Enoch Walked, and So Did Others

Enoch walked.

That is where the last chapter left us, with a man whose life Scripture compresses into five words:

"And Enoch walked with God."
— Genesis 5:22

He did so for three hundred years.

Not for one unusually clear morning. Not only in the moment of a great decision. Three centuries passed beneath that sentence. Children were born. Years accumulated. Ordinary days followed one another until nearly everything Enoch saw when he first began walking had changed.

And still, when Scripture gathers the meaning of those years, it says that "Enoch walked with God".

The frightened reader may hear that and imagine a life beyond his reach: three hundred years without one hesitation, one temptation, one failure, or one need for mercy. The settled reader may go the other direction and make walked with God mean so little that no visible response to God is required at all.

Scripture permits neither.

Walking with God is not the same thing as never faltering while you walk. But it does mean that you are actually walking.

That distinction should be simple. But we have found ways to make it disappear.

The Road We Make Impossible

The claim that obedience is impossible usually depends upon a definition Scripture never gave it.

Obedience is quietly expanded until it means obeying every command, in every circumstance, every moment of every day, without ignorance, hesitation, temptation, or failure for the remainder of your life. Once the definition is made large enough, the conclusion is easy.

No one can do that.

That conclusion is then carried backward and laid over the command in front of us now.

Therefore, Christ's obedience is made to mean that mine need never become real.

Then comes the use for which the definition was built:

Therefore, the thing I know is sin can continue.

Listen to what happened.

Obedience became sinless perfection. The impossibility of sinless perfection became the impossibility of real obedience. The possibility of some future failure became permission for a present refusal.

But none of those conclusions follows from the one before it.

The fact that you may not walk every mile of a long road without stumbling does not make the road impossible to walk. It certainly does not make the next step impossible. Yet this is how the argument functions. We look down the entire road, imagine crossing every mile without one faltering step, declare that impossible, and use the length of the road as our reason for refusing the step directly beneath our feet.

Sometimes we make the argument more carefully. We admit that individual commands can be obeyed, but insist that the whole body of God's commands amounts to an impossible demand. We can tell the truth in this conversation. We can forgive this offense. We can flee this temptation. We can make this confession. We can return what we took. But no one can obey all God's commands perfectly for an entire lifetime, so our ability to obey this command somehow stops mattering.

But if the command before you can be obeyed, the imagined impossibility of flawless obedience for the remainder of your life has not answered your present responsibility. It has only distracted you from it.

Nor does Scripture command every possible action at every moment. You are not required to perform the whole Christian life before breakfast. God's commands address real people in real circumstances. The whole counsel of God gives shape to the whole walk, and each step of that walk answers the light and duty actually given there.

You cannot use the possibility of falling somewhere tomorrow as permission to sit down in rebellion today.

A future failure cannot reach backward through time and make present obedience impossible.

Scripture distinguishes things our excuse merges. Sinless perfection is the absence of every sin and failure. Obedience is a genuine response to God: hearing, trusting, yielding, doing what He says, and returning under His correction when we fall. Settled disobedience is something else again. It knows what God has said, reserves the right to refuse Him, and uses grace to make the refusal feel safe.

This chapter is not claiming the first.

It is refusing to let the third borrow the weakness of the second as a hiding place.

That Thou Mayest Do It

Scripture does not describe the whole body of God's commands as a trap intended to prove that obedience is impossible.

Moses stood near the end of a long covenant address. He had placed blessing and cursing, life and death, love and rebellion before Israel. He was not isolating one unusually easy instruction when he said:

"For this commandment which I command thee this day,
it is not hidden from thee, neither is it far off.
It is not in heaven, that thou shouldest say,
Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it unto us,
that we may hear it, and do it?
Neither is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest say,
Who shall go over the sea for us, and bring it unto us,
that we may hear it, and do it?
But the word is very nigh unto thee,
in thy mouth, and in thy heart,
that thou mayest do it."
— Deuteronomy 30:11–14

Not hidden.

