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God, for the word “walk” is said to mean ‘to go on habitually’,

in Genesis 3 Jehovah Elohim was walking in the garden in the,

cool of the day and called to man and said to him, “Where art

thou?”, an evident expression of the divine longing for

companionship and communion with the man He had created.

But that man had been rendered unfit for His presence through

the coming in of sin.

Yet here is a man like ourselves, living a normal family life, but

fit—no doubt in anticipation of the work of Christ (Romans 3:

23)—to walk with God. For three hundred years day after day

this man was constantly and consciously in the presence of

God, enjoying His companionship and thus kept from the evil

all around. That remarkable prophecy preserved by the Spirit

of God for some 3500 years and revealed to Jude, shows how

Enoch was in the secret of God’s feelings as to the awful

degradation into which men had fallen, not only through their

ungodly works, but also the hard things they had dared to

speak against Him.

Enoch was only the seventh from Adam, the world was but

young and sparsely populated, but men’s hearts were already

turned against their Creator. Yet in spite of the dark

background, here is a man who could ‘look beyond the long

dark night’ and see the appearing of the glory of Christ. Only a

handful of men on earth, and they sunk in sin, but he is

occupied with the holy myriads and how God must righteously

clear the scene in judgment so as to bring in what is to be for

His pleasure.

It is not by chance that the Spirit led the translators of the

Septuagint to render the words “walked with” by “pleased”

God, so that the writer of Hebrews comments that before his

translation Enoch pleased God (Hebrews 11: 5). He is, as we

know, the earliest proof of God’s power to translate what

pleased him. Shortly, and how soon it may be, that power is to

be put forth again as the saints are caught up to meet the Lord

in the air (1