Let's turn in our Bibles to Hebrews chapter 11. Hebrews 11, we're gonna look at verses five and six this morning. The title of this morning's message is Enoch. pleasing God by faith. We're gonna talk a little bit about Enoch this morning. Mostly, we're going to focus on pleasing God and drawing near to him by faith and what that means. So let's begin by reading Hebrews 11, verses five and six. By faith, Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death. And he was not found because God had taken him. Now before he was taken, he was commended as having pleased God. And without faith, it is impossible to please him. For whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. We're gonna jump right into verse six and spend most of our time here this morning. So the writer begins verse six by asserting that without faith, it is impossible to please him. That is, to please God. Or, stated positively, pleasing God requires faith. And then he explains this to us. He gives us his support or his evidence that this is true. He says, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. So there's something of a parallel here. Drawing near to God parallels pleasing God. And that doesn't mean they're synonymous. They don't necessarily mean exactly the same thing, but they go together. And if you would draw near to God, then you must believe that he exists and reward those who seek him. So you can see the writer's logic here. His argument is that pleasing God requires faith because whoever would draw near to God must believe these things. And for that argument to make any sense, he has to be linking pleasing God with drawing near to God. Pleasing God requires faith because drawing near to God requires believing. So likewise, he's linking faith with believing that God exists and that he rewards those who seek him. Now I think it's easy enough to see that faith and belief go together. But do pleasing God and drawing near to God necessarily have to go together? Well, in the previous chapter, in chapter 10, the writer has already linked these things. In verse eight of chapter 10, he said, what doesn't please God? He had quoted from Psalm 40 earlier in the chapter, and then he points out that God does not desire, nor does he take pleasure in the sacrifices and burnt offerings and sin offerings that men offer. even when they're offered according to the law. There's nothing that men can do, in fact, that pleases God, at least nothing that we can do on our own. But the writer continues in verse nine. He says, then he added, behold, I have come to do your will. That is, Jesus came to do the Father's will. And if you look back at verse five of chapter 10, you'll see that the writer says, Christ said this when he came into the world. This is what pleases God. This is God's will, that we would be sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. That's what it says in verse 10. So God isn't pleased by the old sacrifices and burnt offerings and sin offerings, but he is pleased when we are sanctified by the offering that Jesus made when he died for us. The writer then continues to develop this idea of us being sanctified by Jesus' offering over the next several verses. And then in verses 19 through 22, He says, therefore, that is based on God being pleased when we're sanctified by Christ's sacrifice, therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, and then dropping down to verse 22, he says, let us draw near. He ties this thing that pleases God to drawing near to God. Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. sprinkling clean and washing, that refers to being sanctified by Jesus' sacrifice. In contrast with the old covenant sacrifices, which didn't really purify you at all, Jesus' sacrifice makes you clean and washed before God, which is what pleases God and enables you to draw near to Him. That's the point the writer is making. And in doing so, he ties what pleases God to drawing near to God. Then, dropping all the way down to verse 38, still in chapter 10, he says, but my righteous one shall live by faith. And if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him. Here the writer is quoting loosely from Habakkuk chapter two. But see what he says? He says, if he shrinks back. Shrinking back is the opposite of drawing near. If a man shrinks back from God, My soul has no pleasure in him. God is not pleased. So to please God then, you need to draw near to him. And then in the next verse, the last verse of chapter 10, the writer expresses his confidence that we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but rather we are of those who have faith and preserve our souls. That's us. We please God and we draw near to him. And you see at the end of verse 39, he's already introduced the idea that this is done by faith. He contrasts those who shrink back with those who have faith. And that leads into chapter 11, which is all about faith. And now here in verse six, he explicitly ties pleasing God and drawing near to him with faith. Pleasing God requires faith because whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. And Enoch is an example of this. Look at verse five. It starts, by faith Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death. And he was not found