How? By his faith. He trusted God, did he not? And as a result, God became a rewarder, is the correct translation of that verb, it is part of the verb to be. He became a rewarder as a result of the trust. These verses are showing a relationship. They are showing the ingredients that were a major part of that relationship, and they are also showing some of the fruit of that relationship. So God and Enoch had a relationship. The ingredient of that relationship was a mutual trust and the fruit was that God rewarded him.
Genesis 5:24 adds that Enoch walked with God. Every one of us knows that walk is a symbol in the Bible of proceeding through life, that he lived his life with God as being a major part of his perspective. He walked by faith. Amos 3:3 adds, Can two walk together unless they are agreed? God and Amos agreed. They walked together, therefore we can very safely conclude that their relationship was not very adversarial, but instead there was mutual trust.
Now, because there was peace between them, Enoch could be taught the truths of God. This begins to get very interesting. Before we can really be taught the truths of God, there has to be peace. There cannot be an adversarial relationship. What I am saying is that there has to be repentance before there can be peace, a repentance that ends the adversarial relationship so that mutual trust can begin to be built.
Back to Enoch - just picking up on this principle. We can, therefore, very safely conclude that Enoch was not going around sinning. I do not mean that he never sinned. I mean that it certainly was in no way the pattern of his life. God was pleased because here was somebody trustworthy. Somebody that God felt comfortable associating with, being around, sharing life's experiences with. God was not afraid that Enoch was going to do things that would endanger their relationship, and so when the time came that Enoch needed help that God could give him, He gave it. Enoch needed his life preserved because the times that he lived in were so bad he was about to be murdered, and God intervened and took him to a place of safety.
There is something hidden here in the translation from the Greek to the English that I think is worth mentioning so we will see perhaps a little more clearly the power of the relationship between God and Enoch. Every single verb in the entire chapter except for three is in the aorist tense, which is the equivalent of our English simple past tense. That is, then, that the event that all these verbs are used in, or with, have happened and they are done and over with. They occurred and they are over with. That is it. They are done. Those three that are not in the aorist tense are in the perfect tense. This denotes that the thing was done, but the effect of what was done continues all the way up to the present, to the time that the words are being read. You have read at times the statement in the Bible, It is written. That is written in the perfect tense. It was written in the past, but what was written still applies and is affecting us today.
Unfortunately, this cannot be clearly seen in the modern translation into English. One of those three times is in verse 5. The other two are in the episode involving Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, and in Moses keeping the Passover. In verse 5, it appears in the very last phrase, before his translation he had this testimony, that he pleased God. It is the verb that is translated he had. For that to be properly translated into English, it would have to be amplified into it has been and is still witnessed that he well pleased God.
What was it that was witnessed of and is still being witnessed of and affecting us today? The answer is supplied right in the two verses here, 5 and 6. It was that he walked by faith and not by sight, and knowing the tenor of the times that he lived in, he walked by faith and not by sight in the midst of a horribly violent, a religiously and socially degenerate generation.
… . . .
Now there's an escape. This one engineered totally by God. You see, there is a wide variety of kinds of escapes. Now we find in verse 13 of this same chapter:
We know from the testimony of God's own word that Enoch pleased God. God engineered an escape and then Enoch died wherever God took him on this escape.
In each of the cases that we've covered so far the person fled, or was taken because of the anger or the hatred - maybe the two of them combined - anger and hatred of others that threatened the life and limb of the servants of God. Now we're going to examine a somewhat different condition. Let's go to Noah in Genesis 6.
This is kind of the story of Enoch, in a way. We can use that as an early example of a righteous person taken away from trouble and allowed to go to his rest. If you want to look at his story, it is very spare, but it is in Genesis 5:18-24. A righteous man taken by God to escape evil, even evil that is in the future. But Enoch still perished, he still died. And so he qualified for the Hebrew 9:27 death at some point. He is not up in heaven, you know, drinking wine with Elijah. It is just not what happened. He was taken away from a very serious situation and allowed to die in peace.
Enoch's walk is described in Genesis 5:21-24. He began to walk with God when he was 65 years old and he was still walking with God when he was at the age of 365. God allowed him to die eventually and he had a three hundred year walk. I cannot even imagine that, a three hundred year walk with God. And that is what God calls us to do and be - walk our entire lives with God. We are to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God as long as we live - 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
