The Man Who Walked With God.

Hebrews 11:5a tells us, “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.”  Enoch was a lover of God, a friend of God, one who walked with Him by faith.  Like Elijah, who was whisked away by Chariots of Fire while his servant looked on with eyes wide and mouth agape, he is a type, a figure, a living image of those Lovers of God still alive when Jesus returns.  They, too, will not taste death.  Paul makes this crystal clear in 1 Thes. 4:16-18 and 1 Cor. 15:49-52.

Enoch’s name in Hebrew means- ‘dedicated.’  In opposition to Enoch the son of Cain, we can see this one is ‘dedicated to Elohiym,’ and to Life in harmony with Him.  The OT account of Enoch is written in Genesis 5:21-24, and twice in four vv. Moses uses a phrase which is used of only one other person in all of Scripture to describe a life of constant communion with God, a life of unceasing intimacy with the Almighty— “Enoch walked with God.”  The only other person this Hebrew phrase is used for is Enoch’s great-grandson, Noah {Gen. 6:9b}.

There’s a vast Hebrew mythology surrounding the figure of Enoch.  Jews who’d been thoroughly Hellenized believed he was Atlas, the primordial Titan who holds the stars and skies upon his back and keeps them separate from the Earth.  The Essenes glorified Enoch as the most righteous Saint to ever live and one who never had to die.  This caused a reaction among many Rabbis, who began to interpret the phrase “God took him away” as ‘God killed him in a righteous state before he could sin again.‘  They thought he vacillated back and forth between righteousness and unrighteousness.  Listen to me closely.  The very idea of ‘dying in a righteous or unrighteous state’ based on one’s action in the moment completely ignores the fulness of divine forgiveness at the Cross and the great power of God to keep our souls secure in His hands... come what may {Rom. 8:31-39}.  The writer of Hebrews simply skips over all the fanciful elaborations on Enoch’s life and sticks to the Scriptural account: He walked with God by faith; this pleased the heart of His Father; His Creator called Him Home.

The second half of Hebrews 11:5 says, “For before he was taken [‘before’ he could experience the pains of death in a fallen world], he was commended.”  For what?  His gardening skills like his forefather Adam, his knowledge of boat-building which he passed on to Noah, his skill in battle with the descendants of Cain?  No.  His faith in the Lord His God.  “God, once and for all Eternity, bore witness to the faith of Enoch, He testified to it in Time, He spoke well of Him with approval” {RR Exp}.

“Enoch was commended for all Time and Eternity as one who pleased God,” one in whom God ‘took delight,’ one with whom God was ‘well-satisfied.’  The author will use this word in the very next v. when he speaks of the impossibility of pleasing God without the willingness to trust Him, to lay everything we have and everything we are in faith at His feet.  And to renounce our reliance on anything else.  He’ll use it one more time before he’s done, in 13:16, where he says, “Do not forget to do good and to share with others, for with such sacrifices God is pleased,” constantly, consistently.  “God is ever delighted by sacrifices like this, God is always satisfied by the fruit of a generous heart” {RR Exp}.  I love this.  Doesn’t get much clearer, does it?

HJC	Ric Webb  |  Shepherd Heart’s Journey Community 9621 Tall Timber Blvd. |  Little Rock, AR 72204 t +1.501.455.0296
hjcommunity.org
Heart’s Journey – Live Generously and Love Graciously

Heaven Is Our Home.

Every people-group to ever exist has its images of the Afterlife.  Though they differ from culture to culture and epochs in Time, the single unifying testimony of the human heart is a belief in Life after death.  There is abundant evidence in anthropology to support cultures and peoples possessing a God-given sense of the Eternal {Eccl. 3:11b}, an innate instinct that this world is not all there is.

What did the earliest Followers of Jesus believe about a Life beyond the walls of this present world?  The Christianous, the ‘Followers of Christ’ in 1^st and 2^nd century Rome, buried the bodies of their martyred brethren in the catacombs beneath the city.  There lie many tombs with inscriptions like the following.

In Christ, Alexander is not dead, but lives.

One who lives with God.

He was taken up into his eternal Home.

One historian said, “Pictures on the catacomb walls portray Heaven with beautiful landscapes, children playing, and people feasting at banquets.”  As odd as this may sound to Western ears in a post-Christian world, these beliefs are deeply rooted in the Scriptures.  Paul, e.g., in Philippians 1:21 say’s, “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain [Literally, ‘living-Christ, dying-profit’].  …I am torn between the two,” for “I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far,” v. 23.  To die in Jesus, as the early Church believed, is to cash in both the principal of faith and the interest of action, and have in your hands an abundance of God, more than we could ever imagine in Time.

