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[0:00] We're going to read together from God's word from Genesis chapter 5. If you've got a Bible, it'd be great to read along with us. If you've not got a Bible and you'd like one, there are some on the table at the back.

[0:13] The words will also be on the screen, and they'll be in the bulletin if you've got a bulletin when you came in the door. This is Genesis chapter 5. This is the book of the generations of Adam.

[0:24] When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. Male and female, he created them, and he blessed them and named them man when they were created.

[0:35] When Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth. The days of Adam after he fathered Seth were 800 years, and he had other sons and daughters.

[0:48] Thus, all the days that Adam lived were 930 years, and he died. When Seth had lived 105 years, he fathered Enosh. Seth lived, after he fathered Enosh, 807 years, and had other sons and daughters.

[1:03] Thus, all the days of Seth were 912 years, and he died. When Enosh had lived 90 years, he fathered Kenan. Enosh lived, after he fathered Kenan, 815 years, and he had other sons and daughters.

[1:17] Thus, all the days of Enosh were 905 years, and he died. When Kenan had lived 70 years, he fathered Mahalel. Kenan lived, after he fathered Mahalel, 840 years, and had other sons and daughters.

[1:32] Thus, all the days of Kenan were 910 years, and he died. When Mahalel had lived 65 years, he fathered Jared. Mahalel lived, after he fathered Jared, 830 years, and he had other sons and daughters.

[1:46] Thus, all the days of Mahalel were 895 years, and he died. When Jared had lived 162 years, he fathered Enoch. Jared lived, after he fathered Enoch, 800 years, and had other sons and daughters.

[2:01] Thus, all the days of Jared were 962 years, and he died. And when Enoch had lived 65 years, he fathered Methuselah. Enoch walked with God, after he fathered Methuselah, 300 years, and had other sons and daughters.

[2:17] Thus, all the days of Enoch were 365 years. Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him. When Methuselah had lived 187 years, he fathered Lamech.

[2:30] Methuselah lived, after he fathered Lamech, 782 years, and had other sons and daughters. Thus, all the days of Methuselah were 969 years, and he died. And when Lamech had lived 182 years, he fathered a son and called his name Noah, saying, Out of the ground that the Lord has cursed, this one shall bring us relief, from our work, and from the painful toil of our hands.

[2:53] Lamech lived, after he fathered Noah, 595 years, and had other sons and daughters. Thus, all the days of Lamech were 777 years, and he died.

[3:03] After Noah was 500 years old, Noah fathered Shem, Ham, and Japheth. This is the word of the Lord. Let's pray together.

[3:14] Lord, we now come and ask for your help. I ask, Lord, that you would meet with us, every single one of us, every person in this room now, that you would help us to hear your word and receive it exactly where we are.

[3:25] We know that we cannot understand without the help of the Spirit, and we certainly can't know you, which is eternal life, without meeting with the Spirit. So we ask, O Spirit of God, would you come and speak now through your holy word, and we pray that in Christ's name. Amen.

[3:42] We are working our way through Genesis 4 to 11 on Sunday mornings, and some sermons basically preach themselves for preachers, like John 3.16, and then there are genealogies, and they don't preach themselves, not at all.

[3:57] And we know that as we read through that genealogy, patience is required. This is a temptation of a text where you're drawn to sort of pass by it when you're in morning readings.

[4:11] You know, in the modern world, we click on these websites, and they ask you, do you want to accept the cookies? And you don't read any of it. You accept the cookies so that you can move on with your life. And there is a temptation to read the Bible, God's word, and come to the genealogies and do something like that.

[4:27] And one of the reasons for that is because there are lots of hard names, and there's numbers, people living to very long ages here, and it takes real investigation and a very close look and really an encounter with the precision of the text to try to ask, what is God doing with this passage in Genesis and in the whole of the Bible?

[4:49] And I want to show you today that underneath every one of these names that we've just read, and we won't be able to look at all of them by any stretch, but there is an argument, there's a story that genealogies in the Bible are telling stories.

[5:01] They're making arguments, and they're doing something far more than we think about a genealogy normally. So if you've ever gotten on Ancestry.com or something like that, or if your family has made a genealogy binder like my wife's family has, you know, you want your kids to see it.

