is not empty. It is full of everything
• 56:02
  Speaker 1: that does not need to be said, because it has
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: already been lived. That silence is not the absence of relationship,
• 56:09
  Speaker 1: It is the fullness of it. Enoch walked with God
• 56:13
  Speaker 1: for three hundred years, and the text falls silent about
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: the interior of those years, perhaps because the interior of
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: them had become something like that, not empty, full, too
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: full for the outside of it to hold. I am
• 56:28
  Speaker 1: not going to fill this chapter with more analysis. I
• 56:31
  Speaker 1: am going to give you what the text gives you
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: at this point in Enoch's story, a space, a place
• 56:38
  Speaker 1: to stop moving and simply be present to the mystery
• 56:41
  Speaker 1: of a man who walked so close to God for
• 56:43
  Speaker 1: so long that the walking became the whole of who
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: he was. Let whatever you are carrying to night, rest
• 56:50
  Speaker 1: here for a moment, whatever questions have not been answered,
• 56:54
  Speaker 1: whatever distances you feel between yourself and the things you
• 56:57
  Speaker 1: most want to be close to, what ever wait has
• 57:00
  Speaker 1: been sitting in your chest since before you laid down
• 57:03
  Speaker 1: to night. You do not have to resolve it. You
• 57:06
  Speaker 1: do not have to understand it. You do not have
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: to explain it to anyone, including yourself. Enoch walked with
• 57:13
  Speaker 1: God for three hundred years, and we do not know
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: what it felt like from the inside. We only know
• 57:19
  Speaker 1: that he kept walking, and that the walking was enough,
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: that the walking was in the end everything. The silence
• 57:27
  Speaker 1: at the center of this story is not asking you
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: to fill it. It is inviting you to enter it.
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: Breathe slowly again. Let the room be what it is,
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: Let the quiet be what it is. Let the things
• 57:43
  Speaker 1: you do not know and cannot yet explain, simply be
• 57:45
  Speaker 1: what they are tonight. You are held here not by
• 57:50
  Speaker 1: your understanding, not by the clarity of your faith in
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: this particular moment, by something older than your questions, and
• 57:57
  Speaker 1: steadier than your certainty, and more present than the darkness
• 58:00
  Speaker 1: around you. Enoch walked and God walked with him, and
• 58:05
  Speaker 1: the inside of that was between them, as it should be,
• 58:09
  Speaker 1: as it still is. Chapter eight. Methuselah, the Sun who
• 58:16
  Speaker 1: outlived everyone. There is a name in the Bible that
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: almost everyone has heard, and almost no one has truly
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: stopped to feel. Methuselah. We use it the way we
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: use phrases that have become so familiar they have lost
• 58:30
  Speaker 1: their texture. Old as Methuselah, the name has become a
• 58:34
  Speaker 1: shorthand for extreme age a convenient label for something so
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: old it belongs to a different world. Entirely, we say
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: it and we move on without stopping to feel what
• 58:44
  Speaker 1: the name actually contains. Tonight, let us stop, because Methuselah
• 58:50
  Speaker 1: is not simply the oldest man in the Bible. He
• 58:54
  Speaker 1: is the thread that holds everything in this story together.
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: He is the son of the man who walked with
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: God Od and the grandfather of the man who built
• 59:02
  Speaker 1: the Ark. He is the living bridge between Enoch and Noah,
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: between the walker and the builder, between the man who
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: was taken before the flood and the man who survived it.
• 59:14
  Speaker 1: And his life, when you look at it with care,
• 59:16
  Speaker 1: is one of the most quietly astonishing in all of Scripture.
• 59:20
  Speaker 1: He lived nine hundred and sixty nine years. Let us
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: sit with that number. Honestly, nine hundred and sixty nine
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: years the longest recorded human life span in the entire Bible,
• 59:34
  Speaker 1: Longer than Adam, longer than Noah, longer than any one
• 59:39
  Speaker 1: who came before him or after him. Methusela outlived his children,
• 59:43
  Speaker 1: he outlived his grandchildren, He outlived entire generations of people
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: who were born and grew old and died while he
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: was still somewhere in the middle of his own story,
• 59:54
  Speaker 1: and if a calculation that has occupied careful scholars for
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: many centuries is even approximately he died in the year
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 1: the flood came. Now, I want to be honest with
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: you here because this is one of those places where
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 1: the text rewards careful handling. The idea that Methuselah died
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: in the year of the flood is based on adding
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: the numbers in Genesis chapter five. Different scholars working with
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 1: the same text arrive at slightly different calculations depending on
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: how they handle certain details of the chronology. Some find
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 1: the overlap exact, others find it close but not perfectly aligned.
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: What I can say with confidence is that the possibility
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 1: has been noticed and taken seriously by serious readers across
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: many centuries, and the name Methuselah itself has added to
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 1: that discussion. The name in at least one ancient reading
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 1: of the Hebrew may carry the meaning his death shall
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 1: bring or when he dies, it will come. I want
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: to say may carry, because the etymology is genuinely debated
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: among scholars, and I do not want to present a
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 1: content tested translation as if it were settled fact. The
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: first part of the name connects to a route associated
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 1: with death. The second connects to a route associated with
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 1: sending or bringing. Several ancient translations and a number of
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 1: careful modern scholars read the name this way. Others read
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 1: it differently. But if that reading is correct, then Enoch
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 1: named his son with a prophecy embedded in the name itself.
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: He held this new born child on the morning that
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 1: changed everything, and he gave him a name that pointed
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: toward what would arrive when this particular long life finally ended.
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 1: His death shall bring, and it did. Nine hundred and
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: sixty nine years after Enoch held him and named him,
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: Methuselah died and the waters came. Now, I want to
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 1: think about Methuselah not as a number or a theological
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: data point, but as a person, as the child Enoch
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: held on the mourning that became the hinge of everything,
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 1: As the boy who grew up in a household where
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 1: his father walked differently from every other father he could observe.