Not far away.

Not stranded in heaven.

Not waiting beyond the sea.

Near enough to hear. Near enough to do.

Israel's later disobedience did not prove Moses wrong. It proved that possessing a command is not the same thing as yielding to it. The word was near. Their hearts could still turn away. The possibility of obedience did not automate their response, and their refusal did not, after the fact, turn the command into an impossibility.

John speaks the same way under the New Covenant: "This is the love of God, that we keep his commandments: and his commandments are not grievous" (1 John 5:3).

Commandments. Plural.

John knew there was more than one. He knew obedience would have to take form across an entire life. He still refused to call God's commands an unbearable impossibility.

And he refused the opposite error too:

"My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not.
And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father,
Jesus Christ the righteous."
— 1 John 2:1

John holds the whole distinction in one sentence.

"...that ye sin not."

There is the expectation. And yet John does not write as though disobedience were the only honest forecast for a Christian life.

"And if any man sin..."

There is the possibility of failure. He does not turn obedience into a claim that believers never falter.

"...we have an advocate with the Father..."

There is mercy for the one who falls. The failure is not called harmless, and the fallen believer is not left without Christ.

The Advocate does not make obedience unnecessary. The command to "sin not" does not make the Advocate unnecessary.

John expects obedience, acknowledges failure, and sends the one who fails to Jesus. Scripture can hold all three because obedience was never another word for flawlessness or sinless perfection.

The Path Has Footprints

The Bible does not leave that distinction in definitions. It gives us people.

Hebrews gathers three of them in four verses. The phrase repeated over them is by faith. The verbs that follow are visible.

Enoch pleased.

Noah prepared.

Abraham obeyed and went.

"By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death;
and was not found, because God had translated him:
for before his translation he had this testimony,
that he pleased God."
— Hebrews 11:5

The next verse says, "without faith it is impossible to please him." It does not say that pleasing God is impossible. It tells us how Enoch did it: by faith.

His walking did not purchase God's presence. His faith did not make grace a wage. Enoch believed that God was real, that His word was true, and that He was "a rewarder of them that diligently seek him" (Hebrews 11:6). That faith left three hundred years of footprints.

Then Noah.

Genesis says first that "Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD" (Genesis 6:8). Grace comes before the description of his walk. In the next verse, Noah is called "a just man and perfect in his generations," and we are told that "Noah walked with God."

Then God warns him of a flood no one has seen and gives him instructions for an ark no one around him believes he needs.

Genesis records the response:

"Thus did Noah; according to all that God commanded him, so did he."
— Genesis 6:22

And again:

"And Noah did according unto all that the LORD commanded him."
— Genesis 7:5

Hebrews tells us what moved inside that obedience:

"By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet,
moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house."
— Hebrews 11:7

Noah did not build the ark to persuade God to show him grace. Grace had already found him. But grace did not make the preparation imaginary or the obedience unnecessary. God warned. Noah believed. Faith moved with fear, and a real man cut real timber until an ark stood where no ark had stood before.

Then Abraham.

"By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place
which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed;
and he went out, not knowing whither he went."
— Hebrews 11:8

He did not receive the whole road before he took the first step. He received a word from God. Faith treated that word as true enough to move.

Later, the Lord described Abraham's life this way:

"Abraham obeyed my voice, and kept my charge,
my commandments, my statutes, and my laws."
— Genesis 26:5

God piles up the terms. Voice. Charge. Commandments. Statutes. Laws.

Abraham's failures remain in the same book. His fear made him evasive. His impatience helped produce the grief surrounding Hagar and Ishmael. The record does not polish those things out so that Genesis 26:5 can stand.

But neither does God allow those failures to erase the obedience He says was real.

Abraham's failures disprove sinless perfection. They do not disprove Abraham's obedience. God knew the difference even when our definitions do not want to acknowledge it.