[5:19] You want to pass it down. You want to say, this is where you've come from. Genealogies do that, yes, in the Bible, but they do something far more than that. So they're more like the pillars of a skyscraper.

[5:29] I've seen a documentary before about how to put a skyscraper in the ground. You've got to drill over 120 meters down with pillars that go all the way to the sky.

[5:41] And in the same way, actually, genealogies function like that in the Bible. They are the narrative structure of the Bible, actually. And they sort of hold up, they hold up actually the whole logic of the history of redemption.

[5:53] And so if you were to just take them out of the Bible, you wouldn't have the story of the Bible like God has given it to us. And so they're absolutely fundamental. One scholar, Amanda Rossini, she writes this, genealogies aren't just historical records to give linear amounts of time.

[6:09] They are that, but they're also theological pronouncements. So she says every genealogy in the Bible is pronouncing something theologically. It's there to tell a story.

[6:20] And so for the ancient Near Eastern person, it was easier to see than for us. We come to it as modern people, and we have a big gap of distance culturally and in terms of years and time.

[6:34] And so they come to a text like this, and an ancient person can see things that we don't easily connect with. And so you might come to a passage like this today and say, is it really true that people lived this long?

[6:47] And the answer of the Bible is yes. In the post-Edenic life, before life had reduced in the time of years, and at the same time, an ancient person did not just look at ages and see quantity.

[7:01] So if you were to ask me, how old are you? I would tell you I'm 39. I've got one year left to 40, and largely speaking, though 40 is one of those big markers in the modern human life we talk about, largely speaking, 39 is, you go get my birth certificate, check it, you say, this is the amount of years this person has lived, and this was his birthday.

[7:24] That is not how an ancient person thought. So an ancient person thought about numbers very differently. So even in this passage, there's little hints and shadows where we read about Enoch, the man who walked with God, and how long did he live?

[7:38] 365 years. And did he? Yes. And simultaneously, that is, of course, the number of normal days for a solar year. So it's telling us something about Enoch's life, 365.

[7:50] You can jump all the way to the end, and it says things like, Lamech lived how long? 777 years. And if you're a Bible reader, you know that 7 and 7 and 7 and lots of 7s is lots of numbers of perfection.

[8:03] And so these numbers are actually coming to you also at the same time to tell a story. And we've got to, as modern people, we've got to come with it with eyes to see. And so we've been saying in this series, Genesis 4 to 11 is about, ultimately about sin.

[8:18] Genesis 3 is the fall. Genesis 4 to 11 is a series of decline stories. Things getting worse and worse and worse through the lineage of Cain we saw the last two weeks. And we come today and say that this is also a story about decline and fall and sin.

[8:34] But whereas the past two Sundays have been about really what sin is, not by way of theological proposition, but by way of story. Today we see something about the consequences of sin.

[8:45] So let me give you three lessons, three things that come up out of this genealogy that I think Moses and the Lord is pointing us to. Number one, the wages of sin.

[8:57] Secondly, the beginning of the church. And then finally, what it means to walk with God. So first is the wages of sin. Now it is striking how this genealogy begins.

[9:10] This is the book of the generations of Adam. So that word book is the word scroll in Hebrew. This is the scroll of the record of Adam. And that means that the first thing we have is Moses drawing on what we call prehistory, time before Abraham.

[9:29] Time that's normally thought of as before all recorded history. And yet he says, I am drawing from a scroll that has listed the generations of Adam. And so this text we have here, this list of names, is not an invention.

[9:42] It's a record. It's something that had been passed down through history. And as soon as you see that, the very next thing he does is say, I'm going to take the record of the generations of Adam and attach a quote to it.

[9:55] So if you look at the second sentence, what is that quote? Quote, when God created man, he made him in the likeness of God, male and female, he created them. And he blessed them and he called them man or Adam in Hebrew, which just means humanity.

[10:08] That's a quote, of course, from Genesis 1. And so he takes this record of the genealogy of Adam that's been passed down to him. And then he attaches to it a quote from Genesis 1. And so what he's trying to do is draw us back to Genesis 1 and say, whatever's about to happen in this genealogy, you've got to think of it through the lens of Genesis 1.