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 1: As the man who watched that father leave one day
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 1: received into a silence that left no body to bury
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 1: and no grave to visit, just an absence where a
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 1: presence had been. What was it like to be Methuselah,
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 1: to be the son of the man who walked with
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 1: God and then was simply not found. We do not
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 1: know how old Methuselah was when Enoch was taken. The
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 1: numbers allow for the possibility that he was a grown
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: man who had known his father for decades, who had
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 1: watched from inside the household what it looked like to
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: live in the continuous company of God, not as a
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 1: theological concept, as the actual climate of daily life, and
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 1: then one day his father was gone. No final words
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 1: recorded for us to read, no moment of passing that
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 1: allowed grief to do its ordinary work, just the searching
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 1: and the not finding, and the word the writer of
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: Hebrews would later use, he was not found. I wonder
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 1: what Methuselah did with that. I wonder if the not
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 1: finding brought him closer to the God his father had
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 1: walked with, or if the loss pushed him first into
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 1: distance before it could bring him near. I wonder if
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 1: he looked at his own son Lammik, and later at
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 1: his grandson Noah, and understood that the thing his father
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 1: had been was running forward through him. Even in the
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 1: years when he was not sure he was carrying anything
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: at all. The Bible does not answer these questions, but
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 1: the Bible tells us something about the shape of Methuselah's
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: life that matters more than any specific story about him.
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 1: Could He stayed, He did not disappear. He did not
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: leave the community of people who carried the memory of
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: his father and the faith of his father. He lived,
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: He had a son, That son had a son, and
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: that grandson walked with God. The same five words two
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 1: generations after Enoch was taken in a world considerably darker
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 1: than the world Enoch had walked through, his great grandson
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: walked with God. The thread did not break. Now Here
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 1: is the thing I want to rest with you before
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 1: we move forward. We rarely see the full shape of
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 1: what we pass forward. We make choices in our ordinary
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 1: lives about how to walk and what to value and
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: what to return to when everything pulls us in other directions,
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: and those choices create a climate, an atmosphere in which
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: certain things become possible for the people who come after us,
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 1: not guaranteed. People who grow up in faithful households sometimes
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 1: walk away entirely, and people who grow up with no
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: model of faith sometimes find their way to it through
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 1: roads no one could have predicted. But the climate matters.
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 1: Enoch walked with God for three hundred years, and two
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: generations later, in a darker world, his great grandson walked
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 1: with God. Not because Enoch had engineered it, not because
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: he left behind a perfect system, because he walked. And
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 1: the walking was real enough and present enough in the
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: lives of the people closest to him that it left
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 1: a mark deep enough to survive his departure and Methuselah's
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 1: long centuries, and the moral collapse of an entire civilization.
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 1: The thread held. Now, let me say one more thing
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 1: about Methuselah's extraordinary life span before we move on, and
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 1: I want it to land as something felt rather than
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 1: merely observed. Nine hundred and sixty nine years is a
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: very long time to live in a world heading toward catastrophe.
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 1: If the name Methuselah carried a prophetic meaning, then every
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 1: year of his remarkable life was, in some sense a
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 1: year of patience extended, a year of the world continuing
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 1: to exist because the man whose death would signal the
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 1: coming judgment had not yet died, a year of a
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 1: door still open a year of an invitation still extended
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 1: to a generation that was not, for the most part,
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 1: making use of it. The second letter of Peter describes
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 1: God as patient, not wanting any one to perish, but
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 1: every one to come to repentance, and in the same passage,
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 1: Peter connects this patience specifically to the days of Noah.
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 1: Nine hundred and sixty nine years of that patience given
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 1: a human face and a human name, and a human
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 1: body that kept on living long past the point when
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: every one around him had stopped. His death shall bring,
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: but not before nine hundred and sixty nine years of
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 1: the world being given every possible opportunity to turn around
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 1: breathe let Methuselah be a person to night rather than
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 1: a number. The son who grew up watching his father
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 1: walk differently from every one else, who carried a name
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 1: heavy with prophecy, who outlived everyone he ever knew, who
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 1: was without fully understanding it, the living extension of divine
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 1: patience in a world that needed more time than it
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 1: was willing to use. Wisely, we are all in some
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 1: way the children of people who walked before us, and
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 1: we are all in some way passing something forward to
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 1: people who will walk after us. Enoch did not see Noah,
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 1: but Noah walked with God. The thread held and it
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 1: is still holding tonight. Chapter nine. A world walking the
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 1: wrong way. Enoch did not live in a peaceful world.
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 1: This is something easy to forget. When we focus on
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 1: the beauty of his walk with God. We imagine him,
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 1: perhaps in some uncomplicated landscape, a man of simple faith,
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 1: in a simple time, walking quietly through days that offered
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 1: little resistance to the direction he had chosen. But that
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 1: is not what Genesis tells us. Genesis tells us that
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 1: Enoch lived in a world that was getting worse. The
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 1: sixth chapter of Genesis, which describes the conditions inmediately before
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 1: the flood, paints a picture of a civilization in deep
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: and accelerating moral collapse. The wickedness of humanity had become
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 1: great on the earth. The thoughts and intentions of the
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 1: human heart were described as only evil, continually, not occasionally,
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 1: not mostly, with some good mixed in the word. The
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 1: text uses suggests a completeness, a thoroughness, to the corruption
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 1: that had taken hold, a world that had not stumbled
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 1: into darkness by accident, but had chosen it generation by
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 1: generation until the choosing had become the culture itself. This
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 1: was the world Enoch walked through for three hundred and
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 1: sixty five years, and this distinction matters enormously for anyone
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 1: who has ever thought that genuine faith requires favorable conditions
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 1: to survive. Enoch did not wait for the world to
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 1: improve before he began walking. He did not postpone his
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 1: faithfulness until the cultural environment became more hostle spitable. He
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 1: walked with God inside the world, through it, surrounded by it,
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 1: and the walk did not break. Now, let us think
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 1: about what this actually requires, not in abstract terms, but
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 1: in the practical texture of a life lived day after
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 1: day in a particular environment. Imagine knowing what Enoch knew,
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 1: seeing what he saw, carrying the prophetic awareness of where
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 1: the world was heading and why, and then waking up
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 1: every morning and going about the ordinary business of life
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 1: inside that world, raising children in it, participating in the
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 1: community of it, being present to people, some of whom
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 1: were contributing to the very corruption he could see clearly
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 1: and speak about faithfully. That is not a comfortable existence.
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 1: That is the existence of someone who has made a
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 1: decision about direction and must keep making that decision every
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 1: single day in an environment that is constantly presenting alternatives.
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 1: Some of those alternatives would have been attractive, some would
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 1: have been socially rewarded. Some would have been far easier
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 1: than continuing to walk the road. He was walking in
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 1: a world that was not celebrating his choice. He kept walking.
