Morning. Wasn’t that a fun arts and faith Sunday last Sunday? Yeah. Just appreciate everyone who participated in that and all the art that came and and uh just everyone’s participation was wonderful and it was good to have a good full house and lots of uh lots of new people here. So, we’re back though in the great opening book of scripture this morning, the book of Genesis. This is a book that explains how conflicted our world is and explains how conflicted our hearts are and um and explains the graciousness and mercy of God toward mankind, toward people like us. Of course, it began with that beautiful creation. Everything God saw was good that he made. Then through sin, life on earth deteriorated rapidly into the kind of mess where the first jealous murder of Abel by his brother Cain occurred. And last time in chapter 4, we saw the how the world was both it was being rapidly populated. It was becoming technologically advanced. We had that great contract between Lamek who was a descendant of Cain. He enjoyed a a distorted polygamous marriage and he seemed to have an unlimited unlimited taste for revenge and violence. And he was contrasted with the line that emerged from another son of Adam and Eve, Seth, where we read that as that line became established, men began to call on the name of the Lord. So only a few chapters in the Bible, there’s a tension, there’s tugofwar between defying God and seeking God. It’s the same tension you and I really feel inside every day. And this morning we’re taking a very quick survey of a very long period of time covered in Genesis chapter 5. Chapter 5 is the genealogy or the family tree that goes from Adam to Noah. A genealogy that if you add up the figures it it adds up to 600 uh 1656 years of human history. Now to put that in perspective following Genesis 5, the remainder of the Bible covers an additional 2500 years or so. meaning that this single chapter encompasses a full 40% of the biblical timeline. Put it another way, if you were a historian telling the linear story of the Bible in a 1-hour class, you’d spend the first 24 minutes in Genesis 5. It’s a very compressed history we’re looking at this morning. And the camera sweeps over centuries, many generations without comment. But it does pan in on two individuals, man named Enoch and a man named Noah. So we want to think about why are those two highlighted the way they are? What was going on in the world that made them stand out so much and and why they stand in such sharp contrast with the world? part of that we’re going to take a deep dive into a very Lord of the Rings world seems like fantasy a sci-fi but it helps explain the gathering gloom on the planet leading up to that horrific judgment of humanity by God through the great flood narrative that begins in Genesis 6. So our message is titled walking with God in the gathering storm. We’re going to start with what it means to walk with God and then we’ll turn our attention to the gathering storm. The big reveal as to why Enoch and Noah are singled out among all the generations is that both men are specifically said to have walked with God. To have walked with God. And you think, what does that mean? Sky Jethan is an American author. He’s an editor, a pastor. He’s written about various ways we can relate to God. And some of them seem like foul balls in baseball. you know, the pitch comes toward you, you swing at it, you get some wood on the ball, but not enough to hit it straight, and it just goes uh it’s a foul ball. And one foul ball that he talks about would be to view our life with God as transactional, meaning that if we live obediently by God’s rules, we can anticipate that he will bless and reward and uh protect us. He tells the story of Steve Johnson. He was a wide receiver with the NFL Buffalo Bills. And in November of 2010, the Bills were up against the Pittsburgh Steelers. They ultimately lost the game when Johnson dropped a pass in the in the end zone during overtime. And after the game via Twitter, he blamed God for the loss. He said, “I praise you 24/7, and this is how you do me. You expect me to learn from this? How I’ll never forget this ever?” Well, that’s about as transactional as a person could ever be with God. You know, I’m I’m obeying God. I’m doing all these things in order to receive something back in the form of blessing or security or reward. Never going to be a healthy way for you and I to relate to God. A second foul ball would be to think of Christianity mostly as a set of principles or life strategies. And if I aligns with them, uh it should give me the control I need to succeed in life. Now, some of that, the principles in the Bible are wonderful. The strategies that God gives us for living a wise life, those are great. But thinking that if I just understand how God’s world works, if I obey his principles, it’ll it’ll bring me success. There’s a foul ball in there somewhere. Because you can live off principles and strategies, and they may be very true and sound and wise, but you have no need for an actual relationship with God. You don’t