Walking With God (Hebrews 11:5-7)
This sermon was preached on July 13th, 2025.
1 Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. 2 This is what the ancients were commended for…
5 By faith Enoch was taken from this life, so that he did not experience death: “He could not be found, because God had taken him away.” For before he was taken, he was commended as one who pleased God. 6 And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.
7 By faith Noah, when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family. By his faith he condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness that is in keeping with faith.
I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie The Iron claw, but it’s about a professional wrestling family called the Von Erich’s. The father, Fritz, is the patriarch, ruling over his family with sternness.
He’s trained his sons to be wrestlers too. Early in the movie, they are eating dinner, and Fritz says this to his boys, who are all young men “It’s time for you to start thinking about what you’re going to be. Now we all know that Kerry is my favorite. Then Kev, then David, then Mike. But the rankings can always change. Everyone can work their way up or down.”
Fritz thinks that will drive his sons to excellence. But much of what follows in the movie is a playing out of this dynamic in the implosion of the family. As I’m sure some of us know from experience and the rest of us can imagine, living under this idea is a soul-killing thing.
Yet I think that this is what we carry around with us when we think about God. We treat him like he’s Fritz Von Erich and has told us that our place in his heart is dependent on us performing up to his standard. We imagine God has his favorites, and it’s not me. And we either try to work up the motivation within us to climb that ladder of favorites or despair when we mess up.
That’s not the kind of Father God is to us, and when we act like he is, we wind up missing the delight that he intends for us to walk in with him. God is not impressed by our deeds or our trophies, they don’t add a single thing to his love for us. No, he wants us to live a day-in-day-out existence of reveling in his love for us.
This morning we’re looking at a coupler of figures from the OT, the only two people that the book of Genesis describes as “walking with God”—Enoch and Noah. And what we’ll discover this morning is the incredible invitation that is extended to us in our lives today: to walk with God as the Father who delights in us and is leading us home.
Enoch and Noah are two people who experienced incredibly unique things. We meet them both early in the book of Genesis.
Enoch appears in Genesis 5, a genealogy—a family tree. Genesis 5 has a rhythm to it. So so lived this many years, he became the father of so and so. After he became his father, he lived this many years, and then he died. It’s different names and numbers, but the pattern is the same. So and so was born, had some kids, lived some more, then he died.
It’s a vicious cycle, “and then he died” in Genesis 5 is a continual reminder that it awaits everyone. It stays that way until we reach a guy named Enoch. At first, it’s the same pattern: “He was born, lived a number of years and became the son of Methuselah. After he became his father, he lived…then it says something that jars us awake “Enoch walked faithfully with God; then he was no more, because God took him away.”
What? Enoch did not experience death. In that way he became a pin-prick of light in a world filled with darkness. Or, better yet, a big flashing spotlight to us that human beings are not made to die. Death is not a part of life that we should be comfortable with—it is a wrong to be overcome.
We meet later on in the same genealogy, where we’re told his father Lamech named him Noah and said “He will comfort us in the labor and painful toil of our hands caused by the ground the Lord has cursed.”
We aren’t entirely sure what Lamech had in mind, but there was a desperate need for some comfort. During Noah’s life the rebellion and violence of humanity had grown to epic proportions. As Genesis 6 says “the Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.”
God tells Noah that judgments is coming, but that he has miraculously found grace and that God will preserve him through it—if he builds a boat to God’s specifications. Noah does and he and his family are saved.
These are two very different experiences. But like I said earlier, these are the two people that the book of Genesis tells us walked with God. What my mind does with that is think “these were the two most morally upright guys.” Like, God looked out over all humanity and saw Enoch had done so many good things that God couldn’t let him die. Or that he looked out and saw Noah and thought “I gotta save that one. He doesn’t deserve judgment.”
But this is wrong. The story of Enoch and Noah are the story of two wicked men who found grace entirely apart from their deserving. In a world where death reigned, they entrusted themselves to God’s faithfulness and moved forward entrusting themselves to God and his purposes.
Faith is a relational term of what it means to live in trust and dependence on God in the here-and-now. Faith is explicitly what is identified in v6: “anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.” It’s an outward looking trust and dependence on God.
Back to the Von Erich family I mentioned at the beginning: Fritz von Erich was laying out before his sons a way for them to earn commendation from him. They could achieve at a level that they climb higher and higher in his favoritism, grow more and more in his love. How they could please him.