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 1: Now Here is the thing about Enoch's world that connects
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 1: most directly to the world you and I are living
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 1: in tonight. The people of his time were not, as
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 1: far as we can tell, dramatically unhappy with the direction
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 1: they were going. The text does not describe a population
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 1: crying out for something better. It describes a population in
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 1: which the corruption had become so normalized that it no
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 1: longer registered as corruption. It had become simply the way
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 1: things were. The water, everyone was swimming, in the air,
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 1: everyone was breathing without noticing they were breathing it. This
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 1: is one of the most dangerous conditions as civilization can
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 1: arrive at. Not when the wrong direction is obviously painful.
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 1: When it is obviously painful, people look for another road,
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 1: but when the wrong direction has become comfortable, when it
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 1: has been normalized to the point where people can no
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 1: longer quite remember what another direction would feel like when
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 1: the alternative seems not just difficult, but strange, unnecessary, vaguely antisocial.
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 1: That is when the walking becomes most important and most invisible.
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 1: At the same time, Enoch walked in a world that
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 1: had normalized a direction he refused to take, in a
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 1: world that would not have understood his refusal as courage
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 1: because it did not understand itself as moving toward anything
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 1: that required courage to resist. He simply walked quietly, continuously
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 1: for three hundred years, and the world around him continued
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 1: in its own direction. Now I want to bring a
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 1: question from the Book of Amos into this chapter. Do
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 1: too walk together unless they have agreed to do so?
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 1: The question assumes something the culture understood immediately. Walking together
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 1: implies agreement, a relationship of genuine alignment. Enoch's world had
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 1: largely agreed to walk in a direction away from God,
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 1: not through a formal decision, through the gradual accumulation of
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 1: individual choices, generation by generation, each one pulling the culture
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 1: a little further from where it had started, until the
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 1: distance between the origin and the present had grown so
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 1: large that the origin was barely visible. And in that world,
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 1: one man had made a different agreement to walk with
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 1: God in a world walking the opposite direction is not
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 1: simply a private spiritual matter. It is a public alignment,
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 1: not performed for the sake of being seen to align differently,
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 1: but genuine and lived and quietly costly. In the ways
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: that daily faithfulness in an unfaithful world is always quietly costly,
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 1: the cost is rarely dramatic. More often, in the texture
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 1: of daily life, the cost is subtler and harder to
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 1: sustain over time. It is the cost of not belonging
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 1: quite fully to the world you are living in, of
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 1: seeing things clearly that the people around you are choosing
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 1: not to see, of holding values that are not reinforced
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 1: by your cultural environment, of being the person who does
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 1: not go quite as far in the direction everyone else
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 1: is going, not because you are superior, but because you
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 1: have made an agreement about direction, and you are trying,
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 1: day after ordinary day to keep it. That kind of
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 1: faithfulness has no audience except the one walking beside you,
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 1: and Enoch found that to be enough. That is perhaps
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 1: the most countercultural thing. His story says to us, the
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 1: company of God on a road no one else is
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 1: choosing is sufficient. The walk does not need an audience
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 1: to be real. The world around Enoch continued in its
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 1: own direction, and then the flood came, and Enoch was
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 1: not there when it did. There is a mercy in
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 1: that timing, worth feeling. He walked until the walking here
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 1: was complete, and then he was received by the one
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 1: he had been walking with. I say this carefully, not
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 1: meaning to suggest that faithfulness always produces removal from difficult things.
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 1: Noah walked with God and was present for the flood.
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 1: He built the ark and weathered the catastrophe and came
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 1: out the other side. Faithfulness does not guarantee insulation from
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 1: hard things. But for Enoch, the walking and the departure
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 1: were connected in a way the text presents without fully explaining,
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 1: and we should not pretend to understand it more completely
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 1: than we do. He walked, and when the walking here
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 1: was done, he kept walking somewhere else. Breathe. Whatever world
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 1: you are living inside to night, whatever direction the culture
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 1: around you seems to have agreed on, whatever subtle pressure
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 1: you feel to adjust your own direction to match the
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 1: one every one else appears to be traveling, you are
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 1: not required to agree. You are invited to make an
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 1: agreement about direction, and then to keep it day after
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 1: ordinary day, not dramatically, not with an audience, just faithfully.
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 1: Enoch walked with God in a world walking the wrong
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 1: way for three hundred years. He is the evidence that
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 1: it can be done. That the company on that road,
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 1: though invisible to every other eye, is more than enough
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 1: for the journey. Chapter ten the translation, and he was not.
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 1: We have arrived at the center of the mystery. Everything
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 1: in the previous chapters has been moving toward this moment.
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 1: The ancient world with its long, slow centuries, the name
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 1: in the genealogy that broke the pattern, the meaning of
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 1: walking with God in the continuous and habitual sense. The
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 1: Hebrew carries the morning Methuselah was born, and everything shifted.
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 1: Three hundred years of faithful, ordinary life in a darkening world.
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 1: The prophetic voice that ran from an ancient cave in
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 1: the Judean desert into the Letter of jude The silence
• 1:16:05
  Speaker 1: at the center. We chose to enter rather than phil
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 1: the son who carried the thread forward, the world walking
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 1: the wrong way while one man kept walking the right one.
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 1: All of it has been leading here, And he was not,
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 1: for God took him seven words in the English, fewer
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 1: in the Hebrew, and inside those seven words, one of
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 1: the most remarkable events in all of human history is
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 1: described with a quietness that is itself a form of testimony.
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 1: Let us begin with the word that is missing. Every
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 1: other entry in Genesis chapter five contains it, the word
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 1: that had beaten through six consecutive lives like the toll
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 1: of a slow bell, The word so reliable, so woven
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 1: into the grammar of human existence in that world that
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 1: its absence lands with more force than any dramatic announcement
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 1: could died. That word is not here. Six times it
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 1: appeared without exception, and he died, and he died, and
• 1:17:08
  Speaker 1: he died. The pattern unbreakable and ancient and true. And
• 1:17:13
  Speaker 1: then Enoch's entry appeared, and the word was not there. Instead,
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 1: something the text had never said before appeared in its place.
• 1:17:22
  Speaker 1: He was not, for God took him. Now, let us
• 1:17:26
  Speaker 1: look at each part of that sentence with the care
• 1:17:28
  Speaker 1: it deserves. He was not. The Hebrew word is ayinn.