need a face-to-face relationship when you can simply read his strategies for success and and go from good to great and it just happens. Now, a final foul ball that Jathan talks about at first, again, it sounds like it’s pretty true and commendable. It’s relating God to God in a way that we desperately want our lives to count for him and to accomplish something great for him, to do something significant for his kingdom. And that does that sound wrong? Sky Jathani writes of a Christian college that had a place near the campus that the students would refer to as the H OD which stood for the house of despair. And that’s where students who were struggling with life, struggling with faith that gather to numb their pain with alcohol and drugs and sex and and very honest raw conversations, all of which were either prohibited or pretty difficult within the confines of their Christian college. And Jathni was mentoring some of those students. They opened up to him about their struggles. They said to him, “You don’t understand the vibe on campus. Everyone here has life figured out. They’ve got God figured out. And they’re going to change the world for Christ. At least that’s what they say. And if you begin to question things, if you show signs of doubting any of it, you’re shunned. So, you’ve got to keep the facade that everything’s okay and that you’re not a mess inside. You’re either part of the mainstream student body that plays by the rules, has life figured out, or you’re part of the underground. And there’s no room in between. Members of the underground were mostly defined by their drinking. Consuming alcohol was prohibited on campus. School had a code of ethics that banned it, but it was the way of escape. And one female student told him, “I don’t drink because I like the alcohol. In fact, I usually don’t drink at all. I just hold the beer in my hand.” He said there to her,” then why do you take the risk of being caught and disciplined? And she answered, “Because drinking is how you know who’s safe. When you drink with another student, you know that you can trust them. You’re both you both broken the code of ethics. It’s a sign that you can be honest about other things, too. They’re a safe person. You don’t have to pretend with them.” That house of despair was the gathering spot. And the students, they hadn’t abandoned their faith in Christ. They just felt great pressure about not living a life that was significant or missional. So, Jathni started meeting with groups of those students and uh for open conversation. One one night the group uh agreed to talk about habitual sin and some were wrestling with internet porn and others with drugs. He said to them, “I don’t want to know what your particular sin is. Instead, I want I want to know how you think God views you in the midst of your sin.” and one said, ‘Well, I think God’s really disappointed with me. I come from a great family with godly parents. I’ve been given everything imaginable, including a great education. Now I’m in college, being prepared to impact the world for Christ. I think God’s really disappointed when I sin because to whom much is given, much is expected. God expects better from me. That’s how I feel, too, said another student. How am I going to achieve what God wants from me if I’m still stuck in these same sins again and again? Another one shared, “My parents were students at a Christian college in the early 90s when a revival broke out and a bunch of grads that year became missionaries and pastors. They were on fire for God. Here I am consumed by sin day after day. I don’t feel like I’m supposed to be here. I know I’m not who God wants me to be.” It took an hour or so to go around the table in one form or another. Every student gave the same answer. God’s disappointed with me because of my behavioral struggles. He expects more from me. Uh he can’t use me to accomplish his work in the world unless I clean up my act. Just then asked the group, “How many of you were raised in a Christian home?” And all their all their hands went up. He said, “How many of you grew up in a Bible- centered church?” All the hands stayed up. He said to them, “This is incredible. You’ve all spent 18 or 20 years in the church. You’ve been taught the Bible from the time you could crawl and you attend Christian college. Not one of you gave the right answer. Not one of you said that in the midst of your sin, God still loves you. See, now students, we’re all missing something vital in their relationship or or or in our relationship with God. The one way of relating to God that actually works consistently despite all of our fumbling and failures is to be with him. That’s what it means when Enoch and Noah are singled out as walking with God. Look what’s said about Enoch in our passage for he’s broad place in the genealogy. Um Jared was his father. The camera pans in. When he’d lived 65 years, he became the father of Methuselah. And after he became the father of Methuselah, he walked with God for 300 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether he lived 365 