Genesis 5:22-24

And Enoch walked with God after he begat Methuselah three hundred years, and begat sons and daughters:

And all the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty and five years:

And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.

There is something very tender here. Enoch began to walk with God after Methuselah was born. That rings true to life. Children have a way of waking a man up. They make you feel your weakness. They expose how little control you really have. They make you look at the future differently. A man can coast for a long time until he holds a child in his arms and realizes, Lord, I need You more than I knew.

That is not a bad thing.

Sometimes the Lord uses a child to turn a father into a man who prays. Sometimes He uses the weight of responsibility to push us out of ourselves and into fellowship with Him. Enoch did not just have a spiritual moment. He walked with God for three hundred years. That means day after day, year after year, in the ordinary stretch of life, he stayed near to the Lord.

Then the text says something even deeper. Enoch walked with God, and he was not.

That is the secret many of us fight.

God is. We are not.

Moses learned that when the Lord said, I AM THAT I AM, in Exodus 3:14. John the Baptist learned it too when he said so plainly, I am not, in John 1:20. Enoch understood it without giving a speech. He just walked with God until self started fading into the background.

That is where joy begins.

A lot of our misery comes from being too full of ourselves. We keep checking our pulse, measuring our progress, replaying our thoughts, wondering how we are doing, where we are going, what people think of us, how our ministry looks, how our life sounds. And it wears a man out. We were never made to live turned inward. Revelation 4:11 says all things were created for His pleasure. When life becomes about pleasing Him instead of examining ourselves all day long, the soul begins to breathe again.

That is why the happiest believers are usually the least occupied with themselves.

They are not forever bringing the subject back to their own feelings, their own image, their own importance. They have seen something better. They have found the freedom of walking with God. The closer a man gets to the Lord, the less fascinated he becomes with himself.

Then comes the line that sets Enoch apart from the rest of the chapter.

For God took him.

Everyone else in Adam’s line dies. The steady drumbeat of Genesis 5 is the same over and over. And he died. And he died. And he died. But then there is Enoch. He walked with God, and one day the Lord simply took him. He was caught up. Snatched away. Received into the presence of the God with whom he had walked so long.

What a picture that is.

It points forward to that coming day Paul describes in 1 Thessalonians 4:17, when those who are alive and remain shall be caught up together to meet the Lord in the air. I do believe the church is moving toward that moment. But there is also something here for us right now. Before there is ever a physical catching up, there can be a present enrapturing of the heart. A man can be so near to the Lord, so occupied with pleasing Him, so delighted in His presence, that his heart is lifted out of the heaviness and noise of this world.

Some believers have known the Lord for years, yet they feel flat, worn down, and discouraged. The joy seems thin. The wonder feels distant. The problem is not that God has moved. It is that somewhere along the way they stopped doing what Enoch did. They stopped walking closely. They stopped living to please Him. And when that happens, joy leaks out.

The remedy is not complicated, though it is costly. Walk with God. Stay near. Put self in its proper place. Live for His pleasure. The people who bless me most are not the flashy ones or the self important ones. They are the ones who seem quietly taken up with God. There is a freshness about them. A steadiness. A sweetness. You can feel that they are living for Someone bigger than themselves.

That is the kind of people I want us to be.

Not impressed with ourselves.

Not absorbed with ourselves.

Not trying to make our own name big.

Just walking with God until one day, whether through death or through the catching away of the church, we are taken fully into the presence we have loved all along.