Certain Death, Pt. 2

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Think about the people in your life who you’d describe as truly close.  Not just an acquaintance, but someone who walks through life with you. It’s a special bond. Pastor Nick Gatzke opens Genesis 5, where one man is described differently than everyone else around him. The Bible says Enoch walked with God. Find out more

Enoch walked with God. When you stop to consider the nature of that description, it becomes rather intriguing. Enoch is the only one that does not die. Here are just a couple of observations. It says he walked with God, he didn’t live. All of the other listings of people say, so and so lived for this number of years, he had a child and then he lived this number of years. For Enoch, it says Enoch lived this many years and then he walked with God for 300 years. He didn’t live, he walked with God. There’s an intentional contrast that’s being made there. And this walk was not a short lived stroll through the park. This wasn’t a walk that happened during his morning devotions.

This wasn’t a walk that happened for a couple of weeks following that spiritual high that comes from the high school missions trip. This is the walk that lasts 300 years. And as we read the text, we see in a highly abnormal fashion, this must be a walk that’s pretty special because it’s not mentioned just once. In the very short section of verses 21 to 24, it says in verse 22, he walked with God after he fathered Methuselah 300 years. And then he mentions it again. Verse 24, Enoch walked with God and he was not because God took him.

Think about the idea of walking with someone. My grandmother’s name was Lucille Gatzke. Lucille was a stubborn German woman. She was short. She was quirky. But she loved her grandchildren dearly. And one of my favorite memories of her was when Amy and I were fairly newly married. My grandmother was not one to sort of bestow advice upon people. But she sent us a card, and I don’t remember if it was for a birthday or a holiday, but in the card it stuck out to me that she gave some very clear and direct advice. This is what she said. She said, make sure that you try to take a walk together every day. It gives you the chance to hold hands and talk. Make sure you talk.

What does it mean to walk with someone? What does it mean to walk with God? As I try to picture the life of Enoch and how this must have played out, I’m struck by the fact that the description is so short and yet so powerful in its nature and obviously powerful in its effect that it distinguished him from every other person on earth. And with the exception of just one other, every other person in history, that I want to be one too that is identified as walking with God. How is that for a defining characteristic of your life?

“with all the things that you could do or all the things that you could be defined by or all the things that you could pursue, all the things that constitute the good life, but that people would say about us, not just that he lived, but he walked with God. What does that mean, to walk with God? Well, the Bible actually talks about this a lot more than you might have realized. There’s a number of descriptions. Let’s just look at a couple of them together. Walking with God means having faith in God. Now that sounds rather pedestrian, and yet we see in Hebrews 11, verses five to seven that Enoch is listed in this hall of fame of faithful men and women throughout history. This is what it says. It says, by faith Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death.“and he was not found because God had taken him. Now before he was taken, he was commended as having pleased God. And without faith, it’s impossible to please him. For whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. Through the ups and downs of life, this faith was the thing that was constant for Enoch. And it was credited to him as being pleasing to God. What kind of faith is pleasing to God today? Well, Colossians chapter two verses six and seven tells us. It says, therefore, as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, this is the faith in God that we have today. Not faith in simply God the Father, but also in God the Son. Since you have faith, since you have received Jesus Christ the Lord, so walk in him.”rooted and built up in him and established in the faith just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. Faith in the Lord Jesus establishes us and continues to build us up in a type of walk that’s pleasing to God today. It’s not a one -time decision. It’s not something that merely happens when you come forward and pray in response to a sermon. It’s not something that happens simply in the quietness of your own heart. Those things are true and they’re good and they are in many ways the initiation or the first step in your walk with God. But there are a lot of steps after that. Ongoing faith in the Lord Jesus is an ongoing faith in the person of God and it constitutes walking with him. Now this type of faith is, of course, applicable to all of us.”