years. Enoch walked with God. then he was no more because God took him away. Now, as we mentioned last week, you know, their their lifespans in that era, they had approach a thousand years um never exceed thousand years. Some would come close. Their lifespans obviously had a different rhythm than ours. I don’t know why it took Enoch until he was 65 to begin his family. I I suppose he was paying off his student loan or his mortgage, Richard, or or saving up for a car or something. But you notice those two those few sentences how it says that Enoch walked with God. And let’s explore that. So what is a a walk with God? It’s a it’s a walk by faith, we’re told, not by sight. I mean, God wasn’t more or or less invisible to Enoch than he is to us. In the Hall of Fame uh of faith chapter listed in the New Testament, Hebrews 11, Enoch’s mentioned, it says he was commended as one who pleased God. And then the very next verse offers the editorial comment that without faith, well, it’s just not possible to please God. Anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him. So the implication is that Enoch’s walk with with God was a walk of faith. One that earnestly sought God himself. He didn’t just seek God’s gifts or his kingdom principles. He sought God himself and God blessed him because of it. Now similarly when we read about Noah in chapter 6 says Noah was a righteous man blameless among the people of his time like Enoch he walked with God. And let’s not be misdirected by the emphasis on Noah as a righteous man or blameless among the people of his time. In God’s eyes human righteousness is always a very relative thing compared to the righteousness of God himself. None of our righteousness amounts to very much. Isaiah 64:6, all of us have become like one who’s unclean. All our righteous, righteous acts are really just filthy rags. Romans 3 doesn’t give us any break from that. It says, “There’s no one righteous, not even one. There’s no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away. They’ve together become worthless. There’s no one who does good, not even one.” So, we read about Enoch and Noah. We’re not meant to understand that they didn’t struggle with sin as we do. their hearts were made of the same stuff ours are. Sure, you and I can sometimes compare ourselves to other people and come out feeling that uh we’re quite favorable, but as soon as we start actually excavating our inner nature, I think we’re all a little like the golf course at Rundle Park because on the surface it looks pretty well manicured. It’s got lush grass. It’s got flowers and underneath is the old Beverly garbage dump. That was a place of fires and smells and sewage lagoons. In the 1970s, they covered up as much as 25 m of solid waste. I 10 m alone of crushed cars and they put a golf course on top of it. Doesn’t eliminate all the problems. The that rolling terrain you see on the golf course. That’s the uneven settling of the garbage below. And the methane gas still needs to be monitored. That’s that comes up. And apparently during some heavy rains in the 1980s, few old car tires came up to the surface. >> Does that remind you a little bit of your own heart? Story of the Bible. It’s not about good guys and bad guys. It’s about bad guys and Jesus. And we know what category we’re in. 2 Corinthians 5 speaks of how Jesus who had no sin in him at all. He was made to be sin for us so that we could become the righteousness of God. Being seen as righteousness in God’s eyes, that’s just an undeserved gift you and I get when we put our faith and trust in Jesus alone for our salvation to remove our sin from us. So Hebrews 11:7 says of Noah, “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 he became heir of the righteousness.” Comes by faith. It’s not by their great works. It’s not that they were uh so much different than you and I. It comes by faith. With Enoch and Noah, they’re probably pretty good guys. We probably would have enjoyed having them uh in our church. They’d probably show up next Saturday to help clean it. But if you scan the Bible, you’re hardpressed to find anyone who’s chosen by God to work with on the basis of their moral superiority. What set Enoch and Noah apart wasn’t their goodness, but the intimacy they maintained and enjoyed with God because they walked with him. As Enoch walked with God, he had no qualms at all about representing God to his world, to other people in his generation. In the New Testament book of Jude verses 14 and 15, we read about how Enoch, he would speak out against blasphemous men who walked, it says in the way of Cain. Says, “Enoch the seventh from Adam prophesied about these men. See, the Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of his holy ones to judge everyone to convict all the ungodly of all the ungodly acts they have done in the ungodly way and of all the harsh words ungodly sinners have spoken against him. Likewise, in second Peter 2:5, we read that Noah was also a preacher of righteousness to his generation. So, both men had a walk with God that naturally translated into