God Did Not Hide Their Falls

Job is introduced with language we have been trained to distrust:

"That man was perfect and upright,
and one that feared God, and eschewed evil."
— Job 1:1

Those are not Job's words about himself. God repeats them before Satan: "a perfect and an upright man" (Job 1:8). After the first ruinous wave of suffering, God says Job "still holdeth fast his integrity" (Job 2:3).

Yet the book does not end by announcing that an upright man had nothing left to learn. When God answers Job and greater light breaks over the argument, Job responds:

"I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear:
but now mine eye seeth thee.
Wherefore I abhor myself,
and repent in dust and ashes."
— Job 42:5–6

Job's repentance does not prove that God's earlier testimony was mistaken. It shows what integrity does when greater light arrives.

The perfect man was not the man who could not be corrected.

He was the man who answered God when correction came.

David's failure was darker. Scripture does not call the matter of Uriah a stumble so small that only a harsh reader would notice it. David coveted another man's wife, committed adultery, used deceit to conceal it, and arranged the death of a faithful man when the concealment failed.

Yet Scripture later says:

"David did that which was right in the eyes of the LORD,
and turned not aside from any thing that he commanded him
all the days of his life, save only in the matter of Uriah the Hittite."
— 1 Kings 15:5

The exception is named because the pattern was real.

God neither reduces David's whole life to his worst fall nor lets the general direction of David's life make the fall less wicked. He tells the truth about both.

And when Nathan brings that particular sin into the light, David does not point toward all the other commands, imagine the impossibility of keeping them flawlessly, and use the whole body of the law to make this violation abstract.

He says, "I have sinned against the LORD" (2 Samuel 12:13).

David did not hide this sin inside the universal frailty of mankind. When God named it, David named it too.

Then, near the threshold of the New Testament, Luke introduces Zacharias and Elisabeth:

"And they were both righteous before God,
walking in all the commandments and ordinances
of the Lord blameless."
— Luke 1:6

There is the language our excuse says Scripture should never use.

Both righteous.

All the commandments and ordinances.

Blameless.

Then Luke shows Zacharias failing to believe the angel's word. Gabriel rebukes him: "thou believest not my words" (Luke 1:20). Zacharias is made unable to speak until the promise is fulfilled.

Luke did not forget what he wrote fourteen verses earlier. Blameless did not mean incapable of faltering. But neither was it an empty position pasted over an unresponsive life. Luke had defined their blamelessness with a verb: they were walking.

When the child is born and others attempt to name him after his father, Zacharias asks for a writing table.

"His name is John."

He yields to the word he had once struggled to believe. His mouth opens. His tongue is loosed. He praises God.

A blameless man can falter, receive correction, obey, and continue walking.

Blameless is not flawless. When Zacharias's failure was brought into the light, he received correction and returned to obedience. Luke did not withdraw the word blameless.

Our Excuses Shrink

These witnesses do more than prove that obedience happened once upon a time. They press a harder question upon those of us who live after the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ.

Enoch, Noah, Job, and Abraham were not men producing holiness from unaided human strength. Enoch walked by faith. Noah found grace. Abraham lived by promise. The Spirit of God was active long before Pentecost, and no saint in any age has ever had grounds for boasting.

But Scripture also marks a real difference in redemptive history.

Zacharias and Elisabeth stood at the threshold. Luke records the Spirit filling them for prophetic witness, but they still lived before the promise Jesus announced to His disciples was poured out upon the church:

"And I will pray the Father,
and he shall give you another Comforter,
that he may abide with you for ever...
for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you."
— John 14:16–17

The men and women we have just read about walked with God before Christ was glorified, before the Spirit was poured out at Pentecost as the abiding gift of the New Covenant, before every believer could be addressed as one in whom the Spirit of God dwells.

The Spirit is not an occasional visitor to the believer, present for one remarkable act and absent through the ordinary days that follow. He abides. The believer wakes, works, suffers, resists temptation, confesses, and obeys in the continuing presence of the Spirit of God.

