Genesis 5

Genesis 5:24

The Man Who Walked With God And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.—Genesis 5:24.If you open your Bible at the fifth chapter of Genesis you will find a list of men who were descended from Adam. It begins with Seth and ends with Noah and his sons. About all these men we are told the same thing—they lived a certain number of years, and then they died. There is just one exception. Towards the end of the list we come to a man of whom we are told something different—“And all the days of Enoch were three hundred and sixty and five years: and Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.”Did you ever think what these words mean—“Enoch walked with God”? They mean that Enoch chose God as his Friend and sought to follow wherever He led.

The world had become very wicked in the days of Enoch, but in spite of all the wickedness around him he kept on trying to please God. And then one day God took him to walk with Him in Heaven.Now God wants to be our Friend too, to walk with us every day of our life.

But if we are going to walk with Him there are some things we must do for Him, and there are some things He will do for us.I.If we are going to walk with God there are some things we must do for Him, there are one or two rules we must keep.1. We must be willing to walk in the path He chooses.— Have you ever walked somewhere with your mother, father, brother, sister, or friend? Maybe you walked down the driveway, down the road, along a path in the woods, or through the mall. Supposing you came to a place where two roads parted, and your friend wanted to go one way and you the other, what would happen? One of you would need to give in, or you would have to separate. So if we are going to walk with God, we must agree to go His way.

He knows much better than we do, and if we put our hand in His He will always lead us along the best path.2. If we wish to walk with God, we must love the things that He loves, and hate the things that He hates.— How do you make a friend?

Perhaps you never thought about it, but it really is because you and a certain boy or girl have something in common. Your friend likes something that you like—the same storybooks, or the same games, or the same hobbies. Or perhaps it is just something in his nature that answers to something in yours.And if we are going to “walk with God,” to be God’s friend, we must have something in common with Him. We must learn to love all things good and pure and noble, and to hate all that is unworthy and sinful.3. And then if we wish to be God’s friend and walk with Him we must obey Him.—What our earthly friends ask us to do is not always right or wise, but God never makes a mistake. Sometimes He asks us to do hard things, but He never asks us to do anything that would harm us.

Our love for our earthly friends is a poor thing if we do not try to do something to serve them— something that costs us a little—and our love for God is a poor, shabby thing if we do not seek to serve Him, and obey Him, and please Him.II.But there are also the things that God does for us when we walk with Him.1. And the first is—He helps us to walk straight.— If you shut your eyes and tried to walk without anything to guide you, do you know what would happen?

You would walk round in a circle. It might be a very big circle, but still it would be a circle. The reason is that your strides are not equal because your legs are not exactly the same length. So, in trying to balance yourself, you would gradually veer round to one side or the other. It is only your eyes that help you to go straight.Now God is “eyes” for those who walk with Him. We cannot see the path, and if left to ourselves we should walk round in circles and never get any farther. But God sees the path. He can lead us straight on, and He chooses the way that is best for us.2.

And then God supports those who walk with Him. —Sometimes the path is rough and thorny, but He is always ready to stretch out a helping hand, and to ease the bleeding feet.3. But the most wonderful thing about God’s friendship is that those who walk with Him become a little hit like Him.—People say that we grow to resemble those we live with or of whom we see a great deal. Even creatures grow like their surroundings. The Polar bear is white because it lives among the snows. Some animals—such as the ermine—change their coat to match the season; they are white in winter and brown or fawn, like the earth, in summer. Lions are sandy-colored to suit the deserts where they live, tigers are striped so that they may be invisible in the jungle.

Soles and flounders resemble sand, frogs are green and brown like the earth and the weeds among which they live, and some caterpillars and moths look so like the twigs or the leaves of the trees on which they are resting that it is almost impossible to distinguish one from the other.There is a beautiful story of a statue which a sculptor carved out of a rock near a village. It was the figure of a young man with a very beautiful and noble face.

And the sculptor said that one day a youth would live in that village who would have a face exactly like the face of the statue. At first the people of the village came to gaze upon the statue and to wonder at its beauty. But later they became accustomed to it and passed it without even glancing at it. And the sculptor’s prophecy was forgotten.Years passed, and one day a little boy was born in the village. When he grew big enough to run about by himself he loved to visit the statue because he thought he had never seen anything so beautiful. Every day he came to gaze upon it, and at last there came a day when he stood beside it and someone passing said, “Look, he has the face of the statue!” And all the people saw the resemblance and rejoiced, for it had also been prophesied that the man who resembled the statue should do great things for his country.

And so it came to pass.So it is with us too. If we choose God as our friend and walk with Him every day, if we love the things that are true and noble and good, we shall become like Him.