representing him well in their world. They spoke unapologetically about the judgment that was coming against sin. Enoch and Noah had walks with God that were by faith, not sight. They represented God to the people around them. Third aspect, I think, of walking with God that involves intimacy and friendship with our creator. Because we only go walking with people we love, our spouse, a friend, kids, grandkids. to like it when one of your kids, one of your grandchildren put their hand in your hand and they just want to go wherever you’re walking. Enoch walked with God because God was his friend. They enjoyed the company of one another. He was happy to go in the same direction of God. So you and I were walking with God. When we wake up in the morning, we say, “Good morning, Father. What are we going to do together today? Where are we going to go? Who are we going to meet? What kind of fun are we going to have together? or what are we going to accomplish together that pleases you? A walk with God, it isn’t measured by how many mornings a week we have a quiet time or how many minutes each day we spend in prayer, how many Sundays a month we go to church, or how often we avoid certain kinds of sin. We don’t just check off a Bible reading box in the morning and pray for five minutes and say, “There, I’ve walked with God today. Now I can get on with my life.” Having the discipline to pick up our Bibles and engage in a regular prayer life, we need that. But the discipline is never an end in itself. The discipline is just the avenue we walk down to go meet our friend. It’s the path we take to get with God. So what happened with Enoch? This ancient Old Testament man who walked with God says he lived 365 years. He walked with God and then he was no more because God took him away. And in case we think that that phrase God took him away, it’s just a euphemism for death, the book of Hebrews 11:5 clarifies things by saying, “By faith, Enoch was taken from this life so that he did not experience death. He just couldn’t be found because God took him away.” Only other one other man in the Bible, Elijah, would be taken as Enoch was without dying. It’s like Enoch was walking with God one day as he’d been doing for a few hundred years. Been another good day with God. Enoch was expecting to hear God say, “Enoch, I’ve enjoyed being with you again today. Why don’t you go get a good night’s sleep? We’ll meet again in the morning.” Instead, God said, “Enoch, I love being with you. I love your friendship. How about you come home to my place tonight? Why don’t you just come home with me instead?” And Enoch went. His friends looked for him. They couldn’t find him. God had taken Enoch to his house. You look closely at the genealogy in Genesis 5, you’ll notice that Enoch lived by far the shortest life of any man listed in that genealogy prior to the flood. He lived a mere 365 years just tells us that the length of a person’s life, that’s of minimal value compared to the quality of the relationship with God. Enoch’s life was pretty short in years compared to all the people around him, but it was long in his relationship with God. So, it’s not about how long we live, but how well we live and who we live for and who we live with. Enoch and Noah walked with God. They didn’t do it at a time when their culture was particularly encouraging their faith or their religion. They lived in times of cultural evil much darker, I think, than our own. In Noah’s day, it was just awful. We read in chapter 6:es 5 and 6, the Lord saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth and his heart was filled with pain. How bad would things get for a parent to regret bringing a child into the world? What what pain would that bring to a parent’s heart? If your child was so wicked that it required drastic intervention if you knew as a parent that your son or your daughter was the one who went to school with a gun and killed a bunch of kids in their high school and with deep pain you would you turned them into the police knowing that it might even lead to a death sentence. That’s the kind of feeling I think that God had as he looked at his world and his heart was pained because of the way things were going. The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth. His heart was filled with pain. And everything we read in the book of Genesis so far anyway, we know that evil has its origin in the demonic world. We know that some of God’s created beings, his holy ones, they’re called the sons of God. They’re called small G gods, little Elohim. They sinned and they rebelled before any human would rebel. We caught glimpses of that unseen world when we read in Job 38 that these sons of God shouted for joy when God created the world. We reflected on Psalms 82 and 89 and First Kings 22. They they reveal that this God has a heavenly council he convenes with these created angels, the sons of God. God rules over them. But like us, they have a measure of free will. They can rebel against God. And apparently that’s what some of them did. So in Genesis 3, we found that created rebel, the serpent, who successfully tempted human beings to rebel just as the demons before had. And all of that provides a backdrop for a very Lord of the Rings type scenario that’s dropped on us when we begin reading Genesis chapter 6. Men began to increase in number on the earth, and daughters were born to them, and the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful. They married any of them they chose. Then the Lord said, “My spirit will not contend with man forever, for he’s mortal. His days will be 120 years. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old or the men of renown.” notoriously difficult passage for Bible interpreters to come to grips with. But but I don’t think that paragraph was thrown up at random at that point as we’re being prepared for the judgment of the flood. We should assume that this brief mention of the sons of God and the Nephilim somehow essential to carry the story forward. And if so, what’s going on here? You know, I don’t think the Old Testament gives us a really clear solid doctrinal highway that explains the union of these sons of God with the daughters of men and their offspring, the Nephilim. I think scripture gives us more of a dotted line to follow or at least a trail of breadcrumbs, but it’s still important for us to follow it. So come with me down deep down a rabbit hole for a couple of moments because I think it gives us some insight about this horrific judgment that God was about to bring on humanity through the flood. The story I see the Bible giving is that these rebellious sons of God were demons, angels who had rebelled. They took human women. It says any they chose indicating it may not have been very consensual. Result was the corruption of what God had instituted in marriage. This unholy union produced a hybrid clan of demon humans. God had told the serpent that the seed of woman would one day crush his head. So this may have been a demonic strategy to infiltrate the human race, corrupt and and interrupt that possibility, prevent the emergence of that headcrusher. The New Testament Jude verse 6 speaks of angels who didn’t stay within their own position of authority, but they left their proper dwelling. Second Peter likewise speaks of angels who sinned. And in the next verse, it speaks of the times of Noah and the flood. And the offspring of that unnatural union, the Nephilim, we’re told, were on the earth in the days of Noah and afterward, indicating there might have been another incursion or another demonic invasion on earth following the flood. and that Nephilim hybrid clan and the line that follows them described in several places in the Old Testament as being enormousized people as being a line of giants. Numbers 13:33 God’s people had been uh led out of their long enslavement in Egypt and they were spying out the promised land and the fearful spies came back and saying whatever we do we don’t want to go in there. They said we saw the Nephilim there. And then we have this little comment in parenthesis. It’s important. Says, “The descendants of Anch come from the Nephilim.” Then it goes on, “The spies said, ‘We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.” And that giant line of the hybrid Le Nephilim from whose line also came Anch or the Anakim. They were blocking God’s people from walking in their destiny. We have the Nephilim. We have the Anakim. In Deuteronomy 2:20, Moses refers to people who may have been another branch of that family tree, the Refites. And Moses said they were every bit as tall as the Anakites were. Moses, though, always had faith that with God, the giants could be defeated. Just before finally heading into the promised land after 40 years of wandering in the wilderness, the Israelites on the outskirts of the promised land defeated Og, the king of Bashan. And he’s referred to in Deuteronomy 3:11 as the last of the remnant of the Rephites. And then there’s some fascination with the size of this guy because he goes into detail about his bed describing it as 13t long and 6 feet wide. And I think a dead giveaway that he was a giant is he wasn’t named Gary or Brian. He was named Og. And that would be of course if you had a giant, of course you’d name him Og. Moses knew that he was going to die. He preached the sermon of Deuteronomy. Began by reminding them in chapter 1 28 how the spies had lost heart when they saw the Nephilim, the the Anakites. Moses said, “Our brothers made us lose heart.” They say, “The people are stronger and taller than we are. The cities are large and with walls up to the sky. We even saw the Anakites there.” At that time, Moses said to them, “Don’t be terrified. Don’t be afraid of them. The Lord your God who’s going before you will fight for you as he did for you in Egypt before your very eyes and in the desert. There you saw how the Lord your God carried you as a father carries his son all the way you went until you reached this place. And later in that same sermon in Deuteronomy 9:es 1 and 2, Moses said that he’s his people were going to face more of those giants when they went into the