Although he belonged to the line of Seth (some of whom called on the name of the Lord), Enoch experienced a nearness to God unknown to others of his generation. He belonged to a large family, and he himself had a number of children. However, it seems that he especially walked with God after the birth of his son Methuselah. This is interesting, since it was after the birth of Enos that ‘people began to call on the name of Jehovah’, Gen. 4. 26 JND. As Methuselah apparently means ‘when he is dead it shall come', Enoch must have had a divine communication at that time concerning the coming flood, and this changed his life forever.
Three hundred years later ‘he was not; for God took him’, 5. 24; so as far as the world was concerned, he had disappeared! What discussion there must have been about his disappearance! He, and to some extent Methuselah, are types of the church which is going to be preserved from the ‘great tribulation’, as opposed to Noah and his family who are types of the remnant who will be preserved through the tribulation.
The world was fast descending into a moral abyss from which there was no return, with the almost complete elimination of all living as the only answer. For three hundred years in this kind of world, Enoch walked with God by faith. At the same time he must have found himself walking with fewer and fewer godly people who called upon the name of the Lord, with whom he could have fellowship, as they died. However, no one could rob him of his testimony, ‘that he pleased God’, Heb. 11. 5 (note the Septuagint version of the Old Testament gives this divinely attested interpretation of ‘walked with God’).
God translated him so that ‘he should not see death’. In that, as we have seen, he is a particular prefigurement of those of the church, who at some point in its history ‘shall not … sleep’, 1 Cor. 15. 51. As well as walking with God, he had the privilege of speaking for God, and his is the first recorded prophecy about the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ with His saints, Jude 14.
