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Three Good News Stories, Part 1: Leap!

by | Oct 18, 2014 | Faith, Three Good News Stories (A Mini-Series)

Good things come in threes and this is the first of three good news stories from the Bible.

Enoch lived through about nine generations, from Adam to his own son, Methuselah, and Methuselah’s son, Lamech.

He would have known Adam personally and would have understood from Adam about the Garden of Eden and how to care for the environment.

He would have known that the sacrifice of the lamb in the Garden was a symbol of a salvation to come. Indeed, he probably offered sacrifice himself as a sign of his belief that God would send a Saviour some day.

Through Adam and his descendants, Enoch knew God so well that God ‘took him.’ We do not get much detail from the stark statement except that ‘Enoch walked with God for three hundred years … and then was seen no more, because God had taken him away.’ (Genesis 5:21-24).

It takes a leap of faith to believe that God could take one human being direct into heaven, but it becomes more logical as we read further into Scripture.

God demands that there must be a witness to serious sin before any judicial act of punishment and God was about to pass terrible judgement on serious sin. As an act of grace, he allowed Enoch to be a witness to earth’s corruption and to understand the justice of the flood soon to be meted out.

Enoch was also a witness to God’s mercy in saving Noah and his family.

We learn from Hebrews that Enoch was given life with God on the same terms that everyone else will have life with God. It was life ‘through faith’.

Salvation came, and it still comes, through faith – faith to believe in the Saviour.

‘By faith, Enoch was taken up to another life without passing through death, he was not to be found, because God had taken him, and it is the testimony of Scripture that before he was taken he had pleased God.’ (Hebrews 11:5).

Enoch believed in the God of Adam and the God of Seth; in the coming of judgement; in the truth of God’s Word; in the Lamb who saves.

But ‘without faith it is impossible to please God’ so our faith must be the same as Enoch’s. It is that great leap of faith that takes us into the presence of God.

Join us next week for THREE GOOD NEWS STORIES, Part 2: Wind and Fire

Elizabeth Price

(To access the entire “Three Good News Stories” mini-series, please click here.)

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