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Based on our title today, you might easily guess our starting Scripture: “And Enoch walked with Elohim, and he was not, for Elohim took him.” (Gen 5:24)
Enoch walked with God. What does that mean? Does it mean that he believed in God? Does it mean that he worshipped only one God? Does it mean that he obeyed God’s instructions? No, it does not mean any of those things. Those things were all true of Enoch, but they were the consequences of his walk with God. They are not the same as that walk, and they did not cause that walk.
We read this verse, which is often misused in modern Christianity: “But now the righteousness of Yahweh without the Law is manifested, being witnessed by the Law and the prophets.” (Rom 3:21) And again, “Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the Law, but by the faith of Yahshua the Messiah, even we have believed in Yahshua the Messiah, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the Law; for by the works of the Law shall no flesh be justified.” (Gal 2:16)
The works of the Law do not justify anyone. That does not mean that the Law has been abolished, or has lost its value after the Cross. Some people seem to believe that at the cross the fundamental nature of the Law, or sin, or Yahweh’s attitude toward either of these things, changed. But the Scripture itself speaks of only one change to the Law, and it is found here: “For the priesthood being changed, there is made of necessity a change also of the Law.” (Heb 7:12) The chapter goes on to explain that the priesthood, being undertaken by fallible, imperfect men, could never bring about a perfect plan for salvation; that the blood of animals could never cleanse away the sin of a human being, except in symbol. Yet with Christ, we now have this: “For such an High Priest became us, Who is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens; Who needeth not daily, as those high priests, to offer up sacrifice, first for His own sins, and then for the people’s; for this He did once, when He offered up Himself.” (Heb 7:26, 27)
This does not need to be complicated. Hebrews 7 is the only place in the Bible that speaks of a change in the Law, and it is not what the Law says, what the Law means, or what the Law teaches. It is about how the Law is conducted by the priesthood which, being replaced by the eternal priesthood of Christ and His saints, no longer requires the sacrificial system that was so integral to the Old Testament Jewish Economy.
Because the perfect priesthood of Yahshua is for all humanity, and no longer exclusively for the Jewish Nation, the Gospel has gone to the Gentiles, and the elements of the Law designed to separate people into Jews and Gentiles, such as the clothing practices, circumcision, and certain ceremonial rites, have become ineffective. There was no longer to be an isolated nation; in fact, when Peter, following the cultural practices he has known all his life, only ate with the “ritually clean” Jews, Paul, who was far more educated in Hebrew Law, rebuked him publicly for his discrimination. (Gal 2:11-16) The last verse of this passage is actually what we read earlier, Gal 2:16, because it talks about the division between humanity now being those who have the Faith of Yahshua, and those who do not. No other divisions, not of ethnicity, gender, age, language, or nationality, have any meaning with regard to salvation, for we are gathered out of many tongues, and nations, and people, in order to become One.
So yes, this does not need to be complicated. The only change in the Law for New Testament believers is a change in the priesthood, so that we no longer perform ritual sacrifices, and we do not practice culture-specific elements of the instructions given to the Israelites. Righteousness never came by the Law. Righteousness does not come from obedience. It did not in the time of Moses, and it does not now.
We read, “By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death; and was not found, because Yahweh had translated him, for before his translation he had this testimony, that he pleased Yahweh.” (Heb 11:5)
Enoch had the testimony that he did those things that please Yahweh. Whose testimony is that? That is the testimony of Yahshua, who said almost exactly those words of Himself with respect to the Father: “I do always those things that please Him.” (John 8:29)
Enoch was justified by faith – by the faith of Yahshua. He looked forward to the cross, and although it was many years in his future, he held it as a trustworthy reality. In our case, we look back through history to the cross; and likewise, although it is many years in our past, we hold it as a trustworthy reality. Enoch pleased Yahweh because he had the right testimony – the testimony of Yahshua. Enoch obeyed the Father, not in order to be, or become, righteous, but because Yahweh had healed him. Remember that when Yahshua was on the earth, it required human faith in order for His miracles of healing to work. Similarly, the Father does not exercise power over human beings that the Son did not, or could not. “But without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he that cometh to God must believe that He is, and that He is a Rewarder of them that diligently seek Him.” (Heb 11:6)
In this, Enoch reveals himself to have the same religion as the Creation Seventh Day Adventist. In this, Enoch reveals himself to be a prototype, a pattern, for the 144,000. Of course, any Adventist will say that Enoch is a pattern for the 144,000 because, like them, he was translated without seeing death. But… that is not the reason why he is the pattern, at least, not the most important reason. His translation is the result of the similarity, that Enoch had the faith of Yahshua and followed the Commandments of God, bearing the testimony that he did those things that please Him. What Enoch said is what Christ said, which is what we say today. The result of that same faith, the result of that same testimony, is obedience to the Law of Yahweh in this life, and deathless translation at the time of judgment.