[10:25] And if you go back to Genesis 1, you might remember that there was a chorus line in Genesis 1. God would make something and then he would look at it and he would say, it was good.

[10:38] He saw it was good. And seven different times until the final statement, the seventh, it was very good. And then just after that in Genesis 2, the beginning of Genesis 2, we have something that shows up in Genesis 5, but for the first time.

[10:53] And it's this little phrase, these are the generations of. So this, remember, you've got to bear with a genealogy for a minute. These are the generations of has showed up twice so far in Scripture.

[11:06] The first genealogy in Genesis 2, and now this is the second genealogy. And so the writer Moses is begging you, compare them. Go back and remember, I'm talking about Genesis 1 and 2, and I've already given you a genealogy.

[11:18] So I want you to compare them. And when you compare them, the first genealogy said, these are the generations of the heavens and the earth, the whole cosmic story, all that God made.

[11:29] And it ends that genealogy by saying one thing, do not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, lest you die. And so before now, there has been no death in the world.

[11:43] And we saw the first murder take place in the previous chapter, but there is not a single record yet of anybody dying naturally. The first genealogy said, Adam, Eve, seek me, obey me, follow me, and live.

[11:59] But now in the second genealogy, what is it doing? And if you just scan your eyes across the text, you'll see it. Eight different times. There's a little line.

[12:10] It's like a chorus. It's like a song. In Genesis 1, it was, and it was good, and it was good, and it was good. In Genesis 5, verse 8, and he died.

[12:21] Verse 11, and he died. Verse 14, and he died. Verse 17, and he died. Eight times of the ten generations, the person died. And that means that the first thing that I think the writer wants you to see in this genealogy is that death has entered the world, and it is an intruder.

[12:40] It was not part of the first genealogy. Male and female, man and woman, boy and girl, the image of God, re-quoting Genesis 1, was never meant to die. We were not made to die.

[12:51] And yet now you get to chapter 5, and death has entered the scene. And we've seen the past couple of weeks that sin is a predator. Sin is a force.

[13:03] Sin begins as the serpent outside of Adam and Eve. But then in Genesis 4, the serpent is within them, the beast. And the serpent is coiled up on your doorstep seeking to bite you.

[13:15] It's trying to hide itself from you. It's a power. It's a force. If you allow it to grow and grow, it can take over your life. It's things we do. It's things we don't do. It's a state of being.

[13:26] And now, this week, we see not only what sin is, but also the consequences of sin. And here we learn the wages of sin is death. And so eight times, one more than Genesis 1.

[13:40] It was good. It was good. It was good. And he died. And he died. And he died. And he died. And he's really bringing the reality of this intruder to the forefront of our thoughts here in this first great genealogy after the fall.

[13:53] Now, we cope with this reality. We fight, fight, don't we, against the dying of the light. We tell stories to try to cope with the reality of death and to minimize it and simplify it and make it easier to swallow.

[14:10] But the text really is trying to bring that eightfold chorus line into our faces and say, death is not supposed to be here. Let me give you a couple of the stories I think we're still telling in Edinburgh in 2026 about death to try to cope.

[14:24] The first is the stoic narrative about death. And the stoic narrative about death says, death is natural. You need to make your peace with it. It's just the way things have always been.

[14:35] It's biology. And so there is a revival of stoicism in our current culture. And Marcus Aurelius wrote the great textbook of stoicism, one of the Roman emperors, way back in the fourth century.

[14:47] And listen to what he says about it in the second century, pardon me, about what he says about it famously. Do not fear death, but welcome it, since it too comes from nature. And in the stoic revival, the regular slogan, it's on all the podcasts, memento mori, remember you're going to die.

[15:06] And that's got to inform how you live now and death is natural. And really death has become a wellness slogan. Because it's so natural, it's got to inform the way you live, your life of wellness now.

[15:17] The second story that we tell about death today is the progress story, that death can actually be defeated by our efforts. And many of you will have come across Brian Johnson, the Netflix documentary that was published last year, Don't Die.