But I think today specifically of you who are young moms, this type of walk with God is the daily dependence upon him to provide you strength when the little kids are out of control. When it feels like the inmates are running the asylum. This type of walk with God is the walk that says, Lord, I depend upon you for wisdom. I’m gonna walk with you because I know even though I can’t feel my way out of the chaos, that is my current daily experience that you will accomplish your purposes in the long run as I walk side by side with you.

“Walking with God is having faith in God. It’s also being obedience to God. Walking with God means obedience. We see this in Leviticus chapter 26. This is the Old Testament law. And the prophet says on behalf of the Lord, if you walk in my statutes and observe my commandments and do them, then I will give you your reigns in their season and the land shall yield its increase and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit. Obeying God is not just some casual happening of life.”

It’s intentional in its nature. It’s something that we do Not just when we want something but it’s something that we do when things are going well I think this is applicable to all of us, of course But specifically I’m thinking of those of us who are maybe in the business world When things are going poorly, it’s our natural inclination to say God, please help me I don’t know how I’m gonna pay the rent at the end of the month or pay my employees But when things are going well It becomes pretty easy to lift our foot off the accelerator Of our spiritual relationship with God Walking with him is pursuing obedience when things are going well and when things aren’t going well And when things just seem generally pretty dull the good the bad and the mundane seasons of life

“Walking with God means standing with God, even when it’s not popular to do so. Enoch was one such figure known through biblical history as a person who warned others with the conduct that was happening around them. The book of Jude, thousands of years after Enoch lived, talks about him, and this is what it says. It says it was also about these that Enoch, the seventh from Adam prophesied saying, behold, the Lord comes with 10 ,000 of his holy ones to execute judgment on all and to convict all the ungodly of their deeds of ungodliness that they have committed in such an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things that ungodly sinners have spoken against him.”

“These are grumblers, malcontents following their own sinful desires. They’re loudmouth boasters showing favoritism to gain advantage. Now Enoch’s words were not popular. Those words are never popular in any context. But when you consider what we just learned last week in chapter four that sin was making its way through all of culture and that this question is this whole creation experiment of God beyond repair was being asked quietly in the hearts of the righteous, then surely he was standing for God in an unpopular way. This highlights the fact though that God doesn’t raise up people to be mean -spirited, but he does raise up people, men and women, who are going to stand firmly for him when it’s not popular to do so.”

Enoch’s words were words of loyalty to the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, yes, and they were also, as hard as they were, words of love to those that he told them to in the hopes that they would turn from their ways and move back to God. Walking with God means standing with him, even when it’s unpopular to do so, because God alone can break the certain cycle of death. So walk with him. God alone can break the certain cycle of death, so walk with him. We see another way that walking with God is indicated in the Bible. We see that walking with God means a sincere and genuine following. In a time where there are a lot of superficial professors of faith in the Lord, in a time where it’s easy to fake it, spiritually speaking.

“In a time where it’s easy to live a duplicitous life to say on Sunday I’m gonna do this, but the rest of the week I’m gonna do this. We all know that to be true. Most of us have experienced a season of that in our own life. Some of us might even be experiencing that right now. But walking with God means a sincere and genuine following. The beginning of the book of Revelation is a letter to seven churches and it gives them warning. And the Apostle John writing this vision writes to the church at Sardis and this is what he says. He says, I know your works. You have the reputation of being alive.

but you are dead. Wake up and strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your works complete in the sight of my God. Remember then what you have received and heard. Keep it and repent. If you will not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what hour I will come against you. Yet, you still have a few names in Sardis, people who have not sewed their garments, and they will walk with me in white, for they are worthy. Walking with God, to have a life that walks with God means sincerity and genuineness, no duplicity. Everything is laid before him. There are a lot of other descriptions. I’ll just give one more.”

Walking with God means a lifelong commitment, doesn’t it? There are a lot of different temptations in life after you put your faith in God that might lead you to walk another way. We can name them through all the seasons of life, but let’s just focus on the back half of life. One of those temptations to walk another way happens when your kids go to college, when mom and dad have been intentionally raising up kids and they know that they have a responsibility to bring them to church, to teach them the things about God, to model certain things to them. But when those kids go away, when they leave the nest and they’re out on their own, now mom and dad have a choice to make. Do I continue to walk along this path with God or do I walk another way? That’s a very real temptation for a lot of people.