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 1: We have met this word before in this story. It
• 1:17:36
  Speaker 1: carries the meaning of absence, pure, simple, unexplained absence, not death,
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 1: which in Hebrew has its own clear vocabulary, not departure
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 1: in any of the ways the language knows how to
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 1: describe departure. Simply, this the condition of not being present.
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 1: He was here and then he was not here. What
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 1: the word does not say is as important as what
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 1: it does say. It does not say he ceased to exist.
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 1: It does not say he perished. The absence it describes
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 1: is an absence from here, not an absence from everywhere.
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 1: And the second half of the sentence answers the question
• 1:18:16
  Speaker 1: the first half opens. For God took him. The Hebrew
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 1: verb is lacaq to take, to receive, to fetch, to
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 1: carry away to oneself. It is a verb of active
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 1: and intentional possession, not passive disappearance. God did not allow
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 1: Enoch to slip away. God took him deliberately, purposefully, with
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 1: the full weight of divine intention behind the action. This
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 1: is not a man who wandered off. This is a
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 1: man who was received now. The New Testament adds dimensions
• 1:18:52
  Speaker 1: to this that the Hebrew text leaves implicit. Hebrew's Chapter
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 1: eleven says this about Enoch by faith. Enoch was taken
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 1: up so that he should not see death, and he
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 1: was not found because God had taken him. Now. Before
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 1: he was taken, he was commended as having pleased God.
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 1: Three additions to what Genesis tells us. The first, he
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 1: did not see death, not that he was spared from
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 1: difficulty or from the weight of a long life lived
• 1:19:20
  Speaker 1: in a broken world, but the specific experience of death,
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 1: the crossing of that particular threshold, was not his to make.
• 1:19:28
  Speaker 1: He went from here to there without passing through the
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 1: door that every other name in the genealogy passed through.
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 1: The second, he was not found. Sit with that for
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 1: a moment. When Enoch was not there any more, people
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 1: looked for him. They checked the places he usually went.
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 1: They asked one another if any one had seen him.
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 1: They searched with the ordinary human urgency of people who
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 1: love someone and have suddenly lost track of them. And
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 1: they found nothing. Not a body, not a trace, not
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 1: a clue about what had happened or where he had gone,
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 1: just the absence where the presence had been, the paths
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 1: he had walked, the faces of the people who knew him.
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 1: Now looking at a world that contained a shape where
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 1: Enoch used to be. The searching was real, the not
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 1: finding was real, and the reason for the not finding
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 1: was that he was not missing. He was taken the
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 1: third edition from Hebrews is the interpretive key that unlocks
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 1: everything else. Before he was taken, he was commended as
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 1: having pleased God. The word translated as pleased here carries
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 1: in the Greek the sense of being well received, of
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 1: being someone whose company is genuinely wanted, of being the
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 1: kind of person that the one you are walking with
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 1: does not want to stop walking. Beside Enoch pleased God.
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 1: He was, in some genuine and personal sense, good company
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 1: for the divine. The walk had been real on both sides,
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 1: not just Enoch faithfully moving in a direction, a genuine
• 1:21:04
  Speaker 1: mutual companionship in which the one being walked with found
• 1:21:08
  Speaker 1: the walking good. And then Hebrews adds the sentence that
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 1: looks past Enoch entirely and lands directly in this room
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 1: to night. Without faith, it is impossible to please God.
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 1: For whoever would draw near to God must believe that
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 1: he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 1: Not that whoever would draw near must have everything resolved,
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 1: Not that whoever would draw near must have arrived at
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 1: a state of confident intellectual certainty. Must believe that He
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 1: exists and that seeking him is worth doing. That is
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 1: a small enough seed to plant in the most uncertain soil.
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 1: Enoch's faith was not described as a state of arrived certainty.
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 1: It was described as a walk, a movement, a continuous
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 1: choosing of a direction across three hundred years. The faith
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 1: was in the walking, not in a set of propositions
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 1: held with perfect confidence, and the walking pleased God. Now
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 1: let us look at the Greek word the ancient translation
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 1: of the Old Testament uses for what happened to Enoch
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 1: meta titemi. It means to transfer, to transport, to move
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 1: something from one place to another. It is the word
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 1: you would use for relocating something carefully, for translating a
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 1: document from one language into another, for carrying something valuable
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 1: across a distance to a new location. Enoch was translated
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 1: not in the literary sense, in the most literal possible sense.
• 1:22:39
  Speaker 1: He was moved from one mode of existence to another,
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 1: from here to there, from the world where walking happens,
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 1: one step at a time, through seasons and years, to
• 1:22:49
  Speaker 1: wherever the God he had been walking with was taking him.
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 1: The word does not tell us what the destination looked like.
• 1:22:56
  Speaker 1: It only tells us that the movement was real, and
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 1: that the one who moved him was God. Now I
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 1: want to sit with the question. Every honest reader of
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 1: this account eventually arrives at why Enoch? Of all the
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 1: people in Genesis chapter five, Why was Enoch the one
• 1:23:13
  Speaker 1: taken rather than dying. The text's answer is the one
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 1: Hebrews makes explicit. He pleased God. He walked with God.
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 1: The relationship between them had become something for which the
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 1: ordinary ending felt like an interruption. The God walking beside
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 1: him chose not to impose. But I want to be
• 1:23:34
  Speaker 1: honest with you about the limits of that answer. It
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 1: does not fully explain why other people who walked faithfully
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 1: with God were not taken in the same way. Abraham
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: walked with God and died. Moses walked with God and died.
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 1: The faithful people of every generation have walked with God
• 1:23:52
  Speaker 1: and died. Whatever Enoch experienced was not the standard outcome
• 1:23:57
  Speaker 1: of faithful walking. It was something particular, something the text
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 1: presents without fully explaining, and something we should be honest
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 1: about not fully understanding. Some things in Scripture are given
• 1:24:09
  Speaker 1: to us not as templates to expect, but as windows
• 1:24:12
  Speaker 1: glimpses of what is possible in a universe governed by
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 1: a God who is not permanently bound by the patterns
• 1:24:18
  Speaker 1: we take to be unbreakable. Deaths looked unbreakable. The drum
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 1: of Genesis chapter five said so with six consecutive entries.