[15:32] This is a quote from Brian Johnson. Brian is trying to live forever. And this is what he said. Conquering death will be humanity's greatest achievement. And Brian, of course, wants to be the first one.

[15:43] And so death has become, for the contemporary technological society, an engineering problem. And so Brian is taking infusions, transfusions of blood from his teenage son to try to live forever.

[15:56] And I don't, you'll have maybe seen the news recently, but after millions and millions of pounds and dollars spent enough, some, they say he spent so much, he spent the GDP of some small countries in the world on trying to survive, that Brian has just been diagnosed with autoimmune gastritis.

[16:12] It's not, he can't be healed from it. And Brian's going to die. And the third story that we tell is the Greco-Roman humanist story that carries on today.

[16:25] And it's this, look, yes, death is going to happen, death is natural, but you live on in others. And remember Achilles in the Iliad, you know, he said, well, I got to go to Troy and I got to make a name for myself.

[16:36] And he said, I would rather die in glory than live as a servant. And then you get to the Odyssey. I've been rereading the Odyssey since the movie came out.

[16:47] And you get to book 11 of the Odyssey and Odysseus comes to Achilles in the underworld. And what does Achilles say? He says, I was wrong. I would give anything to have one more day alive.

[17:01] I would trade every glory I ever pursued. And look, this text is so striking because I just read this and I think I would love to know more about Adam and Eve's story outside the Garden of Eden.

[17:14] I would love to read the biography of Adam and Eve after the fall. The only people who had been in paradise and who had exited paradise. I would love to know more about Enoch. But all we have here in almost every single life is they lived, this is how long, and they died.

[17:28] And the truth is that three generations from now, we're not going to be remembered for our glories. And this passage is really bringing that out to us.

[17:42] And instead, there's only one question that it's throwing in our faces, and it's, is there an answer that can actually satisfy the great problem? Is there a story that could be told that would actually deliver it?

[17:56] Now, C.S. Lewis, he puts it like this. He talks about this problem of death. Philosophically, existentially, I love what he says in On Miracles. He comes to this conclusion point where he says, we know that we were not made for death.

[18:11] We know we were not made for death. But then, when his wife died, Joy, he wrote A Grief Observed, his next book about death. And he talks about it in a different register.

[18:24] This is what he says. He says, the death of a beloved is an amputation. It's hard to have patience with people when they say to me, there's no such thing as death in the way you mean it.

[18:38] Death doesn't really matter. It's just biological. And he said, but there is death, and it does matter. The death of a beloved is an amputation, he says. This genealogy is the narrative form of what Paul says in Romans 5.

[18:57] Sin came into the world through one man. Death came through sin. And death spread to all people. And the kingdom of death reigned.

[19:07] And so, death is an intruder. It's not natural. But secondly, what could be done about it? And we have here something rather unexpected, I think, an unexpected theology in this genealogy.

[19:22] And it's the beginning of the church, actually. So, here we've got, remember, a genealogy. And it refers to Genesis 2, the first genealogy.

[19:33] These are the generations of. But if you were to open a commentary on Genesis, you'll find out that the entirety of Genesis is structured as ten genealogies. So, this language happens ten times.

[19:45] These are the generations of. These are the generations of. Ten different structures. And almost every one of them is a contrast genealogy. So, if you were with us last week, if you weren't, it's okay.

[19:56] You can just, if you have a Bible, you can see this. That if you just scan your eyes above to Genesis 4, you can see that actually there's a genealogy just before this genealogy. And it was the genealogy of Cain.

[20:08] And it led all the way to Lamech, that evil man who killed 70 times 7, who lived a life of vengeance and murder. And then there's one little line in between that sets up the genealogy that we have here.

[20:23] And the line is that in Genesis 4, 26, people began to call upon the name of the Lord. So, that serves as a headline for the genealogy that you just read in Genesis 5.

[20:35] And what is it saying? This is actually the first use of the covenant name of God in the Bible, Lord. So, remember that the word Lord, Yahweh, all capitals in your English Bible, little capitals.

[20:48] It's not going to be given to Moses until Exodus 3. But this is the first use of it by Moses. And anytime you have that name, you've got God saying, my people.

