There is an interesting analogy between the time of Enoch, and the times we are passing through. If you reflect on the times in which we find Enoch, and compare them with those in which our lot is cast, you will find a very close similarity. People have often said,
“It is all very well to talk about Enoch ‘walking with God,’ but he had not half the trials, half the difficulties, that saints of God have in these days.”
That is a very superficial view of the history of Enoch’s time. He was surrounded by the world as Cain made it. God made the earth, but He did not make the world, or age, as we see it. No one supposes that the disordered system of things round about us is the production of God’s hand. Satan is the god and prince and head of that. God made the literal earth of course, but this disordered system of things that is round about us, where we see such terrible departure from God—God did not make that, neither is He the author of it. Satan has manufactured that out of the total revolt of man. That is exactly what Cain’s world was, in principle, in Enoch’s days. There were two things that entered into the constitution of it—a religion, and a city.
There is a great fact embraced in those two things. Cain was the founder of a religion that disowned the claims of God in righteousness, seeing that man had fallen from God. He also overlooked the fact of the curse that had come in through that fall.
A few words may not be out of place as to Cain’s sacrifice. He brought to God of the fruit of the ground. It was not that he lacked in energy, or that he wanted in earnestness, or that the man was unruly. Cain toiled on the earth, and though cursed, it yielded its fruit to him, and he brought the fruit of the earth that was cursed, as if there had been no curse at all, and offered it to God. There is a great principle involved in this—the moment that the fall exists as a fact, we can bring nothing acceptable to God except through the death of Christ; and the moment that we attempt such a thing, it may be unwittingly, we have fallen under the power of Cain’s religion in principle. That which characterized and marked what I call the religion of which Cain was the inventor and founder, was bringing to God an offering, and doing it so as to deny the great principle, “without shedding of blood there is no remission.”
The city is exactly what we have all round us at the present moment. There was manufacture, there was the art of man cultivated to its greatest possible extent, ingenuity taxed beyond all conception, to produce something which would make the world, out of which God had been rejected, bearable to man. This was Cain’s world. Herein lay its religious, political, and moral aspects (Read Gen. 4:17-2217And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bare Enoch: and he builded a city, and called the name of the city, after the name of his son, Enoch. 18And unto Enoch was born Irad: and Irad begat Mehujael: and Mehujael begat Methusael: and Methusael begat Lamech. 19And Lamech took unto him two wives: the name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other Zillah. 20And Adah bare Jabal: he was the father of such as dwell in tents, and of such as have cattle. 21And his brother's name was Jubal: he was the father of all such as handle the harp and organ. 22And Zillah, she also bare Tubal-cain, an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron: and the sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah. (Genesis 4:17‑22)).
It is a very blessed thing to find God calling out a man in the midst of a scene like this, surrounded as he was on all hands by that which disowned God; and it is a comforting thing, too, to our hearts, to find the Spirit of God giving us a record, such as you have in those verses in Genesis 5. With that state of things on every hand, here is a man that is called forth as a witness to the power of God. He was kept in the midst of all that, “walking with God.” Beloved friends, it is exactly what you and I are called to in these days; we are called to “walk with God.”
I heard a beloved servant of God say that when he left England, and went abroad, he came across many of God’s people who had gone out from England to settle there, and he asked them how it was they came out there. He got one reply from one, and another from another, but not a word that indicated to him in the least that there was anything like an exercise of soul before God as to His pleasure in the matter. And he said to one something like this,
“Well, but I read in Scripture that ‘Enoch walked with God,’ and I also read in Scripture that God says, ‘I will guide thee with Mine eye.’ What do you know of that?”
Well, the only reply he got from several to whom he spoke after that fashion, was simply an evasion of this direct appeal to their conscience.
Now, beloved friends, all this is very serious; and here is the solemn part of it, these very people were not unintelligent people, they had a very good knowledge of dispensational truth; they understood the scripture. They could tell you the bearing of certain parts of Scripture, and so forth; but when it came to this practical question of individually “walking with God,” and communion with God, and guidance by God’s eye, and this principle of faith, they were completely at sea. I say that is very solemn, and I think that you and I have to be on the lookout. We have to take care that our outward intelligence is not in advance of our personal communion with God. Be assured of it, the moment it comes to be so, Satan has materials at hand with which he will make terrible havoc. The outward understanding of the things of God, apart from this blessed question of personal “walk with God,” is a weapon in the devil’s hands.
There is another thing in connection with this “walking with God,” which is exceedingly blessed. We see it in Enoch. He had but one object. You will always find that where there is this simple walking with God, there is this one object. There is the relationship enjoyed; there is the soul in the sense of this relationship, but besides this, there is an object. You will find it brought out most beautifully in Hebrews 11, in the end of that fifth verse,
“Before his translation, he had this testimony, that he pleased God.”
That was the one thing that was before him. May I ask you affectionately, is that the one thing before you? Take everything in your life, take every circumstance in your history as a Christian, take everything that your hands are engaged in, your business relationships, your home relationships, your church relationships; is the one thing that is simply before your heart that you want “to please God”? This is very searching.
Before ever he left the world of Cain, with all the hindrances and attractions that were in it, “he had this testimony, that he pleased God.” You see, the eye was entirely off everything but God; there was the one thing that commanded him and controlled every movement of the man, the intense desire “to please God.”
If I have God before me, if I am acting with reference to Him, if I am thinking of pleasing Him, I have the testimony in my conscience that I please Him, and that keeps me up; it is a secret spring of satisfaction and joy in my heart. It is a blessed and wonderful thing, because it separates the affections of the soul from the ten thousand motives and influences that would act upon it.