The Character and Translation of Enoch

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A sermon, delivered in the Independent Chapel, Shrewsbury, on Tuesday evening, February 24, 1852, by John Angell James—on the occasion of the sudden death of the Rev. Thomas Weaver.

The circumstances of Mr. Weaver's death should be mentioned in explanation of the sermon. On the day on which it occurred, he appeared in his usual health. Having attended a meeting, to make arrangements for the first public service of the Evangelical Alliance in Shrewsbury, at which he had shown great cheerfulness and animation, he went on the same business to the house of Mr. Wightman. He was there shown into a room alone, and Mr. Wightman, after a little time, returning home and going to him, found him lying perfectly dead beside the chair on which he had been sitting.

It will not be denied that Mr. Weaver was, at the time of his death, from his sterling virtues, and the unbending consistency of his long and blameless life, of all ministers of religion in Shropshire, the one most esteemed and venerated by all parties. And this testimony to the worth of a Nonconformist those who know the county best will best appreciate.

I need not inform the large and deeply affected audience now before me, what event has brought me into this pulpit on the present occasion. Mr. Weaver, the respected inhabitant of this town, the holy minister of religion, and the beloved pastor of this church for more than half a century—is no more. Three years ago I was here to celebrate his jubilee—I am now here to commemorate his death. That was a season of unmixed joy—this of general lamentation. We then rejoiced with him in his joy—but he does not now weep with us who weep. His tears ceased forever to flow when those of his friends, on his account, commenced. He is gone—but is he forgotten? No! nor ever will be as long as anyone that knew and loved him (and who that knew him did not love him?) shall remain. When I consented to preach his funeral discourse, a passage of Holy Scripture occurred to my recollection, which, by general opinion, will be considered even more descriptive of his character than it is of his removal.

"And Enoch walked with God—and he was not; for God took him." Genesis 5:24

I. We will first look at the HISTORY of Enoch. The name of Enoch appears upon the skies of Scripture as a star of the first magnitude, the rays of which, the brighter for their contrast with the surrounding darkness, have guided many, we believe, to that blessed world to which he himself was so mysteriously taken. His history is a short and beautiful episode in the midst of a dry list of antediluvian names, and of a mournful record of the ravages of mortality. We know little more of him than that, in an age of general and abounding depravity—he was an eminent example of earnest and consistent piety. The apostle Jude informs us that he was not only a believer in God—but an inspired prophet. This was probably the case with all the patriarchs in the line of Seth, commemorated in this chapter. There was then no written revelation, and the knowledge granted originally to Adam, and subsequently to others, was continued, before the flood, by tradition. To preserve this uncorrupted, was perhaps the design of the extreme longevity recorded of the antediluvians, a distinction possibly conferred only on those illustrious men, and not upon the inhabitants of the world in general.

"And Enoch, in the seventh generation from Adam, prophesied about them: Look! The Lord comes with thousands of His holy ones to execute judgment on all, and to convict them of all their ungodly deeds that they have done in an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things ungodly sinners have said against Him." (Jude 1:14-15). There is a detail in this quotation which is worthy of a passing remark. The very number of Enoch's generation is mentioned, and he is called "the seventh from Adam." There seems to be no importance in this particular, except to distinguish him from another of the same name who was a descendant of Cain, with whom, however, it was not likely he would be confounded. But it seems to show us the honor God puts upon his servants, and the importance he attaches to his cause, when though nearly the whole of Cain's posterity were passed over in neglectful silence, and though the kings and empires of the old world were consigned to eternal oblivion as not worthy of notice, this little circumstance connected with Enoch's pedigree should obtain a place in the inspired chronicle.

The Bible was not granted for the gratification of our curiosity—but for the salvation of our souls; and while there is infinitely too little to satisfy the one, there is abundantly enough to accomplish the other. How scanty is our knowledge of the antediluvian world—its whole history, though extending through a period of nearly two thousand years, is shut up within the compass of the first five chapters of Genesis, and yet that small fragment of the Bible contains more important information on many momentous particulars connected with man's physical, moral, geographical, and social history, and God's purposes and plans towards him, than can be collected from all the volumes ever written by the pen of man. Of the inhabitants of the antediluvian world we know very little but the fact of their abominable wickedness, which consisted, perhaps, not of idolatry—but of atheism, and its attendant consequence, unbridled violence towards each other.

Among this abandoned race Enoch lived as a believer in God and a preacher of His righteous law; and while he presented to them an illustration of its purity in his holy life, he predicted the infliction, at the judgment day, of its penalty upon all who transgressed its precepts. But they knew not the day of their visitation, and turned a deaf ear to his warnings; and God, at length, removed the blessing which they had so little valued, and so little improved. Noah followed, who was a preacher of righteousness, and by his ark, seemed to hold up to them a type of God's willingness to save all who would repent, believe, and reform, and of the method of their salvation—but all was in vain, and at last, having filled up the measure of their iniquities, and become ripe for destruction, they were swept away by the waters of the deluge.