[20:59] I'm their God. They are my people. So, that means that when you take the Genesis 4 genealogy and the Genesis 5 genealogy, you've got the line of Cain and the line of Seth. And the heading is, this is my people, the people who called upon the name of the Lord.

[21:13] What we're reading about is actually the beginning of what you might call the church, the beginning of seeing the people of God arise in the earliest history of the world. This is the very start of what we might think of as the church.

[21:27] And that's because the most important line we've said every single week is Genesis 3.15 that structures really the whole Old Testament. And Genesis 3.15 in the fall story, it said that one day there would be an offspring of the woman, Eve, who would crush the head of the serpent.

[21:47] And so, from there, we've got this long story across the Old Testament between the offspring of the woman and the offspring of the serpent. What the theologians call the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent.

[22:00] And that means that what we have in this genealogy is Genesis 4 recording the seed of the serpent and Genesis 5 recording the seed of the woman. And it's really asking the question, whose lineage are you in?

[22:13] Are you of the seed of the woman? Are you of the one that was promised? We've got theologians all the way back in the second century, and they're reading Genesis 3.15, and they're saying this is the first moment the gospel was ever preached.

[22:27] The proto-evangel, the first gospel, that one day a singular seed, a son of Eve, would come and crush the head of the serpent. So the question becomes, who is it? Who is this seed? And these genealogies all across Genesis are tracing that story.

[22:41] And so in Genesis 5, what you've got is the beginning of this family lineage, but it's also the lineage of what would later become the church. It's the people of God, the people who began to call upon the name of the Lord.

[22:53] And I just want to show this to you very briefly in a couple ways. Just like the author, Moses, is asking us, compare Genesis 5 to Genesis 2, then we have this question, would you please compare Genesis 4 and Genesis 5?

[23:11] And when you do that, just listen. Boy, it's so striking in Hebrew. The names often rhyme. And so it sounds like this, Enoch and Enoch. Those don't rhyme.

[23:22] They're the same. Erod and Jerrod. Mahujael and Mahalalel. Methushael and Methuselah. Lamech and Lamech. And it goes on and on.

[23:33] It's asking you to see them side by side. If you followed both of the lineages to the seventh person, the most important, the seventh of Cain is Lamech, the man of vengeance.

[23:43] But the seventh of Adam is Enoch, the man who walked with God. You see, he's talking about two different ways to live. Two different allegiances.

[23:55] The allegiance to the seat of the serpent. Sin, Satan, the world, the flesh, the devil. But then all of a sudden inserted into this death story, there is this beginning of the household of God.

[24:07] The seat of the woman that comes in in Genesis chapter 5. And Meredith Klein argues that this is exactly the structure of Genesis, and it's the whole structure of the entire Old Testament. And the question then becomes, well, who is this promised seed?

[24:21] Who is the one who would come and crush the head of the serpent? Last time we learned it was not Abel. The first, the second born son, he was murdered. Then we learn, is it Cain?

[24:33] No, it's not Cain. He's the murderer. He's hardened his heart against God. But then, just before our passage starts, and then at the very beginning, it says, Seth, he is the appointed one.

[24:45] And Eve is saying that. Eve is saying there is someone. She's pulling from Genesis 3.15 and saying there is an offspring. Seth, I'm going to name him appointed one.

[24:57] But is it him? Is he the one? Is it Enoch? He walked with the Lord. Is it Noah, whose name is Rest? He would bring rest from all the toil, the curse of the ground, a reversal of Genesis 3 curse?

[25:11] And in one way, the answer to this passage is yes. Because seed, the family, the offspring, doesn't just mean one person. It means a whole body, everybody who would call upon the name of the Lord.

[25:25] This is them. It's the beginning of the church. And yet, at the same time, the answer is no. Because we're still looking for one offspring, one singular seed of the woman.

[25:36] And when you flip over to the New Testament, and you come to Luke chapter 3, the Bible begins in structured genealogies. The Old Testament ends in a genealogy.

[25:48] The New Testament begins in a genealogy. And in Luke chapter 3, you've got a genealogy of Jesus. And listen to the last line of this genealogy from Luke chapter 3. It says this.