Enoch “walked” with God. It does not say he worshipped God, because that would not be unique. It does not say he obeyed God, because that would not be unique to Enoch either. Walking with Yahweh involves worship and obedience, certainly, but just as the Law does not produce righteousness, so it is that neither obedience nor the proper worship produce a walk with God. The walk comes first.
Yahweh calls to His children. He outlines a Way, and He says, He invites, “Walk with Me.” We say, “I will, I will walk with You,” and so it is done. We begin to walk with Yahweh. Before there is any doctrinal discussion, before there is any testing or trial, we are walking with Him. Now, yes, one needs to know who the Father and Son are, so that they can walk with Them, but knowing who They are means knowing that They are love, light, justice, and righteousness. It means knowing the characteristics of Their personality, it does not mean accepting or rejecting human labels or limited mental models. Light on the nature of Yahweh comes to the mind in a meaningful, sanctifying way after one is already walking with Him.
Walking with Yahweh is a choice, a simple, easy, choice. Are you willing to go where He leads? You may not understand everything now. You may not feel you are equipped to defend your faith from a skeptic or a critic. You may not yet have found the perfect balance between faith and works, or clarity on every point of doctrine, but that is not what Yahweh is asking His people to do. It is to walk with Him. It is to go in the same direction, toward the same destination, and to hear Him when He says, “Turn left,” or “Turn right.”
That is what Enoch did. We have little to no information about the way that the religion of Yahweh was practiced before the Flood. We know that, as a pre-cross faith, it involved sacrifices, but other than that, we have very little to go on. The way the doctrines were expressed, the teachings that were relevant to someone just a few generations down from Adam… we just don’t know. The Bible doesn’t tell us because, as we saw in The Secret Doctrine study, that is not what is actually important. What is important is that we are set free by the Father and Son to truly be ourselves, not who we had become as sinners, but who we were meant to be had sin never entered the human experience. That is the healing that the Father performs, and He requires our faith, which means, our trust.
Things about our lives do change when we are converted. That which we hated we come to love. That which we loved, we often find we no longer enjoy. I cannot say what anyone’s individual experience will be. That is their own personal journey with Yahweh. But it will require the kind of trust in the Father that Yahshua had – that is the Faith of Yahshua. It will result in a love of, and therefore obedience to, the instructions our Father has given us – that is the Commandments of Yahweh. So these two elements will always be present. Also, it will result in such joy, such freedom, such lightness of spirit, that it will produce a proclamation of that freedom, that the new saint is no longer a slave of sin, and in fact, has found victory over all the power of sin and self. That is the testimony of Yahshua, and cannot have any other effect than a drawing together of all who share this experience into One, just as the Father and Son intended.
When Enoch chose to walk with Yahweh, he was healed of the “sin disease.” This means much more, though, than recovering from a sickness of the body, like bronchitis or the flu. In this healing, Enoch the sinner died, suffering the just consequences of his transgressions. And yet, Enoch the saint arose from this death, and his soul was preserved through this resurrection as a type of Christ’s physical resurrection. He was a different person, yet the same individual. Self was dead, but he was a new “self” in unity with Christ. When Enoch chose to walk with Yahweh, he was dead, and yet alive, the same and yet entirely different. These are the paradoxes of the spirit that we understand only by experiencing them for ourselves.
This does not need to be complicated. Enoch walked with Yahweh, because Yahweh invited him, and Enoch said, “Yes.” That’s it. Let us be clear. What happened to Enoch was complicated, but what Enoch did was not complicated. You understand… I can turn on a computer, and type a single sentence into Notepad. The sentence, what I typed, what I did, was not complicated… but the mechanism I used, the computer, is incredibly complicated. Yahweh does the complicated part. He does not ask us to figure out His work. He designed and carried out the Plan of Salvation, which we will be studying for eternity. It is He who knows how to save the sinner without preserving the sin. It is he who knows how to bring light from darkness, and a victorious life out of a carnal past. What our Father does for us is complicated… a wheel within a wheel, tactics involving an innumerable company of angels to keep us safe, transporting a camel through the eye of a needle. But what we do is simple: We choose to trust Him.