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 1: And then once the drum stopped, And the stopping is
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 1: the window. And what I see when I look through
• 1:24:35
  Speaker 1: it is this a God who took the walk seriously,
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 1: who was genuinely present in those three hundred years, who
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 1: received something real from the walking, something the text calls
• 1:24:47
  Speaker 1: pleasure and Hebrews calls being well pleased, and who at
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 1: the end of those three hundred years, chose a different
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 1: ending for this particular walker than the ending that had
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 1: claimed every other name in the list. Not because Enoch
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 1: earned it, because the relationship was real, because the walking
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 1: was genuine, because God took the company of this man
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 1: seriously enough to respond to it in the most personal
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 1: and particular way imaginable. He took him home to wherever
• 1:25:16
  Speaker 1: the one he had been walking with was fully present,
• 1:25:20
  Speaker 1: to the place where the walk did not end, but
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 1: simply changed its form, and he was not found because
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 1: he was elsewhere with God breathe. Let me say one
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 1: more thing before we move forward, and it is the
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 1: thing I most want you to carry with you when
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 1: this night is over. Enoch was not the only one taken.
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 1: I do not mean that others were translated the way
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 1: Enoch was. I mean something more personal than that. I
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 1: mean that the people you have loved who are no
• 1:25:49
  Speaker 1: longer here were also taken, not abandoned, not lost in
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 1: some mechanical and impersonal process, taken by the same God
• 1:25:59
  Speaker 1: who took Knock, the same God who reaches into the
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 1: world where walking happens and receives the ones whose walking
• 1:26:06
  Speaker 1: here is done. The word an says he was not here.
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 1: It does not say he was nowhere, And the word
• 1:26:13
  Speaker 1: lacach says God took him actively, personally, with intention. Whatever
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 1: you are holding to night about some one you love
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 1: who is no longer in the places where you used
• 1:26:25
  Speaker 1: to find them, let that word do what it can do.
• 1:26:28
  Speaker 1: Not lost, taken by the one who knew them by name,
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 1: by the one who knows where they are to night,
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 1: even when we cannot find them, by the one to
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 1: whom absence from here is not absence from everywhere. The
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 1: taking was real, and the one who took them knew
• 1:26:46
  Speaker 1: exactly where he was going. Chapter eleven, Enoch and Elijah,
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 1: two men who never died. Consider what it would mean
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 1: to be the second, not the first, the second person
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 1: in all of recorded human history to leave this world
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 1: without passing through the door of death. Elijah knew what
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 1: it meant to be the second, because Enoch had been
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 1: the first. We do not know with certainty whether Elijah
• 1:27:16
  Speaker 1: knew the story of Enoch in detail, but the tradition
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 1: of the Walker the Seventh from Adam, the man who
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 1: was taken, was almost certainly alive and present in the
• 1:27:26
  Speaker 1: Jewish world that Elijah inhabited. The memory of Enoch was
• 1:27:30
  Speaker 1: not ancient myth by the time of Elijah. It was
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 1: the kind of story that gets passed carefully through generations,
• 1:27:37
  Speaker 1: precisely because it refuses to be ordinary. And then Elijah's
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 1: own story unfolded, and at the end of it something
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 1: happened that only one other person in all of human
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 1: history had experienced before he was taken. Now, I want
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 1: to begin this comparison not from the fire and the
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 1: whirlwind that most people reach for first when they think
• 1:27:58
  Speaker 1: about Elijah's departure, but from the silence, the silence that
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 1: surrounded Enoch's translation. We have spent a great deal of
• 1:28:07
  Speaker 1: this night inside that silence, the absence where a presence
• 1:28:11
  Speaker 1: had been, the people who looked and did not find him.
• 1:28:14
  Speaker 1: The text that notes his departure with fewer words than
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 1: it would take to describe an ordinary meal. He was
• 1:28:21
  Speaker 1: not for God took him. No witnesses to the moment,
• 1:28:26
  Speaker 1: nor spectacle, no announcement. One day Enoch was walking, and
• 1:28:32
  Speaker 1: then he was not found. Now hold that silence in
• 1:28:35
  Speaker 1: your mind, and let Elijah's departure enter it. A chariot
• 1:28:39
  Speaker 1: of fire, horses of fire, a whirlwind that came between
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 1: two men walking together on a road and carried one
• 1:28:46
  Speaker 1: of them upward into the sky. Elisha watching from below,
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 1: crying out, tearing his own clothes, in two fifty prophets
• 1:28:55
  Speaker 1: standing at a careful distance on a hillside, with their
• 1:28:58
  Speaker 1: eyes fixed on the last place the sky had been disturbed.
• 1:29:02
  Speaker 1: Sam destination, completely different road. And this is what I
• 1:29:07
  Speaker 1: want to suggest to you about that difference. It is
• 1:29:10
  Speaker 1: not a difference in significance. It is a difference in design.
• 1:29:15
  Speaker 1: Enoch's translation was quiet, because quietness was the design. His
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 1: entire life had been a quiet faithfulness, three hundred years
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 1: of walking without an audience, without witnesses, without the kind
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 1: of visible dramatic events that get retold and preserved in detail.
• 1:29:32
  Speaker 1: The departure matched the life. Quiet came in and quiet
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 1: went out. Elijah's translation was loud, because loudness was the design.
• 1:29:41
  Speaker 1: His entire ministry had been fire and confrontation and divine
• 1:29:45
  Speaker 1: intervention at a scale that demanded to be witnessed. He
• 1:29:49
  Speaker 1: shut the sky for three years. He called down fire
• 1:29:53
  Speaker 1: on Mount Carmel before hundreds of people. He outran a
• 1:29:56
  Speaker 1: ryal Shario. His life was a series of moments that
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 1: had to be seen to be believed, and his departure
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 1: was a moment that had to be seen to be believed.
• 1:30:06
  Speaker 1: The same God arranged both endings. Enoch needed a quiet door,
• 1:30:12
  Speaker 1: Elijah needed fire, and the God who walked beside both
• 1:30:16
  Speaker 1: of them knew exactly which one each man needed at
• 1:30:19
  Speaker 1: the end of his earthly road. Now Here is what
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 1: these two men share. Beneath the differences in style, both
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 1: walked with God in a way that became the defining
• 1:30:28
  Speaker 1: quality of their lives. Not an achievement added to an
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 1: ordinary existence, the texture of the existence itself. Both spoke
• 1:30:37
  Speaker 1: truthfully into worlds that did not want to hear the truth.
• 1:30:40
  Speaker 1: Enoch prophesied about judgment to a generation choosing its own destruction.