II. Let us now contemplate the CHARACTER and CONDUCT of Enoch. We find another record of him in the Epistle to the Hebrews, where it is said, "By faith, Enoch was taken away so that he did not experience death, and he was not to be found because God took him away. For prior to his transformation he was approved, having pleased God." It is here distinctly declared that the principle on which his whole character was founded and his conduct directed, was faith. The apostle did not intend to limit the exercise of his faith to his translation—but to inform us what was the one great moving cause of all he did, and what it was that was crowned by this remarkable interposition of God. There are three guides of human conduct—sense, reason, and faith. These are diverse but not opposed. Sense is not opposed to reason, nor sense and reason together, to faith. By sense we act in common with brute animals; by sense and reason, as men, in reference to the affairs of this life; and by faith, as Christians, in reference to the life to come. Our whole conduct in reference to religion is a course of faith. We see nothing—but believe everything. Neither the God whom we worship, nor the Savior in whom we trust, nor the heaven to which we are tending, are the objects of vision; we believe in all upon the testimony of God, and our whole character and conduct must be formed under the guidance of this one principle—our belief in the accredited testimony of God—and he who cannot thus live cannot be saved.

In an atheistic age Enoch "believed that God is, and that he is the rewarder of all who diligently seek him," and he opposed his faith to the infidelity that surrounded him. Such also must be our course. With an immeasurably fuller revelation of the Divine will than he possessed, we ought to have a still stronger and more influential belief of spiritual and eternal realities. It is a difficult—but it is an indispensably necessary thing, to subordinate both sense and reason to the dominion of faith. It is, in fact, the very nature of true godliness—it is the sublime of human conduct.

We now turn to the description of his character and conduct given by the writer of the Book of Genesis—"Enoch walked with God." Nothing can be more beautiful, comprehensive, or expressive than these few words. They contain a figure of speech—and what a figure! The allusion is to two people voluntarily and pleasantly walking together, and conversing confidentially with each other. They are friends, for "how can two walk together except they are agreed." They are conscious of each other's presence, as two people in such a situation necessarily must be. They are engaged in actual fellowship; there is communion and interchange of thought by speech. They are going the same way and engaged upon the same subject. Thus did Enoch walk with God. He was, like Abraham afterwards, the friend of God, having, as a sinner, come into a state of reconciliation with God by repentance and faith in the promised "Seed of the woman." He loved God as the effect of God's love to him, they were friends, and the patriarch knew and rejoiced in it. He lived as in the presence of God—he endured as seeing Him that is invisible, he acted "as ever in the great Taskmaster's eye," and was checked in temptation, stimulated in duty, and comforted in affliction, with Hagar's appeal, "O God, You see me." His private, domestic, and social life was ever regulated by the assured belief that he was always and everywhere in the presence and under the notice, even to the state of his heart, of an observant God. He maintained habitual communion with God, not only by those public acts of worship and sacrificial rites, which doubtless, he celebrated before the eyes of the scoffing generation amidst which he lived, not only at the domestic altar around which he gathered his household, nor even in the usual acts of his own private and personal devotion—but also in the constant frame and tenor of his devout and holy mind. His soul was in habitual communion with God, by its thoughts, its aspirations, and its unutterable breathings of confidence, affection, and intense desires. He exercised a divine friendship, a confidential, yet reverential familiarity, and talked with God as a man talks with his friend.

On the other hand, he listened with awe, and veneration, and delight to those communications which God made to him by dream, by vision, or audible revelation. He also sought the same object as God did, he walked the same way, and was one with him, as regarded the chief end of his existence, the glory of Jehovah. To honor him before the ungodly was his object, purpose, and aim. Such was the manner in which Enoch walked with God. Others denied God; he confessed him. They forgot God—he habitually remembered him. They dishonored him; he delighted to glorify him.

The conduct of this antediluvian saint was the piety of intelligence; he understood God's claim, and his own obligations, and it was not a mere custom. It was the piety of deliberate design and choice—he was not, so to speak, thrown accidentally into God's company—but chose to go to him, and with fixed, determinate purpose, sought His friendship. It was the piety of a great and public man, for he was, probably, a chief, the head of a tribe, at any rate a patriarch, and yet made public duties no excuse for the neglect of personal religion. It was the piety also of a minister of religion—and what is any minister of religion, without personal godliness—but an actor in the most dreadful tragedy ever performed on the stage of this world, since it ends not in the pretended—but the real, death and destruction of the performer? It was the piety of one who had few of those helps and advantages of divine revelation and religious ordinances which we enjoy, and therefore shows how God can and will help those in the divine life, who are, by Providence, deprived of the assistance which others possess. It was the piety of one who faithful stood amidst the faithless, and who held fast his integrity against the torrent of evil example which continually assailed him, demonstrating not only that God has always some chosen ones in the worst of times—but that He can and will support them in their determination not to follow the multitude who run to do evil. It was piety maintained during a long period of severe trial, a profession consistently upheld amidst all conceivable opposition, for nearly four centuries, thus exhibiting a sublime instance of endurance, perseverance, and victorious faith.

Such was the character of Enoch; how splendid in itself, and how bright a pattern for us! We, too, are called to walk with God. This is the duty to which we also are summoned; the privilege to which we also are invited. This must constitute our religion. What an honor is thus placed within our reach. There is in the very language something every way calculated to astonish us. To walk with God. It seems as if this were a distinction too lofty to be conferred on the highest seraph that lives and worships in the temple above, that it were too great a condescension for the Divine Majesty to confer on Gabriel or Michael, to walk with him in the gold-paved streets of the New Jerusalem. How much more astonishing is it that this honor should be bestowed on every saint of the Most High on earth, however young, illiterate, or obscure

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