Even our faces will show the difference. They will be lit up with a new beauty.“Enoch was not; for God took him” We do not know exactly what that means. We know only that Enoch did not die like other men. Perhaps nobody could explain the story better than did a little girl. She had just come in from Sunday school and her mother asked her what the lesson was about. She said—“It was all about a man who used to go for walks with God. His name was Enoch. One day they took a specially long walk.

And they walked on and on until at last God said to Enoch, ‘ You are very far from home and you must be very tired; you had better just come in and stay.’ And he went.”Some day God will take us too. But we need not be afraid. If we have walked with Him on earth then He will just ask us to come and walk with Him in Heaven. And we shall put our hand in His and go.

Genesis 5:29

Little Comforts He called his name Noah, saying, This same shall comfort us.—Genesis 5:29.There was once a very little girl, so little as to be almost a baby, and she had a hot little temper which blazed out suddenly every now and then. One day when she had flown into a passion her father exclaimed, “Little spitfire!” Baby stopped and solemnly looked at him, but said nothing. The same day her mother received news which made her very sad, so sad that she could not help crying. Baby, who had a warm little heart as well as a warm little temper, was distressed too. She climbed on her mother’s knee, put her arms round her mother’s neck, and lisped, “Poo’ Mommy, don’t ky, don’t ky!” And mother dried her tears at the touch of those clinging arms and hugged the tiny comforter and whispered, “Mother’s little comfort.” When Baby was dropping over to sleep that night she was heard repeating softly to herself, “Daddy’s ’itta ’pitfire, Mommy’s ’itta tumfort.” And for many days after if you asked her name she promptly replied, “Daddy’s ’itta ’pitfire and Mommy’s ’itta tumfort.”Today I want to tell you of someone in the Bible who was both his father’s and his mother’s “little comfort.” In fact his name just means “comfort,” though the Hebrews pronounced it “Noah.” The Bible doesn’t tell us exactly why Lamech, Noah’s father, called his little son “Comfort,” but it gives us several hints, and we guess the rest.Noah’s father and mother had been having a hard struggle to make a living. They had worked early and late and their hard work had not had great results.

Perhaps the soil was at fault, perhaps a blight had fallen on the crops. Perhaps a flight of locusts had alighted on the fields and eaten up every green thing.

We are not told. All we know is that they were feeling that they had struggled hard and had failed. And then, when they were feeling specially down-hearted, God sent them their little son, and Lamech and his wife took new heart and fresh courage from God’s gift to them. They felt that here was something that more than made up for all their disappointments, so they called him Noah—“Little Comfort.”Can’t you imagine Lamech talking to his wife and saying, “We shall try again for the sake of the boy. And this time we shall succeed”? And they would both go forward hopefully, looking to the time when baby Noah would be a big boy and ready to work along with them.But it was not only to his parents that Noah was a comfort.

He was a comfort to God. Noah was born at a time when the people around were very wicked.They loved evil.

They loved it to such an extent that they intentionally forgot God. They put Him out of their lives as if He did not exist, and they went their wicked way rejoicing in it, and trying hard just how wicked they could be. Among them all there was only one who remembered God and listened to His voice, and it was Noah. God’s heart was nearly broken with the wickedness of the men whom He had created. Noah was His one comfort. Later God saw that the only way to stop the terrible wickedness was to destroy the doers of it. And so, as you know, He sent the flood and drowned the determined evildoers. But Noah and his family He saved alive in the ark.We too can be Noahs, boys and girls.

We can comfort our fellow-men and we can comfort God.(1) How can we comfort our fellow-men? In thousands of ways—big ways, and little ways, and middle-sized ways. We can begin with the little ways. We can begin to be Noahs at home. We can notice when father is tired or mother needs a helping hand. We can slip in and do our little bit to help. That will be acting Noah. We can take the little ones and amuse them for half an hour till mother gets a rest.

We can run an errand for father or offer to post his letters. We can show little brother how to do that sum which he has already wiped out half a dozen times on his slate. We can fix little sister’s doll and dry the tears which she has been shedding because its arm has come off. We can begin, I say, with the little ways; but we shall not end with them. If we begin with the little ways, we shall go on without knowing it to the big ways, and shall end, God helping us, by being a comfort to our day and generation.(2) And we can comfort God. “That sounds strange,” you say. “I always understood that God comforted His children. I didn’t think He needed to be comforted Himself.” That is just where you and many others make a mistake. God needs comfort. He needs it terribly.

For after all, “comfort” is just another name for “love,” and God hungers more than we can say, or think, or imagine for the love of His children on earth. He longs for it with a longing unspeakable. And the pity of it is that some people think God can get along quite nicely without them. Are you going to be God’s “comforts” too, dear children? God hopes you are.