• 1:30:45
  Speaker 1: Elijah stood before Ahab and said, plainly, it is you
• 1:30:49
  Speaker 1: and your father's house who have troubled Israel because you
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 1: have abandoned the commandments of the Lord. Different centuries, different kingdoms,
• 1:30:58
  Speaker 1: the same willingness to say the difficult true thing in
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 1: a world that preferred the comfortable false one. Both left
• 1:31:05
  Speaker 1: successors who carried the work forward. Enoch's faithfulness ran through
• 1:31:10
  Speaker 1: Methuselah to Lammic to Noah. Elijah threw his cloak over
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 1: Elisa's shoulders in a field and watched him abandon his
• 1:31:18
  Speaker 1: plow without looking back. Both men poured what they carried
• 1:31:22
  Speaker 1: into people who would carry it forward when they were gone,
• 1:31:25
  Speaker 1: and both men were taken. Now here is the thing
• 1:31:28
  Speaker 1: about there being two of them that I want to
• 1:31:30
  Speaker 1: press on One person taken without dying. Could be an
• 1:31:33
  Speaker 1: anomaly so singular that the most honest response is simply
• 1:31:38
  Speaker 1: to note it and move on. An exception so unique
• 1:31:41
  Speaker 1: that it resists any broader meaning. Two is different. Two
• 1:31:47
  Speaker 1: is the beginning of something, not a common pattern, not
• 1:31:51
  Speaker 1: something that happens with enough regularity to count on, but
• 1:31:55
  Speaker 1: a demonstration offered twice that the boundary we take to
• 1:31:58
  Speaker 1: be absolute is not the final word available to the
• 1:32:01
  Speaker 1: God who made everything Death looked final. Genesis chapter five
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 1: made it look final with a completeness that felt like
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 1: a law woven into the fabric of creation itself. And
• 1:32:13
  Speaker 1: then Enoch was not found. And then Elijah went up
• 1:32:17
  Speaker 1: in fire. Two exits, one God, and through both of
• 1:32:23
  Speaker 1: them the same light coming, not the light of a
• 1:32:26
  Speaker 1: doctrine to be defended or a formula to be applied,
• 1:32:29
  Speaker 1: the light of a possibility that the word died, for
• 1:32:33
  Speaker 1: all its weight and all its certainty, is not the
• 1:32:36
  Speaker 1: last word available to the God who walked beside these
• 1:32:39
  Speaker 1: men through every year of their faithfulness. He received them
• 1:32:43
  Speaker 1: both by different roads, in different ways, but both received
• 1:32:49
  Speaker 1: both taken both held by the same hands that had
• 1:32:53
  Speaker 1: walked beside them through everything that preceded their departure. Breathe,
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 1: let the two of them stand together in your mind
• 1:33:01
  Speaker 1: for a moment. Enoch in the silence of the ancient world,
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 1: taken in a quietness that left no witnesses. Elijah on
• 1:33:09
  Speaker 1: the bank of the Jordan, taken in fire that left
• 1:33:11
  Speaker 1: one weeping man and fifty watchers on a hill. Two
• 1:33:15
  Speaker 1: windows in the long stone wall, and through both of them,
• 1:33:19
  Speaker 1: the same light is coming rest Now two chapters remain,
• 1:33:24
  Speaker 1: one to sit with what Enoch leaves behind for all
• 1:33:26
  Speaker 1: of us, and one that belongs entirely to you. The
• 1:33:30
  Speaker 1: walk has been long, and it has been worth every step.
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 1: Chapter twelve, What Enoch leaves behind for us. I want
• 1:33:42
  Speaker 1: to come directly to you now, not through the story,
• 1:33:45
  Speaker 1: not through the scholarship or the Hebrew words, or the
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 1: ancient caves or the genealogies. Those things had their place,
• 1:33:52
  Speaker 1: and I hope they opened something real in you tonight,
• 1:33:55
  Speaker 1: But right now I want to set all of it
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 1: aside and simply be present to whoever is actually here.
• 1:34:02
  Speaker 1: Because Enoch's story was not preserved for scholars. It was
• 1:34:05
  Speaker 1: not preserved for people with their faith neatly organized and
• 1:34:09
  Speaker 1: their questions adequately answered. It was preserved for people, ordinary
• 1:34:14
  Speaker 1: people living ordinary lives in worlds that do not always
• 1:34:17
  Speaker 1: cooperate with the things they are trying to believe and
• 1:34:20
  Speaker 1: the directions they are trying to walk. It was preserved
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 1: for you. So let me speak to several people who
• 1:34:27
  Speaker 1: may be listening tonight, because I do not think everyone
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 1: here is in the same place, and I do not
• 1:34:33
  Speaker 1: think this story speaks to everyone from the same angle.
• 1:34:36
  Speaker 1: There is someone here tonight whose faith has gone very quiet,
• 1:34:40
  Speaker 1: not lost, not rejected with dramatic finality, just quiet, the
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 1: way a fire goes quiet when it has not been
• 1:34:48
  Speaker 1: fed for a while. Still there perhaps still something, but
• 1:34:53
  Speaker 1: not the warm and present thing it once was. And
• 1:34:56
  Speaker 1: the temptation in that quietness is to conclude that the
• 1:35:00
  Speaker 1: quietness is the answer that a faith this thin must
• 1:35:04
  Speaker 1: be thin all the way down. Enoch speaks to you
• 1:35:07
  Speaker 1: from inside three hundred years. Not all three hundred years
• 1:35:11
  Speaker 1: felt the same seasons of warmth and seasons of cold,
• 1:35:16
  Speaker 1: seasons when the presence was vivid and close, and seasons
• 1:35:20
  Speaker 1: when the walking felt like moving through fog without being
• 1:35:23
  Speaker 1: certain the road was still beneath his feet. He walked
• 1:35:27
  Speaker 1: through all of them. The quietness was not the conclusion.
• 1:35:31
  Speaker 1: It was a season, and the walking continued through it,
• 1:35:35
  Speaker 1: the same way it continued through everything else. If your
• 1:35:38
  Speaker 1: faith is quiet to night, you are not outside the story.