because God had taken him. And then it says, Now, before he was taken, he was commended as having pleased God. It doesn't say how long before he was taken up that he was commended as having pleased God, but the writer here makes a point of telling us that it was sometime before he was taken up. So let's go back and look at the very brief account that we have of Enoch back in Genesis chapter five. And we're gonna focus on verses 21 and 22. It says, when Enoch had lived 65 years, he fathered Methuselah. Enoch walked with God after he fathered Methuselah 300 years, and he had other sons and daughters. It doesn't say that Enoch did not walk with God before he fathered Methuselah, but it kind of implies it. In fact, many of your translations, like the New American Standard, for instance, say Enoch became the father of Methuselah, then he walked with God. And again, that's not explicitly saying that he didn't walk with God before that, but I think that's what it suggests. So what happened? Why the change? Well, I think it's not altogether unusual that God would use the birth of a child, as he uses any event that he chooses, as a catalyst for change. It could be that after 65 years of carefree living on Enoch's part, perhaps the birth of Methuselah was what God used to get Enoch's attention. That's certainly possible and maybe it's even likely that that's part of it. But I think the walking with God is not so much just the result of a change in Enoch as it was the cause of the change. When the Old Testament, when it was translated into Greek, which we call the Subtuagent, this verse was translated, Enoch pleased God. It says, when Enoch had lived 65 years, he fathered Methuselah. Enoch pleased God after he fathered Methuselah. The Hebrew word here literally does mean walked. And the translators at that time who translated into Greek, they knew that. But figuratively, it means pleased in Hebrew. in a way that doesn't necessarily come across in Greek, or in English for that matter. So to capture that sense, they chose to translate it this way, as pleased, instead of the more literal translation, which would have been walked. And those first readers of the book of Hebrews, they would have been familiar with this. And even those who were reading Genesis in the Hebrew language would have picked up on this. And that's what the writer of Hebrews is keying on here. Not so much that Enoch walked with God in the way that we might usually picture it, but that Enoch pleased God. So in Hebrews 11 verse five, when it says, now before he was commended as having pleased God, it's talking about the 300 years between Methuselah's birth and when Enoch was taken up. That is when Enoch pleased God and God commended him for it. So when Genesis 5 says that Enoch walked with God or that he pleased Him, what does that mean? Well, the writer of Hebrews is telling us that it means, based on what we saw earlier in chapter 10, what it means is that Enoch was sanctified by the sacrifice that Jesus would eventually make when he would die on the cross. That is what pleasing God means according to Hebrews. And when it says in Hebrews that Enoch was commended as having pleased God, that's really the equivalent of what it says in Hebrews 11 verse 4, when it says that Abel was commended as righteous, Or when it says in verse 7 that Noah became an heir of righteousness that comes by faith. In other words, this is when Enoch was justified before God, when his sins were forgiven, based on the sacrifice that Jesus was going to make. And that is what pleased God in Enoch. It pleased God to justify and then for 300 years to sanctify Enoch. That is how a man pleases God. And there really is no other way. And the only way that that happens, the only way a man can be justified and sanctified is by faith. So, pleasing God requires faith. But what is faith? Well, we have the definition from verse one of this chapter. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. As we saw when we studied this a couple of weeks ago, this means believing things, having confidence in things, and even acting on things that we cannot independently verify. That doesn't mean that we believe things that don't have any evidence, but in the end, what it means is that faith is the thing that persuades us. That's what this definition means. But here in verse 6, the writer now effectively adds to that. He ties this faith, the faith that's necessary to please God, with believing that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. So I wanna break this down into three parts and then use those three parts as headings for the rest of our study in this verse. The first thing that faith does is that it believes that God exists. That's pretty straightforward, right? Well, we'll see. The second thing that faith does is it believes that God rewards. Those are the first two things, believing that God exists and believing that He rewards, and that's pretty clear in the text. The third thing that faith does is it seeks God. Now, even if the text doesn't say directly that faith does this, it's clear from every example of faith in this chapter. Abel sought God, Enoch sought God, Noah sought God, and so on. And when we see what this kind of seeking really means, then