He also wrote in 2 Corinthians 5, which is a perfect parallel to the glory of Resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15 {both Jesus’ and ours}, “We know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed [He compares the body we currently have to an ‘earthly tent’ …and if it ‘is destroyed:’], we have a building from God, an Eternal House in the Heavens [the place where God dwells and from which He rules], not built by human hands.  Meanwhile [even in this moment] we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling [The body that will be is a ‘building from God,’ an ‘Eternal House,’ a ‘heavenly dwelling’— ‘heavenly’ signifying where it comes from, Who designed it, and Who empowers it.]… so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by Life,” vv. 1-2, and 4c.  Which is another way of saying {and the reverse of} what he said in 1 Corinthians 15:54, that “when this perishable body we now inhabit has been clothed with the imperishable [notice not naked but ‘clothed’], and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’”

For “as long as we are at home in the body,” bound to the present Earth in a body stained by sin, “we are away from the Lord.”  We “prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord” {vv. 6b and 8b}.  In what?  Our “Eternal House” ...crafted and constructed by the hands of the Master.  Even the very body we’ll be given, the Armor that equips us for Eternity, will be custom fit by the Master Carpenter.  Is that cool or what?  Notice he doesn’t say, “We prefer to be without a body;” he says, “we prefer to be away from our weaknesses, away from our weariness, away from the death, decay and corruption of our present bodies, and with Jesus until that Time when He clothes us with power in a body just like His!”  Aaaaaaamen.

HJC	Ric Webb  |  Shepherd Heart’s Journey Community 9621 Tall Timber Blvd. |  Little Rock, AR 72204 t +1.501.455.0296
hjcommunity.org
Heart’s Journey – Live Generously and Love Graciously

Something Worth Celebrating.

Nothing focuses the heart and mind on things like death, mortality, and the weakness of this world of flesh like losing a loved one, like the passing of a Family member or friend.  Yet, what we imagine in our sorrow and suffering to be the End of this present phase of life is merely the Beginning of a real Life beyond the walls of this world, the first chapters of an Eternal Adventure.  We exist in God, with God, and for God, and when our Time in Time is done, He calls us Home— upward and onward— back to the bosom from which we were birthed, back to Himself.  And there we may delight in Him, and He in us, without the profound limitations of Time, Space, sin, selfishness, ego or arrogance.  It’s there we become what we were always meant to be— true Sons and true Daughters of a glorious and gracious God!

The earliest Followers of Jesus most certainly grieved the loss of those they loved.  For they were as human as human can be ...flawed, faltering, flailing at Jesus like Peter sinking beneath stormy waves.  But they did something we rarely do in a post-modern, post-Christian culture: they celebrated the reality of Resurrection on the Day of a Believer’s Death.  We have no record of the earliest Church celebrating the Day of someone’s birth, but what we do have is a record of them celebrating triumphantly the anniversary of someone’s Death.  The eyes of faith are able to look beyond their present pain, beyond the heart-wrenching, gut-punching loss, and with an eternal perspective rejoice in the deliverance of their loved one.  With deep trust in the goodness of the Father’s heart, they imagine all the joy, all the beauty, all the intimacy and adventure this person is experiencing— right now, this very moment— in the Presence of Jesus.  They can see through the eyes of faith a Universe of delights, undreamed of on Earth, waiting to unfold for Jesus’ Beloved.  And they celebrate.

The 1^st century Church, Jesus’ earliest Followers in the Faith— battered, beaten, persecuted and opposed— stood on the solid ground of Scripture and declared no matter what, no matter when, and no matter how, you cannot kill those alive “in Christ Jesus”!  You can only help me reach my Destiny.  You cannot change it, alter it, or annul it, you can only be an instrument in Abba’s hand to push me on toward the final step.  That’s all.  So, in the laughing words of Lazarus, “Give it your best shot.  What are you going to do... kill me?  Haaaaa haaaa haaaaa.  I’ve been dead ...and now I’m not.  You going to threaten me with Death?  I know the Author of Life.  He raised me from the grave, and He loves me as His Own!”  See, this is an Eternal Perspective, this is what it means to live with a heart full of passionate trust in the innate goodness of God.

