John 3:16-21; Hebrews 11:5-7;
Genesis 5:21-24; 6:5-9, 9:8-17
Make what you will of the long lives reported for the pre-flood line from Adam and Eve down to Noah and his wife. Of the ten names in that list, all the reported ages are far beyond our experience and expectation for human life. The Bible does not explain why this is so, and we have no other data, so all our attempts to use human reason either to defend or to explain away these reports are simply speculative. Enoch lived on earth about five times the average modern life span, but when compared to his immediate family line only 47% of the next shortest lifespan in this list and only 37% of the longest, his son Methuselah. Why did Enoch get the short end of the lifespan stick? Had he done something very bad? Not so. Beyond the fact that Enoch fathered Methuselah and other sons and daughters, we know one other thing about him. The text says, “Enoch walked with God and he was not, for God took him.” It wasn’t punishment; it was blessing. Presumably, it was something similar to what later happened to Elijah when he was escorted alive out of this life by chariots of holy fire.
Enoch was transferred from the realm that is visible to us into what is from our perspective the invisible realm of God…without first dying. This is not the sort of thing that God does for everyone who pleases him. Usually it is preferable that we live out our calling on earth and demonstrate how to live, to suffer, and to die with obedient, vulnerable, vibrant, creation-affirming faith before we enter eternal glory. Enoch’s transfer is a sign and an assurance to us of what pleases God, and what pleases God is a life spent walking with God. The Letter to the Hebrews gives the best explanation of the purpose of this sign: 11:5 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. 6 And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.
What the text says is that, if we would draw near to walk in close fellowship with God, we must have faith, believing and trusting that God exists and that, in some extraordinarily valuable way, God rewards those who seek him. Sometimes the reward is in this life, sometimes in the next life, sometimes the reward is a part of ordinary experience. Sometimes it can only be called miraculous, but what is important, either way, is that it comes from the hand of the sovereign God. To be sure, God may work to refine our understanding of what it means to be rewarded, blessed, and favored by God. Early in our walk of faith we may understand blessing too much in terms of the rewards that this world encourages us to seek: health, wealth, education, influence, pleasure, surface happiness, and we may be sometimes pleased to get what we want, but often disappointed when what we are expecting simply does not happen. The lack of the reward we had in mind does not mean that a reward is not coming, or even that it has not already come unnoticed by us. As we mature in faith, we are more likely to see blessing in the deep satisfactions of knowing that we know that we know that we serve a God who is holy, gracious, faithful, and eternally sovereign. The sooner we learn this, the sooner our satisfactions grow rich and deep. Jesus said, and I liberally paraphrase, “Seek first the prevailing of God’s will and righteousness, and all the rest of the stuff will fall satisfactorily into its proper place.”
What Jesus is saying is that we must by faith prioritize seeking God and his righteous will. This means that our number one goal in life must become to know who God is, what God wants, and what God is doing around us right now. If knowing God is really our number one goal, that means that we will spend time reading God’s word in search of deeper understanding of what God has revealed of his nature and purposes. If knowing God is really our number one goal, then we will frequently spend time in prayer listening for what God would speak to our hearts and minds through the Holy Spirit. If knowing God is really our number one goal, then we will find time to join in what God is doing around us so that we can know him better through serving him, experiencing God in action. Indeed, if we want to know God, we will practice the spiritual disciplines in which God shows up; our way of describing those is the 9 Ways.
There is a corollary to prioritizing knowing God, and that is that we must want God to know us as we really are so that God can work within us to make us more what he has planned for us to become. Of course, God already does know everything about us, but we must want that to be so. We must stop fooling ourselves into thinking that we can hide anything about ourselves from God. At most, we can fool ourselves into thinking we have hidden it from God. Really seeking God means letting go of foolish games of spiritual hide and seek, and letting ourselves (as we actually are) be found by God (as God actually is). God rewards that choice in deep and rich ways. Remember, whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.