[26:00] The son of Noah, the son of Lamech, the son of Methuselah, the son of Enoch, the son of Jared, the son of Mahalalel, the son of Kenan, the son of Enosh, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God.

[26:13] Do you know that you're reading in Genesis 5 the genealogy of Jesus Christ? And it's preaching to you this, that if Genesis 5 says the wages of sin is death, the end of the genealogy, when you trace Genesis 5 all the way to Luke 3, it tells you that the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

[26:41] The genealogy preaches to you the cost of your sin, and it preaches to you the one in whom the hope of reversing the problem of death could be found. And it's in Jesus Christ, the true offspring of the woman.

[26:53] And this is his genealogy, and this is his lineage. And before I move to the final point, I want to say something very important that I'll come back around to in a few weeks when we come to Genesis 10. More genealogies.

[27:06] And it says that in a moment in 2026 where ethno-nationalist racial essentialism is on the rise again, it is important to say, who can be the seed of the woman?

[27:24] Who can be of the lineage of Adam and Seth and Eve? Who can be of God's family? And here, note, it is not by blood. It is not by biology.

[27:36] It is not by nationality. Boy, the genealogy of Cain and the genealogy of Seth, they're cousins. They're all cousins. They're all related. No, and you come to the New Testament and you read in the book of John 1, 12 to 13, how quickly the author of the gospel addresses this problem.

[27:55] And what does he say? The children of God, the sons and daughters of Abraham, are born not by blood, not by the will of the flesh, but only born of God.

[28:07] And in the same way that last week we said, Cain, you can come back by repentance, this week we see that being a son and a daughter of the family lineage of God, the first church all the way to today, is not by blood.

[28:19] So what is it? Lastly, we learn there's something here that's so striking about walking with God. How do you face the problem of death?

[28:29] How do you become part of the lineage of this family that would grow into the nations that follow Jesus Christ? How do you become a part of that? And here we've got the seventh man, Enoch, and we're given the same order as the rest.

[28:48] He lived this long. He fathered a son. After he fathered a son, this is how long he lived. But then, of course, the text changes. It's different than the rest of the text. And it says that Enoch walked with God and he was not, for God took him.

[29:04] So this genealogy has been trying to get you to see that chorus line, and he died, and he died, and he died, except once. For he was not. God took him.

[29:14] He walked with the Lord. And, of course, the question is, what does that mean? The Hebrew text here actually says he walked around with God. He walked about with God. So it's got this circular idea to it.

[29:26] And we'll see this next week. If you were to flip the page, you'll see it says the same thing about Noah, that Noah walked about with God or walked around with God. And remember that God walked with Adam in the garden.

[29:37] And so there's this walking concept. It's striking that it doesn't say he feared the Lord and therefore he was taken. That's very good and right. It doesn't say he obeyed. It says he walked with him.

[29:48] And it's this companionable word. It's friendship terminology. It's that he desired the presence of God. He wanted to be with God. And so God brought him to him.

[30:00] And what does it mean that he took him? It's striking. This Hebrew word to take has already shown up two times in Genesis 1 to 4, 1 to 3 really.

[30:11] And both times it was about Adam. And one is Genesis 2.15. It says that God took Adam and put him in the Garden of Eden. And I think that means that when Enoch was taken, he was taken in to God's Edenic heavenly presence.

[30:31] He was translated, as the New Testament puts us. He was brought all the way in to the Edenic presence of God. Is there a way back through the curtain? Is there a way to reverse sin and get past the problem of death?

[30:42] And here we have this one man who was taken back all the way in to God's presence. And he never died. It's telling us that he physically never walked through death. And that means we're being shown here in this genealogy, just in a small way, that there is a way to have victory over death.

[30:58] And the answer to that is walking with God. And I just want to finish with you by asking, what does that mean for you today to walk with God? What does that look like?

[31:09] And it's all over the Bible. You could trace this word walking with God or to walk hundreds of times throughout Scripture. And it becomes a real metaphor of what it is to call upon the name of the Lord, to be with God.

[31:22] And it just simply means this. It means living and abiding in God's presence in your normal life. So the theologians of old talk about living life quorum Deo, before the face of God at all times.