In AD 125, a Greek named Aristides wrote to a friend about ‘the Way,’ and why this ‘new religion’ as he called it was so successful: “If any righteous man among the Christians passes from this world, they rejoice and offer thanks to God, and they escort his body with songs and thanksgiving as if he were setting out from one place to another nearby.”  The 3^rd century the Church father Cyprian said, “Let us greet the Day which assigns each of us to his own home, which snatches us from this place and sets us free from the snares of the world, and restores us to Paradise and the Kingdom.  Anyone who has been in foreign lands longs to return to his own native land….  We regard Paradise as our native land.”  Amen and hoooaahhh!  How beautiful would it be if we took up the practice of the early Church and began, not to mourn, but to reflect on and rejoice in the promotion of our Brothers and Sisters on the Day of their physical death?  “He will wipe every tear from their eyes.  There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things [a fallen world with all its sinful selves] has passed away.  He who was seated on the Throne [Jesus Christ the King] said, ‘See, I am making all things new!’  Then He said, ‘Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true’” {Rev. 21:4-5}.  Now that’s something worth celebrating.

HJC	Ric Webb  |  Shepherd Heart’s Journey Community 9621 Tall Timber Blvd. |  Little Rock, AR 72204 t +1.501.455.0296
hjcommunity.org
Heart’s Journey – Live Generously and Love Graciously

Man’s Murderous Mentality.

From mankind’s first murderer comes a very interesting character by the name of Lamech.  In Cain’s line he is the seventh firstborn son from Adam, the Man molded from the Earth by the hands of His Creator.  His Story is told in Genesis 4.  “Lamech said to his wives” in v. 23, “‘Adah and Zillah, listen to me; wives of Lamech, hear my words.  I have killed a man [same verb as v. 8: harag- ‘destroy, slay, murder’] for wounding me, a young man for injuring me.  If Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech seventy-seven times!’” {v. 24}.  Do you see the intensification of violence here?

Is there any doubt the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve will kill to get what they want?  We will murder for money: an insurance settlement, a partner’s retirement, or the spare change in our pockets.  We will murder one another for the right to sling rock on a certain corner, or to traffic in powder, Mexican meth, and Afghani heroin by the ton.  We go to war over insults— political and personal.  We go to war over land; we go to war over oil; we go to war over trade routes, over shipping lanes at sea, over mineral deposits and the natural resources of nations.  We have warred over material wealth, over the right to tell other men and women how to run their lives, their cultures, their communities and their families, how they can worship and how they can’t, what they can and cannot do with their own business, in their own homes, on their own lands.

We will impose the most heinous of human rights sanctions resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands on nations we once armed to fight our enemies because someone in an office of the Pentagon, the White House, or the halls of Congress decided these are now our enemies.  We will kill anyone, anywhere who tries to save their nation from the systemic evil of the international banking cartel, or rein in the incestuous relationship between Wall St. and Washington.  Any president who gets serious about exposing the evil and corruption of the Federal Reserve can look forward to a short ride through Dallas in a white convertible.

Imagine the heart of Love {not to mention holiness} beating in the breast of the Creator, and the Paradise which He envisioned and brought into being for His Image-bearers.  Now look at the world ravaged by the sin of man and the lies of Satan, the full effect Cain’s sin, anger and arrogance on his descendants.  There is no level of murder left, for any reason, which the Sons of Adam have not condescended to commit.  Those made in the “image” of God murdering those made in the image of God— and on and on it goes, down the corridors of Time, like some raging river of envious green bile.  What do you think Abba thinks about this: our willingness to so eagerly take another human life when it benefits us in some way, great or small?  You think He looks around and says, “Mm-hhmm, yessss, now this is what I had in mind!”

Like so many peoples to follow Cain’s offspring, in spite of their prosperity evil is advancing ominously.  Moses paints a picture of an affluent society, technologically advanced, living in defiance of the True and Living God, seeking only what the world has to offer.  Sound familiar?  It should, to all of us.  It is this world in which Israel will emerge, drawn from the fires of slavery by the hand of the Master, and into this world she will be sent— like the Body of the Risen Jesus is sent as “a kingdom and priests” {Rev. 1:6a} to proclaim the righteousness of God and the “praises of Him who called” us “out of darkness into His wonderful Light” {1 Pet. 2:9e}.  And “Light”— Light from the Lord, Light from the Heavens above, Light from the Kingdom of Light— is what we could use in our world right now.  Desperately.

HJC	Ric Webb  |  Shepherd Heart’s Journey Community 9621 Tall Timber Blvd. |  Little Rock, AR 72204 t +1.501.455.0296
hjcommunity.org
Heart’s Journey – Live Generously and Love Graciously