Enoch walked with Yahweh, and the result of the complex operation that Yahweh performed on him left him with “love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance.” (Gal 5:22, 23) It left him in possession of the fruit of the Holy Spirit. Enoch did those things that pleased the Father, because he had been made free to do so. He chose to walk with Yahweh, and He benefited, because of that simple choice, from the wisdom of a divine mind and the execution of a divine power. All of Heaven’s resources were made available to Enoch according to his needs, and as a result, the saint of Yahweh overcame death itself.
We have much to learn from the very few verses that mention Enoch.
We see that walking with Yahweh does not require great effort, lengthy study, or a particularly brilliant mind. It requires hearing the voice of our Father inviting us to His Way, and replying with a firm, trusting, “Yes.” Now, once we have made that choice, we possess the righteousness that comes by faith. This means that we will be able to exert great effort on behalf of our faith. It means we will be able to study the Word of Yahweh at great length, and with great insight. It means our minds will be made as brilliant as they need to be in order to perfectly do the works we are called to do.
These things come from faith. Righteousness does not come from obedience to the Law. Righteousness that is obedience to the Law comes from faith, made possible and motivated by the transformation – the healing – that the Father does within us as a result of that faith, just as Yahshua healed those who believed in Him during His brief time on the earth.
When Enoch walked with Yahweh, after he had made that choice to go in the direction, and toward the destination, that Yahweh prepared for him, what did it look like? What did it mean on a practical level?
It means that Yahweh was an abiding presence to Enoch. He spoke with His Father. He knew His father was there, as He is with everyone, always and everywhere present, but Enoch acknowledged this as an active reality, and as such, like those of us who are in the last generation, Enoch stood in Yahweh’s judgment. How do we know? How do we know that Enoch endured the Judgment of The Living, just as we do this day? Perhaps you have not thought of this… because the Judgment of The Living is presented as a dark, secret, end-of-days thing, but no… Enoch had the same destiny as we are expecting, which is a character perfected in this life, and a translation into the next without ever coming under the power of sin, which is death. Enoch was judged worthy of Heaven while he was yet alive; this was precisely what we are teaching of our current time, a judgment of those who are still alive, so that Yahshua will prepare crowns for them to be delivered on the day of His soon return.
The Scriptures will never leave the people of Yahweh unprepared for the future, not even the time of trouble, not even the travail of our souls. He has given us teachings, warnings, advice, and here in Enoch, an example so that we will know what it looks like. Yahshua says to us, as He once said to Enoch, “I will not leave you comfortless; I will come to you.” (John 14:18) And, “Let your conversation be without covetousness; and be content with such things as ye have, for He hath said, ‘I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.’” (Heb 13:5) And, “Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” (Mat 28:20)
Enoch endured the judgment of the living, and as a result, he did not die, and he will never die. That is what it means, in this generation, to truly and completely walk with Yahweh. We know this, because Yahweh cannot look upon an evil thing. He cannot allow for, or overlook, sin. Therefore, when we walk with Yahweh, as Enoch did, we are saying, ‘I am standing next to One who cannot be in the presence of sin.’ Only the victorious life can do this. We open ourselves up to judgment, willingly, knowing that we are loved, and will be corrected rather than destroyed, we will be guided, rather than condemned, and we know that our Father will take our simple choice to trust and follow Him, and perform some amazing, complicated, and eternally significant things.
Enoch is not the only one that the Scriptures say walked with Yahweh, or walked “before” Him, which is exactly the same thing. We read, “These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God.” (Gen 6:9) “And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, Yahweh appeared to Abram, and said unto him, ‘I am the Almighty God; walk before me, and be thou perfect.’” (Gen 17:1) David wrote, “I will walk before Yahweh in the land of the living.” (Psalm 116:9) “And the king [Josiah] stood in his place, and made a covenant before Yahweh, to walk after Yahweh, and to keep His commandments, and His testimonies, and His statutes, with all his heart, and with all his soul, to perform the words of the covenant which are written in this book.” (2Chron 34:31)
What all these people have in common, who walked with, or before, or in the way of, Yahweh, is this: They all made a simple choice, and they all did amazing things that affected the course of human history. They performed deeds that echoed in eternity, and about which we are still reading thousands of years later. When a human being walks with God, he does the works of omnipotence. Enoch was translated without seeing death. Noah build an ark to save all of humanity from destruction. Abraham became the father of many nations, and a patriarch in the line of the Messiah. David defended Israel against attacks, invasions, and corruption. Josiah restored the Law to Israel after it had been abandoned for many years because of idolatry and sin.