that's going to be even more clear. But first, the first is faith believes that God exists. Now, a lot of people say that they believe in God. And in fact, everyone knows that there is a God. And I can say that because the Bible says so. I pointed this out before, and I think even just recently I have, but in Romans 1, verses 19 and 20, it says, for what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. And that means that there are things that you can know. There are things that don't need to be accepted by faith because God has made them plain. And then it goes on to tell us what those things are. His invisible attributes. Namely, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived. Now, obviously there are people who deny this, who suppress this knowledge. Maybe they've talked themselves out of believing this because they don't like the implications of there being a God. But scripture says that they know it, that it is clearly perceived. So believing this, is not faith. Accepting the mere existence of a God is not faith. That's just perception. Believing this about God may make you a little more honest than an atheist, but this is not what pleases God. Our text in Hebrews 11 says that you must believe that He exists, not just any God, this one specific God. And what does the writer mean by this? Well, let's go back to the first few verses of the book. Hebrews 1, verses one through four. It says, long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets. But in these last days, he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God. and the exact imprint of his nature. And he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs. God has revealed himself to us by the Son, the Son who created the world, who has all of God's glory, who is God in His very nature, who directs the universe by the word of His power, who made purification for sins and is now exalted in heaven. That is the God you need to believe in. Now that's not the end of faith. That's not everything there is to faith, just believing that Jesus is God. But it's the beginning of it. It's foundational to our faith. The gospel begins with God. And the Son is God's revelation of Himself to us. Now that's not to say you don't need to believe in the Father or in the Spirit. It's kind of a package deal. And that the Son is the Son requires that there's also the Father. Or else what does it even mean to say that He is the Son? And Scripture clearly reveals the Spirit as the third person of the Trinity. But in these last days, God has revealed himself to us by the Son, according to this writer. And that is the crux of the gospel. Without the Son, there is no gospel. So that's the first thing that faith does and continues to do. It believes that God exists, that He exists, this particular God who reveals Himself to us in the person of the Son. The second thing we find in this verse that faith does is it believes that God rewards. There are a couple of points that I want to make under this heading. The first is that the reason he rewards is that we are accountable to him. It's not just that there's this God who has all these resources and all this power and he can do nice things for those who please him. He is our God by virtue of the fact that he created us. And He has the right to set whatever standards and impose whatever requirements on us that He chooses. And therefore, it is His right to reward us when He pleases. And Scripture is filled with passages that tell us that we are accountable to Him. Perhaps none put it more succinctly than Romans 14, verse 12. There it says, so then, each of us will give an account of himself to God. The second sub-point here really flows from the first. Although it may not say so directly in this verse, It's not just that God rewards those who seek Him, He also punishes those who sin against Him. Righteousness begets reward. Sin begets punishment. And this is the essence of the Gospel. From the beginning, If you obey God, if you keep His commandments, if you live according to His righteous standard, then He promises a reward, and that reward is immense. It's incredible. It's more than you could ever imagine. Eternity of perfect fellowship with this perfect, beautiful being. where He lavishes kindness on you for all eternity. But if you rebel against Him, if you fail to keep Him in His place as God, and you sin against Him, then the punishment is as horrible as the reward is wonderful. An eternity of wrath being poured out on you by God for your sin against Him. Fall had never happened. If man had been righteous before God on his own, then man would have justly earned a reward from God. But that's not what happened. Adam sinned. He fell. And with him, every one of his descendants fell. We are born rebelling against God, and we prove our rebellion by our own sin, every one of us. None is righteous. No one is, says Romans 3. So we've all earned ourselves an eternity in hell. What's remarkable, and this is my third sub-point, what's remarkable is that God still chooses to reward those who seek Him. Even though we cannot be considered righteous in ourselves, He has made a provision for us by which He will reward those who seek Him. God himself, in the person of the Son, became a