Yet the only way, the only thing, that pleases God from our end isn’t the number of good things we do or how hard we work. His love for me is full and complete and does not need to grow. And he delights when I come to him in this posture of faith, with the open hands of a child to receive, the open arms of a child to be held.
When I was a little boy, my dad had Mondays off and when the weather was nice, we’d go fishing.
He was a great fisherman. He had the patience for it. And I know as an adult he probably would have had a wonderful time going by himself. Enjoying some solitude by the river. I know he would have caught more fish if he didn’t have to worry about helping me.
But the fishing wasn’t the point. Dad didn’t take me to the river because I was the best fisherman he knew, and I would help maximize how many he could catch. Dad took me to the river and shared that with me because he loved me, and he loved being with me, and doing things with me. That was the point. There was no performing to do. It was a little boy, free in the love of his father to catch fish, to get hooks caught in my clothes, to skip rocks, and all the rest.
This is the kind of point that I think Hebrews 11 is trying to help us to see. Enoch is a man who we are told walked with God, but we aren’t told much of what he did. It wasn’t anything “grand” or notable. Noah was a man who did something huge. But what pleased God wasn’t that Noah was really good at building boats. What pleased God was that Noah walked with him in relationship: that he believed God and entrusted himself to him.
This is what it means to walk with God. And we can have the utmost confidence in God, not because we’re crossing our fingers that we’ll have some extraordinary individual experience like Noah and Enoch, but because we have the definitive statement of who God is and what he is up to in Jesus Christ.
We read Noah and Enoch’s stories, and it’s like seeing a report on the news about someone who has won the lottery. Great for them!
Enoch couldn’t pass it on to anyone else. Noah and his family were saved for judgment, but can’t pass it down. Their incredible experience of God’s grace was wonderful but they were pointing forward to God acting in a decisive and final way—not just benefit one person or one family, but the way of salvation for all who will come to him by faith.
Enoch and Noah pointed to Jesus. Enoch was one who walked with God and did not taste death. A miracle. But Jesus? He’s one who did not deserve to experience death who faced it anyway. And in his facing death, as one who had given way to sin, the power of death and sin were gutted. Jesus is the true and better Enoch—the reality to which the shadow of Enoch led: the one full of life, who gives that life and that access to God to us, and reconciles us to God so that death doesn’t have the final word on us either.
Noah was one who walked with God and was protected from God’s just judgment. Jesus is one who underwent judgment against sin though innocent, choosing to take onto himself the guilt of our sin, becoming sin for us, so that God’s perfect judgment could be carried out against our sin without us being swallowed up in the process. And we get to walk forward in freedom from condemnation, because Jesus is the true and better Noah, the one to whom Noah was pointing, the one who truly would bring comfort and rest to God’s people, even in the midst of a world filled with spiritual darkness.
Jesus speaks to us the clearer word about God and us, a word that Noah and Enoch never could speak. That God wills to be with us, to be our God, God-with-us and not God-without-us. And that’s what he is for us: God for us, God with us, God within us. That’s the commitment that he has made and the goal that Jesus has accomplished.
And because of this, we can be people who walk with God in our daily lives. The God who delights in us, who loves us. And his love for us can be the whole thing. The road we’re walking on, the nourishment that’s keeping us going, the goal that we’re heading toward.
And we can be people who, without pride in thinking we’ve earned it, can say “yes, God loves me. Yes God likes me. And he is forming me into being a transformed and changed version of myself that will glorify him and love others even better.” What hope!
Come what may, no matter what, what will be opening in front of us are new arenas of God’s love. And far beyond even our longest lives here lay an eternity of dwelling with the God who delights in us. That’s our destiny. That’s our hope. That’s what belongs to us.
Our lives here, for however long we have them, become witnesses to this glorious truth. And we can walk forward on mission with God to love others sacrificially and love others well without stopping to worry if we are ‘worthy’ or whatever. As Charles Spurgeon said “God uses people who fail—because there aren’t any other kind.”
Live like what God says is true, because it is. Live in his truth, beauty, and goodness. Live like the man Brennan Manning wrote about in his book Abba’s Child: One day an Irish pastor was traveling in the countryside and he saw a man sitting by the side of the road. As the pastor got closer he realizes the man is praying. The pastor waits for him to look up and tells the man “you must be close to God.”
The man smiles, thinks for a moment, and says “Yes. He’s very fond of me.”
This is the heart of it. May we walk forward into our lives with a firm conviction that God is fond of us. That he delights in us. In Christ, it’s true. Cling to that.