Deliverer, Patriarch, Reformer, Overcomer. These are the titles our Father calls on us to bear. The works worthy of these titles our Father calls on us to enact. Those who walk with Yahweh do such things as this, because the One with whom we walk is mighty.
Yahweh takes our simple choice to walk with Him, and He does the complicated work of raising the dead, of bringing us to life, of giving us victory over sin. This first operation, this first work, is the first angel’s message. Yahweh takes our simple choice to walk with Him, and He does the complicated work of cleansing away Satan’s deceptions, and confusion, and falsehoods. This leaves us with a pure understanding of who He is. Babylon, confusion, is gone. This second operation is the second angel’s message. Yahweh takes our simple choice to walk with Him, and because we walk in His Way, and have the same destination, He does the complicated work of taking people who were once angry, and sad, and suspicious, and hopeless, and legalistic, and licentious… and He makes us into One Family. No longer is there bitterness, resentment, or mistrust. No longer is there fear of being controlled, imprisoned, oppressed, or subjugated. No, Yahweh does the work of healing, and this operation is the third angel, which prepares a single, united people for our protest, our last stand, against the Beast and his image.
There are some who think that they are serving Yahweh, but they do not walk as Enoch walked. They are not willing to stand in the judgment as Enoch did. They are not willing to trust in the Father as Enoch did. They are not willing to undergo this three-part transformation. They say, “Oh, but we are all teaching the Gospel, we are all heading for Heaven.” Enoch walked with Yahweh. It does not say that he walked his own path and ended up where Yahweh was calling him to be. No, it is not only the destination, but the journey that matters. The Christian does not believe that the ends justify the means. The Christian knows that the steps our Father outlines for us are important, for “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber.” (John 10:1)
If one who claims to speak for the Father and Son in this generation, where so much light has been given, does not teach perfect victory over sin, “the same is a thief and a robber.” If one who claims to speak for the Father and Son does not teach the importance of knowing who They are as divine Persons, honoring rather than rejecting the Law, “the same is a thief and a robber.” If one claims to speak for the Father and Son, but does not teach about the importance of order, unity, baptism, and covenant, “the same is a thief and a robber” and does not know the One who does all things perfectly.
Walk with Yahweh. Trust in Yahweh. Say “Yes” to His invitation. Have faith that He will deliver you along the Narrow Way. We read, “Hear me, O Judah, and ye inhabitants of Jerusalem: Believe in Yahweh your God, so shall ye be established; believe His prophets, so shall ye prosper.” (2Chron 20:20) Trust in His Word, and hear the words of His servants, those whom you know in your spirit are speaking on His behalf. So you will, like Enoch, have the testimony that you please Yahweh, the very testimony of Yahshua, and thus you will see the world to come without passing under the shadow of the grave.
Let us end with a brief passage that describes well the mind of Enoch, and the will of Yahweh toward His beloved people: “Wherewith shall I come before Yahweh, and bow myself before the high God? Shall I come before Him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? Will Yahweh be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth Yahweh require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” (Mic 6:6-8)
David.
An Enduring Witness
“Enoch’s walk with God was not in a trance or a vision, but in all the duties of his daily life. He did not become a hermit, shutting himself entirely from the world; for he had, in the world, a work to do for God. In the family and in his intercourse with men, as a husband and father, a friend, a citizen, he was the steadfast, unwavering servant of God. His faith waxed stronger, his love became more ardent, with the lapse of centuries. To him prayer was as the breath of the soul. He lived in the atmosphere of heaven.” [Testimonies for The Church, Vol. 8, pp. 329, 330]
“In choosing men and women for His service, God does not ask whether they possess learning or eloquence or worldly wealth. He asks: ‘Do they walk in such humility that I can teach them My way? Can I put My words into their lips? Will they represent Me?’” [The Ministry of Healing, p. 37]
“By faith Enoch ‘was translated that he should not see death; ... for before his translation he had this testimony, that he pleased God.’ Hebrews 11:5. In the midst of a world by its iniquity doomed to destruction, Enoch lived a life of such close communion with God that he was not permitted to fall under the power of death. The godly character of this prophet represents the state of holiness which must be attained by those who shall be ‘redeemed from the earth’ (Revelation 14:3) at the time of Christ’s second advent.” [Patriarchs and Prophets, p. 88]