Besides Enoch, we get especially favorable comment on one other of the listed ten. In Genesis 6:8-9, it says, “But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord….Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God.” Noah found favor with the Lord and stood out in his generation as righteous and blameless, because, like Enoch, he walked with God. But he did not get transferred out of this life. Instead, he was assigned to oversee the repopulation of the earth after God’s sweeping judgment on its sin.
Genesis 6:5 The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. 6 And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. 7 So the Lord said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.” 8 But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. 9 … Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God. You know the story. God commanded Noah to build an ark. Noah followed God’s specifications and built the ark, supplying it and filling it as instructed, so that male and female of each kind of living creature of land and air, along with Noah and his family, were all preserved. The rains came, the waters rose, the world was flooded until there was no land life outside the ark, the rains stopped, the floods receded, and at last life was sustainable again outside the ark, and so the Lord sent the occupants of the ark out to repopulate the earth. There is, of course, more to the story than that, and every part has its importance, but today I want to skip to the ending.
Genesis 9:12 And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: 13 I have set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. 14 When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, 15 I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh. And the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. 16 When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.”
By binding himself to this covenant, God guaranteed that there would never again be a destructive judgment as encompassing as in the time of Noah. Despite this covenant, God remained holy, not giving up one piece of his plans of perfection for his human children, and yet at the same time knew that his human children would slide back into sin. The rainbow covenant was extremely costly for God. It meant that he would have to take upon himself the cost of redeeming sinful humanity. In the fullness of time, the rainbow would require the cross of his perfect Son Jesus Christ through which God would offer to his wayward children not just forgiveness, but covering with righteousness and gradual transformation into actual righteousness, all that without yielding one iota of his holiness. When you see a rainbow, imagine not the pot of gold at its end, but envision the infinitely more costly and glorious cross of Christ, emblazoned in glory at the peak of that rainbow.
As the first recipient of the rainbow promise, Noah had an important part to play in the drama. Hebrews 11 sees it this way. Hebrews 11: 7 By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear constructed an ark for the saving of his household. By this he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith.
By obeying God’s instructions for preserving life and faith in the face of righteous judgment, Noah demonstrated a faith that was in marked contrast to that of the perishing world. In this way, he condemned the world for its lack of faith and was himself counted righteous by means of Christ’s much later death on the cross.
When it says that Noah condemned the world, I am not saying that he went around giving angry denouncement speeches. I am saying that the positive counterexample of his faith showed the kind of faith that was open to everyone.
Noah was not a perfect person. You don’t have to be yet perfected to be by God’s grace through your faith on the path to perfection. Grace and faith will get you to the goal if you will hold on, keep getting up, dusting yourself off, and listening to and obeying God yet again. If you are living your life in Jesus Christ, that kind of faith turns to righteousness and eternal life.
Our texts emphasize walking with God, faith, righteousness, and obedience. Perhaps it is time for me to emphasize also that these are possible only by the grace of God. We enter and persevere in the journey to salvation only by the grace of God.
How does God’s grace make this possible? First of all, salvation is only through Jesus Christ, even for Enoch and Noah and the other saints of the Old Testament. They did not know Jesus, but he provided the way for imperfect people of faith to be counted in. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one-of-a-kind Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” Jesus with his costly perfect righteousness agrees to stand in for us, to set the balances right, so that our faith can be counted as righteousness, and so that we can enter eternity without wrecking the perfect plans of God. Without Jesus, that cannot happen and so salvation would never get started.
Second of all, God sends his Holy Spirit to those who believe in Jesus, and the Holy Spirit gives us new birth and gradual metamorphosis, changing us degree by degree toward the goal. It is only those who are on this journey who will persevere in their faith. And this journey would not be possible without the Spirit of God graciously living within us.
So, from beginning to end, our salvation is the gracious work of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but to receive God’s gracious saving work, we must gratefully walk with God in faith and obedience. When we read them carefully, the New Testament writers from Paul to James are in total agreement on this. It is time for us understand that the gracious signs of the rainbow and the cross call for us, like Enoch and Noah, to walk daily with God. One more time, remember, whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. So seek him, today and every day. Walk with God.
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