• 1:35:42
  Speaker 1: You are inside it. Somewhere in the middle of the
• 1:35:45
  Speaker 1: three hundred years, still here, still pointed in a direction
• 1:35:50
  Speaker 1: that the quietness has not actually changed. There is some
• 1:35:53
  Speaker 1: one here to night who is carrying a grief that
• 1:35:56
  Speaker 1: has not yet found its shape, some one who has
• 1:35:59
  Speaker 1: lost person they loved and is still in the place
• 1:36:02
  Speaker 1: where the loss is so recent or so large that
• 1:36:05
  Speaker 1: the ordinary markers of grief do not quite fit the
• 1:36:08
  Speaker 1: size of it. You are looking for the person in
• 1:36:11
  Speaker 1: the places where the person used to be, and they
• 1:36:14
  Speaker 1: are not there. Enoch speaks to you from inside the
• 1:36:17
  Speaker 1: word I in. He was not here. The people who
• 1:36:21
  Speaker 1: loved him looked and did not find him. The not
• 1:36:24
  Speaker 1: finding was real, The absence was real. The searching was real,
• 1:36:29
  Speaker 1: But the taking was also real. God took him actively, personally,
• 1:36:36
  Speaker 1: with intention, not lost, taken by the one who knows
• 1:36:41
  Speaker 1: where they are even when we cannot find them, by
• 1:36:44
  Speaker 1: the one to whom absence from here is not absence
• 1:36:47
  Speaker 1: from everywhere. The person you love was not lost. They
• 1:36:51
  Speaker 1: were taken by the one who knew them, by the
• 1:36:55
  Speaker 1: one who knows where they are tonight, even when we
• 1:36:57
  Speaker 1: do not. There is someone here tonight who has been
• 1:37:00
  Speaker 1: walking faithfully for a long time without seeing the fruit
• 1:37:03
  Speaker 1: of it. The years have accumulated, but the evidence has not.
• 1:37:07
  Speaker 1: You have continued in a direction without the visible confirmation
• 1:37:10
  Speaker 1: that the continuing was worth it, and you are tired
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 1: in the particular way a person gets tired when they
• 1:37:16
  Speaker 1: have been faithful in the dark for a long time,
• 1:37:19
  Speaker 1: without anything visible to show for it. Enoch speaks to
• 1:37:23
  Speaker 1: you from the single line that describes three hundred years
• 1:37:26
  Speaker 1: of ordinary life. He had sons and daughters. That is it.
• 1:37:31
  Speaker 1: That is the entire visible record. No miracles listed, no
• 1:37:36
  Speaker 1: demonstrations that the walk was producing anything beyond what any
• 1:37:39
  Speaker 1: other person's life would have produced. Sons and daughters, ordinary
• 1:37:44
  Speaker 1: family life, faithfully lived in the presence of God. And
• 1:37:49
  Speaker 1: then he was taken and his name outlasted the names
• 1:37:52
  Speaker 1: of kings, and two generations later his great grandson walked
• 1:37:56
  Speaker 1: with God. The fruit of faithfulness is not always visible
• 1:38:00
  Speaker 1: in the season. When the faithfulness is happening, it runs forward,
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 1: Its surfaces in places you did not plant it, in
• 1:38:08
  Speaker 1: people you will never meet, in the downstream effects of
• 1:38:12
  Speaker 1: a life consistently pointed in one direction. Your walking is
• 1:38:16
  Speaker 1: not wasted because you cannot see its fruit. Yet it
• 1:38:19
  Speaker 1: is running forward, even to night. There is someone here
• 1:38:24
  Speaker 1: tonight who is not sure they believe any more, not
• 1:38:27
  Speaker 1: aggressively uncertain, just quietly unsure, in a way that has
• 1:38:31
  Speaker 1: become so familiar it is hard to remember what certainty
• 1:38:34
  Speaker 1: felt like. And the honest question underneath everything is this?
• 1:38:39
  Speaker 1: Is any of this real? Enoch speaks to you from
• 1:38:42
  Speaker 1: a single sentence in Hebrews. Whoever would draw near to
• 1:38:45
  Speaker 1: God must believe that he exists and that he rewards
• 1:38:49
  Speaker 1: those who seek him not, must have everything resolved not,
• 1:38:53
  Speaker 1: must have arrived at a state of confident certainty. Must
• 1:38:57
  Speaker 1: believe that He exists and that the seeking is worth doing.
• 1:39:02
  Speaker 1: Is it possible that God is real, not proven beyond
• 1:39:06
  Speaker 1: every doubt porcible? Is it possible enough to take one
• 1:39:10
  Speaker 1: step in the direction of the one who may or
• 1:39:12
  Speaker 1: may not already be walking beside you, to try the
• 1:39:16
  Speaker 1: thing Enoch tried, and see what one morning of walking
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 1: in that direction finds. The reward comes to those who seek,
• 1:39:23
  Speaker 1: not to those who have already arrived. The seeking is
• 1:39:26
  Speaker 1: part of the walking, and the walking is how it begins. Breathe,
• 1:39:32
  Speaker 1: Let whatever you have been holding loosen a little in
• 1:39:34
  Speaker 1: this quiet Enoch walked with God for three hundred years
• 1:39:39
  Speaker 1: in a world heading the wrong way, and the walking
• 1:39:42
  Speaker 1: produced sons and daughters and a thread that ran forward
• 1:39:45
  Speaker 1: through centuries and arrived in a man who built a
• 1:39:48
  Speaker 1: boat and carried the faithful remnant through the worst catastrophe
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 1: the ancient world had seen. You do not see the
• 1:39:55
  Speaker 1: full shape of what your walking is producing. But the
• 1:39:59
  Speaker 1: thread is real, and it is running forward even now
• 1:40:06
  Speaker 1: Chapter thirteen. To you tonight, the story is complete. A
• 1:40:13
  Speaker 1: name in a genealogy surrounded by the drumbeat of death,
• 1:40:17
  Speaker 1: a pattern broken quietly on the seventh entry. A walk
• 1:40:22
  Speaker 1: through three hundred years of ordinary, faithful life in a
• 1:40:25
  Speaker 1: world choosing its own destruction. A son who carried the
• 1:40:28
  Speaker 1: thread forward across nine hundred and sixty nine years without
• 1:40:32
  Speaker 1: knowing where it was going. A prophecy found in clay
• 1:40:36
  Speaker 1: jars in a desert cave. A silence at the center
• 1:40:40
  Speaker 1: that turned out to be full rather than empty. A
• 1:40:43
  Speaker 1: translation that left no body to find and no moment
• 1:40:47
  Speaker 1: any one witnessed. Two windows in the long stone wall
• 1:40:51
  Speaker 1: of human mortality, each letting in the same light. And
• 1:40:56
  Speaker 1: now we are here in this room, at this hour,
• 1:41:00
  Speaker 1: with the day behind us and the night fully settled in.