man. Now, because Jesus didn't have an earthly father, because he was born of a virgin, he didn't inherit Adam's sin. But because he had an earthly mother, he was human, and therefore he was eligible for the reward that God promised to humans who obeyed. And Jesus obeyed perfectly. He accomplished perfect righteousness. He earned the reward. And having earned it, he could have just ascended into heaven without ever needing to die because he never sinned. But instead, He chose to take on our sin and to pay the penalty for it by dying on the cross, and in doing so, experiencing the Father's wrath for all our sin. By doing that, He not only paid our penalty, He also made his reward for his perfect righteousness available to us. That is why God can reward us, us who are not righteous in ourselves, and still be a just God. That is the reward that faith believes in. Not that God would have rewarded a perfectly righteous man had Adam never sinned, and certainly not that it's possible for me to earn a reward on my own based on my own righteousness. The reward that faith believes in is the reward that we receive for Christ's righteousness. It is the righteousness that Paul values above all else in Romans 3. After first listing the things that Paul used to have confidence in, he then writes in verses eight and nine, he says, Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake, I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish in order that I may gain Christ. and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith." That is the righteousness that God rewards. That is the only righteousness that exists today that is worthy of reward. And He has made it available to us by faith. So that I can be rewarded and that you can be rewarded based on the righteous life that God the Son lived when He was a man. Do you believe that? That's the faith you need. Because without that faith, It's impossible to please God. There's one more thing that faith does that we see in Hebrews 11, verse six. Faith seeks God. It doesn't just accept the truth of all of this intellectually, it pursues it. And that's evident in the text. The text doesn't say that God rewards those who simply believe as mere intellectual assent to an idea. It says God rewards those who seek Him. But seek can have different meanings. So it's important that we understand what the writer means and what he doesn't mean. So I'm gonna give you three different meanings of the word, three different ways it can be used and used in relation to God and the things of God. And I want to try to discern what meaning the writer uses here and the kind of seeking that scripture exhorts us to. The first meaning of seek I'm going to call search. You search for something that you don't have. You don't know where it is. You may not even know what it is that you're searching for. Now, when I was a kid, my parents used to take us up fishing in Canada, and we'd fish on lakes, and we'd use flies to fish with. Now, if you know what the fish are eating, then you use a fly that's made to look as much like their food as possible. But most of the time, at least for us, we had no idea what the fish were feeding on at that particular time. So you'd use a fly that was called a searching pattern. It didn't look like anything in particular, but it could be a lot of things. And so you'd use it to search when you really didn't know what you were doing. Basically, you were casting a wide net, to mix up my fishing metaphors. Back in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, you heard a lot about seekers in a spiritual context. These were people who were looking for something to fill the spiritual void that they felt in their lives. But that didn't mean that they had any sense of their guilt before God, of their need, not just a need for meaning or some kind of fulfillment, but a need for righteousness that's only possible by faith in Christ. Now, these seekers might have been being drawn by God's Holy Spirit, and if they were, they would have been convicted of their sin and responded in faith when they heard the gospel. But they also may have been like the Greek philosophers in Athens that we read about in Acts 17. They wanted Paul to preach to them at the Areopagus, not because they were drawn to truth, but simply because they liked to spend their time, the text says, in nothing except telling and hearing something new. So they were seekers in some sense, but this kind of seeking, this kind of searching, is not an indication of faith in the least. It's not an element of faith. It's not what the writer is talking about. The second thing that some might consider seeking is speculation. Now, I'm sure many at the Areopagus were speculators as well, and that's worse. They endlessly speculate on what might be, perhaps telling themselves that they're seeking truth by doing so. But that's an illusion. It's a distraction from revealed truth. Providentially, I came across this as I was studying this week. In his commentary on Hebrews 11, John Calvin addresses those who speculate about Enoch's death and about Enoch's future regarding things that are unknowable because God didn't reveal them to us. Now Calvin specifically addressed the speculation that some make that