Another crossroads of temptation with regard to walking with God is found at retirement. We’ve met a lot of people over the years, all of us have, who have very, very pure desires and expressions of how they’re gonna spend their retirement years, how they’re gonna leverage their resources in the final couple laps of life. And yet, at the very same time, they’re fighting against the narrative of American retirement, which is in many ways poisonous to the idea of walking with God. Because the narrative of retirement in the Western world is you’ve worked hard your whole life, now it’s time to sit back and consume.

You’ve worked hard now, just sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labors. I mean, life is now about you and the next entertaining thing that you can enjoy. And that idea of retirement leaves person after person, family after family wanting, especially when it comes to this idea of walking with God. Because God has so much more for you than that. So much more than that, in a walk with Him. Another temptation, another crossroads of life that tempts us not to walk with God is the loneliness that is sometimes accompanied with old age. Friends, for those of you who are among us today who are on those last few laps of life, don’t ever believe that God has abandoned you.

He is right alongside of you. So walk with him. God alone can break the cycle of certain death. So walk with him. God alone can break this cycle of certain death. That’s what we see in Genesis five. So walk with him. I want my life to be described as a person who walked with God through the hills and through the valleys and through the spring and the summer and the fall and the winter seasons of life to have a consistency of faith in him. When the ups and downs come, I know that he’s walking right alongside of me. He’s talking to me and I am talking to him. It’s striking to me that in this list in which the youngest person dies at 777 years old and the oldest person dies at 969 years old, that God took Enoch at just 365.

Did you notice that? He broke the cycle of death and he broke it definitively. Why? He broke it because he desired his presence in a different way. I wonder why God did that. I closed this morning with a description of the walk of this life for us that’s written by Marcus Dodds. He says this, he says Enoch walked with God because he was his friend and he liked his company because he was going in the same direction as God and had no desire for anything but what lay in God’s path.

We walk with God when he is in all of our thoughts, not because we consciously think of him at all times, but because he is naturally suggested to us by all we think of, as when any person or plan or idea has become important to us, no matter what we think of, our thought is always found reoccurring to this favorite object. So with the godly man, everything has a connection with God and must be ruled. By that connection. When he falls into sin, he cannot rest till he has resumed his place at God’s side and walks again with him. This is the general nature of walking with God.

It is a persistent endeavor to hold all our life open to God’s inspection and in conformity to his will. A readiness to give up what we find does cause any misunderstanding between us and God. A feeling of loneliness if we’ve not some satisfaction in our efforts at holding fellowship with God. A cold and desolate feeling when we are conscious of doing something that displeases God. This is walking with God. Necessarily tells us on the whole life and character. It’s easy then to understand how we may practically walk with God. It is to open to him all of our purposes and hopes to seek his judgment on our scheme of life and idea of happiness. It is to be on thoroughly friendly terms with God.

I wanna walk with God. I hope you wanna walk with God because he desires to walk with you, to be on that thoroughly friendly terms to the person and work of Jesus and in a faithful life through all of its seasons from this day until the end. So let’s pray and ask God for that, shall we? Please pray with me. Father, the intimate nature of a walk is striking to us. The idea of moving from the place that we are to the place that we’re going with another person is striking to us and our own shortcomings in the midst of this idea of walking with you are ever before us and yet we know, Lord, this is your desire and so we ask.

Sincerely, that you would help us to have faith, that you would help us to have obedience, that you would help us to stand for you when it’s not popular, that you would help us to be sincere and that you would help this walk to be life long in its effect. You alone break the cycle of certain death and so we wanna walk with you. And we pray that you would help us in this way. Amen.

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* This transcript was generated using AI transcription technology and reviewed for accuracy, but may contain errors. Please refer to the original audio for precise wording.