[31:35] And you know what that means? That means that God really is present with you. And to walk with him and to be in his presence is only based upon the condition that he is present unto you. And so the presence of God is not a mood.

[31:51] It's not an emotion. The presence of God in your life is a fact. And walking with God really just means becoming more and more aware of it over time and experiencing God's presence more and more.

[32:06] We come to church. Let's say that you give two hours a week to gather to worship, give or take, depending on how long the preacher goes, these sorts of things. Right. And that means that we've got 166 other hours that we live.

[32:20] And what we're being told here is that in the New Testament, that when you come and gather with God's people, you do so to meet with God in a corporate way that is actually, the Bible teaches, unique.

[32:33] Unique. And this is not the most perfect language, but in some sense, gathering with God's people is supercharged. It's like meeting with God in a supercharged way.

[32:44] He's given you the word, sacraments, and prayer gathered with God's people. And then he says, and then from out of that strength, go and walk with God in the 166 other hours that you have.

[32:55] And so let me give you two ways you could do that. Number one, with your body, who you are, with your person. When you come to the New Testament, the Bible works this logic out by saying in 1 Corinthians 6, 19 to 20, your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit.

[33:12] Is God present with you, Christian friends? Yes, you are the living temple of the Holy Spirit. And so that's got to drive us to say something like this. I can't live on the ethic that says, is anybody going to find out?

[33:28] I've got to live on the ethic that says, I am walking with God in his divine presence at every single moment of my life. Let me give you one more way. You might be walking through a wilderness season right now and thinking, I've never felt like God was further away from me than this moment.

[33:43] And I don't know what it could possibly mean to walk with God. And all throughout the Old Testament, in the wilderness, God says things like this. Moses, Exodus 17, is the Lord not among us?

[33:56] They were thirsty. They lacked water. They mistook that lack for not being in God's presence. You might be walking through the wilderness years right now and God is with you.

[34:08] And you're being asked here to walk with God and to be more and more aware of his presence. Now, the last word. I want to ask you this morning, have you walked with God?

[34:24] Have you spent your 166 hours walking with God? Have you glorified God and enjoyed him forever in the way you're living your life? Have you treated your body like a temple, the temple of the Holy Spirit?

[34:38] Have you approached hard things in your life, maintaining a sense of God's presence with you that he's trying to grow you through that? I don't know about you, but I know for me, I can look at this passage and say, whatever it was that Enoch was like, I think I probably am not.

[34:53] Whatever Enoch was doing to walk with God so closely to be translated into the heavenly domain, I don't think that's what my life is like. And you could say today, look, I want to walk with God.

[35:08] I don't know that I have. And let me tell you, Jesus Christ did. He did. Just think about it. Enoch walked with God.

[35:21] He was spared death. Jesus Christ walked with God perfectly. Far better than Enoch ever could have. And yet, the only man who never had unbroken communion with God in all of his life, was he spared death?

[35:38] He entered all the way into death on Enoch's behalf. And on your behalf, think about Enoch. Enoch bypassed death.

[35:48] Jesus Christ took it. The one who deserved to enter into the heavenly domain. And you can think, Brian Johnson's victory is blood transfusions.

[35:59] Jesus Christ's victory. What does Paul say? He says, you can say today, death, where is your victory? Where is your sting? Because even though you've not walked with God perfectly, Jesus did for you.

[36:12] And that means that when you turn, and what is this genealogy saying? It's saying when you turn and you look at him and you put your faith in him, you can go out from today knowing that you are safe. You are okay. He is going to translate you.

[36:22] He's going to take you. Passing through death in and beyond the shadow, beyond the veil of tears, all the way into the garden. And that means that you can go out of this place as we sing now and be free to walk with God.

[36:38] Because it's not about earning your place. You can walk with God in the freedom that Christ has already walked the road for you. So let's pray.

[36:48] Father, we ask that you would teach us to walk with you. And we ask, oh Lord, that you would help us find comfort in the face of the reality of death.

[37:00] That wicked, unnatural intruder. Father, we ask that you would help us find comfort in the face of the world.

[37:32]  As we sing in Christ's name. Amen.