Enoch and Elijah, who was the other Old Testament saint who was taken, that these two are the witnesses in Revelation. But what he says here, what Calvin says, applies to any fanciful speculations and musings that occupy men's minds. Calvin wrote, let us leave this airy philosophy to those light and vain minds, which cannot be satisfied with what is solid. Let it suffice us to know that their translation was a sort of extraordinary death. We should be satisfied with what is solid. That is with what God reveals to us in his word. What we can know by faith because God has told us. And it's not like he hasn't revealed plenty to us in his word to occupy us for our entire lives. And then some. The Apostle Paul is even more direct about this in his second letter to Timothy. In chapter 2, verse 23, he says, but refuse foolish and ignorant speculations, knowing that they produce quarrels. Interestingly, the word for speculations here in 2 Timothy has the same root word as the word translated seek in Hebrews 11 verse six, but they have different prefixes. And that different prefix changes the meaning significantly. Speculation is most definitely not indicative of the kind of faith that God rewards. So the third meaning of seek is to strive. This is seeking in the sense of pursuing, chasing after something. You know what it is that you want. and you zero in on it, you doggedly pursue it. This is the kind of seeking that true faith produces and that God rewards. Earlier we looked at Philippians chapter three, where Paul counted everything as loss in order to gain a righteousness from God that depends on faith. Paul's faith does not just sit contently and wait for righteousness to happen, though. That's not what faith does. After Paul has renounced every work of self-righteousness, listen to what he says. Starting in verse 12, he writes, not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own, but one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead. I press on. to the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. That is striving. And in this passage, we see the reward for it as well. The prize, it says, of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. That is how Paul's faith expressed itself, by striving. That is the seeking that God rewards, not as a work, but as an expression of faith, responding to what Jesus has done for us and in us. This is what Hebrews tells us about faith. Faith believes that God exists, and not just any God, specifically God as revealed by the Lord Jesus, who is God. And faith believes that God rewards. Faith accepts that I have sinned, and yet it still believes that God has provided a way that I can be rewarded, not for my own righteous, which is rubbish, but for the righteousness of the Lord Jesus, which is assigned to my account by faith. And faith seeks God. It strives after Him with all its worth to make Christ's righteousness my own, because Christ Jesus has made me His own. That is the faith that God rewards. I'm gonna close by addressing Enoch, and that he was taken up so that he should not see death. As I said earlier when I was quoting Calvin, there's much that we don't know and really can't know about his death and what happened to him, and it's really pointless to speculate. But here's the point, I believe, that is revealed to us in God's Word. So go back to Genesis 5. The chapter starts, chapter 5 starts, this is the book of the generations of Adam. And then they're listed. In verse 5, thus all the days of Adam were 930 years, and he died. Verse 8, thus all the days of Seth were 912 years, and he died. Verse 11, thus all the days of Enosh were 905 years, And he died. And so on down through Jared in verse 20. Thus all the days of Jared were 962 years and he died. What's the common thread here? They all died. And then we come to Enoch in verse 23. Thus all the days of Enoch were 365 years. Enoch walked with God. And he was not, for God took him. There's a deliberate contrast there. Enoch didn't die, not in the way that others did. He didn't see death, as Hebrews puts it. He was translated into the next life in a different way. Why? What was the point of doing this and of telling us about it in Genesis and then returning to it in Hebrews? Enoch is a sort of object lesson, and it illustrates for us what the conclusion will be for those who please God, when they're justified and sanctified by Him, which is only possible by faith. The curse that God pronounced on man because of sin was death. That included physical death, But the worst part was eternal spiritual death. And so when God spared Enoch from an experience of physical death, however it was that God did that, it shows us what God is going to do for all who please God, who God justifies and sanctifies. God will spare us ultimate death that comes by the curse. That is what Enoch shows us. So have faith. and not just a one-time exercise of faith when you were converted, but a faith that pleases God all your life, like Enoch did, as you believe, as you believe in God as He reveals Himself to us by His Son, as you believe that He will reward you despite your sin. and strive for Him and His righteousness as you press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let's pray.