The last chapter heard the promise:

"I will put my spirit within you,
and cause you to walk in my statutes,
and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them."
— Ezekiel 36:27

We live on the far side of that promise's fulfillment.

The Old Testament saints had grace, and the New Covenant gives us no ground for boasting. But we have received what they awaited: Christ crucified and risen, the veil opened, the Spirit poured out, the law written upon the heart, the throne of grace opened through our great High Priest.

If Enoch walked in the light he was given, what shall we say?

If Noah trusted a warning about things not seen, what shall we say?

If Abraham obeyed without knowing where the road would lead, what shall we say?

If Job repented when greater light arrived, what shall we say?

If Zacharias and Elisabeth walked in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord before Pentecost, what shall we say?

Greater provision does not create a smaller expectation.

Our excuses shrink, not grow.

It is incoherent to look at people who walked with God before the indwelling Spirit was given as the abiding New Covenant gift, then claim that those in whom He now dwells are consigned to permanent inability. The flesh still resists. Temptation still presses. We still need the Advocate. But we are not alone beneath the command.

Apart from Christ, nothing.

But the gospel does not leave us apart from Christ.

The Step Beneath Your Feet

The tender conscience may have heard every name in this chapter as another witness for the prosecution.

It remembers not only the sins it chose but the sins it hated and still repeated. It knows the weariness of bringing the same confession back to God and wondering whether the repetition has finally made the confession a lie.

Do not turn these witnesses into plaster saints and then use the plaster to crush a living, struggling faith.

Your need for Christ's advocacy does not prove that every act of obedience was imaginary. Your repentance does not prove that you never walked. Repentance is part of the walk of faith. Settled rebellion protects the sin from the light; living faith keeps bringing it back to Christ.

Some bondage requires more than one private resolution. It requires confession to another believer, prayer, counsel, accountability, closed doors, surrendered access, and a long war in the light. Seeking that help is not an admission that grace is powerless. It may be obedience finally becoming concrete. It is a real part of bearing one another's burdens, and so fulfilling the law of Christ (Galatians 6:2).

The question is not whether the battle has been difficult.

It is whether you are fighting in the light or protecting the sin in the dark.

But another reader has been borrowing the failures of biblical saints while refusing their response to God.

He borrows Abraham's fear without Abraham's going. He borrows Job's words without Job's repentance. He borrows David's fall without David's confession. He borrows Zacharias's unbelief without receiving Zacharias's correction.

You may not use their failures to erase their footprints.

The Bible does not record their sins to teach that obedience is unreal. It records both because both were real: the walk was real, the failure was real, the correction was real, and the return was real.

So do not ask whether you can obey every command, in every possible circumstance, without faltering for the rest of your life.

That question takes the whole road at once and makes it large enough for fear and presumption to hide inside together.

Ask what stands beneath your feet.

What has God made plain?

What does obedience require here?

What are you afraid obedience will cost?

Are you prevented from obeying, or are you protecting what obedience would take away?

Perhaps you will fail somewhere tomorrow. If you do, Christ remains the Advocate to whom you must come honestly.

But tomorrow's mercy is not today's permission.

The command before you is not the whole road. It is the next step on it. Do not take it to purchase grace. Do not take it to keep the verdict from fading. Take it because God has spoken, because faith treats His word as true, and because the Spirit has not been given merely to admire the path.

Enoch walked.

Noah prepared.

Abraham obeyed and went.

Job repented.

David confessed.

Zacharias answered.

None of them purchased the road. None crossed it without needing mercy. But they walked.

The question is not whether your path contains a fall.

It is whether, when God names the fall, you rise and return—or use the length of the road as your reason to remain where you stopped.

One set of footprints led into a courtyard before dawn.

They did not end there.

Up Next:

The Denial and the Dawn (Chapter 7)