land here. Oh Israel, you are now about to cross the Jordan to go in and dispossess nations greater and stronger than you with large cities that have walls to the sky. The people are strong and tallites. You know about them and have heard it said, “Who can stand against the Anakites?” But be assured today that the Lord your God is the one who goes across ahead of you like a devouring fire. He’ll destroy them. He’ll subdue them before you. and you will drive them out and annihilate them quickly as the Lord has promised you. So shortly after Moses died, Joshua led the people into the promised land. And in Joshua 11, we read that he went and he destroyed the Anakites, took them all out of the hill country, from Hebron and Deber and Adam and from all the hill country of Judah, from all the hill country of Israel. Says Joshua totally destroyed them and their towns. No anites were left in Israelite territory. Only in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod, it says, did any survive. So only in those three Philistine towns, apparently, were any of the giants left. Few of them occasionally raised their heads as we go further along in scripture, including one very large man from the town of Gath, that Philistine town of Gath named Goliath, who ended up being slain by David. Okay, so let’s come out of the rabbit hole now. That’s what’s deep into the rabbit holes we’re going to go. That’s the Lord of the Rings world. Come back to the realization that this clan of giants that included the Nephilim, the Anakites, the Reapites, they were always blocking the way of God’s people walking in their destiny and receiving from God what he wanted to give them. Genesis 6 may well describe the origin of that unholy clan. Reason for the flood is given is said to be the ungodliness of human beings. But all the evil of man has been demonically inspired from the start. And those giants, though they’re invisible to us, they’re still very active. Ephesians 6 doesn’t pull any punches when it says, “You and I are not battling flesh and blood. We’re battling rulers and authorities and powers of the dark world, spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. The giants are still out there. They’re still attempting to block our destiny. Still very active. But each one of us can go into our week this week with those words of Moses echoing in our ears. Be assured today that the Lord your God is the one who goes across ahead of you like a devouring fire. He’ll destroy them. He’ll subdue them before you. So to wrap up this morning, we see people like Enoch and Noah. They’re able to successfully walk with God in a world that was becoming deeply dark, was bringing great pain to the heart of God. And if they could walk with God in their world, surely we can walk with God in our own. Like Enoch and Noah, it’s always going to be a walk of faith. It’s always going to require us to represent God to the people in our world. But it has every potential to be a walk of great friendship and intimacy and delight until the day that God says to each one of us, why don’t you just home come home to my place tonight? And when we walk with God and prayer is less about communicating with God and more about communing with him. When it begins to punctuate the hours of our day, then our lives start being transformed. In 1982, the Today’s Show in New York had scheduled an interview with Billy Graham. He arrived at the studio and one of the programs producers informed Graham’s assistant that a private room had been set up set aside for the reverend to pray before the interview before the broadcast. And the assistant thanked the producer for the thoughtful gesture, but he told him, “No, Billy Graham won’t need that room.” And producer was a bit shocked that a world famous Christian leader wouldn’t wish to pray before being interviewed on live television. Graham’s assistant responded, “Well, Mr. Graham started praying when he got up this morning. He prayed while eating breakfast. He prayed on the way over in the car. And he’ll probably be praying all through the interview. And don’t all of us want to walk with God that looks like that? Enoch and Noah would have would have us know they weren’t anything special. There are people like us. Walking with God is as available to us as it was to them. So, let’s just take advantage of what God has made available to us to walk with him and to have friendship with him. Some things to pray about this morning. Just in the next moment or two, pray that you’ll learn to walk with God by faith and with boldness and that your friendship with God would develop an intimacy. Thank God that the wickedness that inhabits all cultures, including our own, it doesn’t deter the plans and purposes of God. And then a key one, I think, pray Moses words. Pray these over yourself. And pray pray for others who you know may be facing great spiritual difficulty or battle. Do not be terrified. Do not be afraid of them. The Lord your God who’s going before you will fight for you. Take a few moments with God and then I’ll close us in prayer.