• 1:41:04
  Speaker 1: I want to ask you something simple before we close,
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 1: and I want you to let it rest in you
• 1:41:09
  Speaker 1: rather than demanding an immediate answer. What direction are you
• 1:41:14
  Speaker 1: pointed in right now, not in the long arc of
• 1:41:17
  Speaker 1: your life. To night, in this particular darkness, with this
• 1:41:22
  Speaker 1: particular collection of things you are carrying, and questions you
• 1:41:26
  Speaker 1: have not resolved, and hopes that have not yet arrived,
• 1:41:29
  Speaker 1: what direction are you pointed in? Because I think that
• 1:41:33
  Speaker 1: is the question. Enoch's story is ultimately asking, not whether
• 1:41:37
  Speaker 1: you have walked perfectly, not whether your faith has been
• 1:41:41
  Speaker 1: consistent and your doubts well managed, whether you are pointed,
• 1:41:46
  Speaker 1: whether there is a direction that underneath all the noise
• 1:41:49
  Speaker 1: and exhaustion and uncertainty of your actual life, you are
• 1:41:53
  Speaker 1: still moving toward, even imperfectly, even slowly, even on the
• 1:41:59
  Speaker 1: days when moving feels less like walking and more like
• 1:42:03
  Speaker 1: simply refusing to stop. Enoch walked for three hundred years.
• 1:42:08
  Speaker 1: He walked, and we have spent this entire night thinking
• 1:42:12
  Speaker 1: about what that walk contained, and what it cost and
• 1:42:15
  Speaker 1: what it meant. But at its core, the whole of
• 1:42:19
  Speaker 1: it reduces to something very simple. He kept going, That
• 1:42:24
  Speaker 1: is it. He kept going in the direction he had
• 1:42:27
  Speaker 1: chosen on the morning his son was born, and everything changed.
• 1:42:31
  Speaker 1: Through the ordinary years and the prophetic burden and the
• 1:42:35
  Speaker 1: long centuries of a world, choosing a different road through
• 1:42:39
  Speaker 1: all the interior seasons. We know nothing about the seasons
• 1:42:43
  Speaker 1: of closeness and distance, and clarity and fog. He kept
• 1:42:47
  Speaker 1: going until the going here was complete, and the god
• 1:42:50
  Speaker 1: walking beside him received the walker at the end of
• 1:42:53
  Speaker 1: the road. He kept going. Now Here is what I
• 1:42:57
  Speaker 1: want to say directly to you. Whatever your before has contained,
• 1:43:01
  Speaker 1: you are now in the after, the after that began
• 1:43:05
  Speaker 1: whenever you first turn toward the direction you are turning
• 1:43:08
  Speaker 1: in tonight. The after that continues every morning you choose
• 1:43:12
  Speaker 1: to continue, the after that runs forward through your life
• 1:43:16
  Speaker 1: and beyond it in ways you will never fully see.
• 1:43:20
  Speaker 1: Enoch lived sixty five years before he began. The text
• 1:43:24
  Speaker 1: does not call that failure. It calls that before and
• 1:43:29
  Speaker 1: what comes after. The before is the only thing the
• 1:43:32
  Speaker 1: text remembers, the three hundred years of walking, not the
• 1:43:37
  Speaker 1: sixty five years of whatever came before the walking started.
• 1:43:41
  Speaker 1: Whatever your before has contained, it is behind you now.
• 1:43:46
  Speaker 1: And the one walking beside you in the after is
• 1:43:49
  Speaker 1: not keeping a ledger of the before. He is keeping
• 1:43:52
  Speaker 1: company in the now, day after ordinary day, not with
• 1:43:57
  Speaker 1: an audience, not with visible result. Else you can measure
• 1:44:01
  Speaker 1: and report just the direction chosen again and the presence
• 1:44:06
  Speaker 1: received again, and the morning coming again, as mornings always come.
• 1:44:12
  Speaker 1: That is what Enoch knew that we sometimes forget. The
• 1:44:16
  Speaker 1: walk is not a performance to be assessed. It is
• 1:44:19
  Speaker 1: a companionship to be lived. Now, let me leave you
• 1:44:22
  Speaker 1: with an image, before the night closes, a path in
• 1:44:25
  Speaker 1: the early morning, before the heat of the day arrives,
• 1:44:29
  Speaker 1: before the noise of the world reasserts itself, before the
• 1:44:33
  Speaker 1: ten thousand things that will compete for your attention today
• 1:44:37
  Speaker 1: have found their voices. The light is thin and cool,
• 1:44:40
  Speaker 1: the way early morning light is thin and cool, coming
• 1:44:44
  Speaker 1: flat across the landscape from somewhere just below the horizon,
• 1:44:48
  Speaker 1: touching the tops of things before it reaches the ground.
• 1:44:51
  Speaker 1: A path, and on it a figure walking not alone.
• 1:44:56
  Speaker 1: The one walking beside him is not visible to any other,
• 1:45:00
  Speaker 1: but he is there. He has always been there. He
• 1:45:04
  Speaker 1: was there before the walking started. He will be there
• 1:45:08
  Speaker 1: when the walking here is done. And when the walking
• 1:45:11
  Speaker 1: here is done, it will not end. It will simply
• 1:45:15
  Speaker 1: continue somewhere. The walker has not yet been, but the
• 1:45:18
  Speaker 1: companion already knows well. Enoch walked with God and was
• 1:45:23
  Speaker 1: not found because he was elsewhere, still walking, still held,
• 1:45:29
  Speaker 1: still known by the one who knew him before his
• 1:45:32
  Speaker 1: name appeared in any genealogy. That path is open tonight.
• 1:45:37
  Speaker 1: It has always been open one foot and then the other,
• 1:45:41
  Speaker 1: one morning and then the next. The companion is already there,
• 1:45:46
  Speaker 1: walking beside you in the thin, cool light before the
• 1:45:49
  Speaker 1: day begins, in the darkness of this room where you
• 1:45:52
  Speaker 1: are almost asleep, In every step of every ordinary day
• 1:45:57
  Speaker 1: that lies between now and wherever the road is eventually leads,
• 1:46:01
  Speaker 1: he knows your name the way the morning knows the
• 1:46:04
  Speaker 1: landscape before the light arrives. Go gently now into the
• 1:46:09
  Speaker 1: rest that is already here. The path continues in the morning,
• 1:46:13
  Speaker 1: and you will not walk it alone.