Genesis 05

(Gah, still trying to get caught up.  Who knew you could get too sick to sit and type?)

Genesis 5 is the first of many, many genealogies in Scripture.  In Genesis, these are mainly used to as bridges between the "Bible Stories" we all learned in Sunday School.  (As opposed to their use in 1Chronicles, where they seem to serve primarily as motivation to stop reading 1Chronicles.  I'll probably pay for that remark later.)

Because it is very hard to preach or write devotions about a list of odd Hebrew names, most who tackle Genesis 5 tend to focus on v.24, which tells us that "Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him." (Gen 5.24, ESV)

There are three words apparently missing from that verse.  They're in every other man's account (except for Noah's, of course, but he stars in a couple of Bible Stories).  The words are "and he died", which are missing because Enoch in fact didn't die.  "God took him" could mean a few different things, but the near-unanimous understanding of that phrase for the last three thousand years has been that Enoch was physically taken to the presence of God without having to suffer death, because of the fact that he "walked with God".

Those three words are found nowhere else in the chapter; indeed, the only man to this point who's ever been said to walk with God is Adam, and that was back before the Fall.  Adam, however, lived a very long time; assuming no gaps in the genealogy, he was alive over three hundred years after Enoch was born.

These days we have to use our imaginations to fill in the blanks to Adam's story.  Like I said before, while the Bible tells us everything we need to know, it doesn't tell us everything we want to know.  What was it like to live in a perfect world?  What did he and God talk about as they strolled through the Garden?  What was it like to literally walk with God?

Enoch didn't have to imagine.  He only had to ask.

And when he heard the answer, I can only assume that he wanted it for himself.  And he got it.  Not under his own power, of course; I don't want to suggest that Enoch was sinless, or some kind of wizard of holiness (as so many gnostics seemed to think).  But at some point Enoch made the choice to respond to the call of God on his soul, and God always honors that choice.  We don't know why, and we don't know how.  But we know it happened.

Someday, I'd really like to ask Enoch about that.