By faith Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death; and he was not found because God took him up; for he obtained the witness that before his being taken up he was pleasing to God. —Hebrews 11:5, NAS
That which set Enoch apart from the rest of his generation was his sudden disappearance, and yet there was something that lay behind that disappearance in which his real secret is to be found: Enoch “walked with God.” Yet surely this man Enoch was not the man who would be voted by his contemporaries as the man “most likely to be remembered in history!”
Are you aware that the writer to the Hebrews passed by another Enoch as he referred to the Book of Genesis for source material? There was Enoch before our own Enoch in this chapter, and this other Enoch was a contemporary of our Enoch. The other Enoch was a son of Cain (Gen. 4:17), and without doubt Enoch the son of Cain was the more spectacular by contemporary standards. The first city mentioned in the Bible was named after Enoch the son of Cain. How many of us have had a city built in our name?
Consider the people you hear so much about at the present time, such as those you see on television. Consider the movie stars, the best-selling authors, the noisy politicians. The question is, will posterity even recall them? Even twenty years from now? It is quite likely that Enoch the city, not the Enoch who walked with God, was the talk of that generation.
Enoch was not a spectacular man, but he walked with God. The writer to the Hebrews adds that Enoch “pleased God.” We are not told that Enoch pleased his friends or his family, for that is sometimes hard to do. We are told that he pleased God, and that is something any of us can do—by faith.
Excerpted from Believing God (MorningStar Publications & Ministries, 1997).
