What pleases God? Have you ever asked yourself that question? Many people have and wonder if their life really measures up. When we truly comprehend the holiness of God and realize how sinful we are, it could strike fear in our hearts that we cannot possibly measure up and please God.
With God, no one could ever be pleasing to Him based on performance. His standard is perfection, and no goodness on our part can ever compensate for our sins. We may please man with our actions, but “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). It takes the precious blood of Jesus to do that.
The way we receive the forgiveness that’s available through Jesus’ blood is by faith (Rom. 10:9-17). It is that faith, more than anything else, that pleases God.
5 By faith Enoch was taken from this life, so that he did not experience death: “He could not be found, because God had taken him away.” For before he was taken, he was commended as one who pleased God. 6 And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.
A person whose actions are not right but who trusts the Lord is more pleasing to God than an individual who is doing the right things but has no faith in God. Just think about it. There are many things we can do that God could be pleased with—our love, our worship, our service, our obedience. But it is faith that pleases God the most. Why? Because in all of these other things it is us doing something for God, while faith is asking God to do something for us. It pleases and glorifies God the most because it is asking Him to show up and show off His might or wisdom or grace or goodness. The spotlight is on Him when we are trusting Him to do something for us.
Someone has said, “The soul is measured by its flights, some low and some high. The heart is known by its delights and pleasures never lie.” I’m not aware of who the author is nor the occasion of its writing. But the situation that the author refers to is poignant for us. Listen again to the last two lines: “The heart is known by its delights and pleasures never lie.”
The author is pointing to a means for measuring something which is otherwise invisible. The character of the human heart can be unmistakably known by that which brings it pleasure.
How about you this moment? What is it, really, that brings you the most pleasure?
Henry Scougal, a Puritan pastor, said it much the same way when he said, “The worth and excellence of the soul can be measured by the object of its love.” And John Piper has written, “To know a soul’s proportions, you need to know it’s passions.”
If this is true, then what do your passions and pleasures say about the state of your soul today?
And if that this is true, what does it say that what brings God’s heart the greatest delight is your faith. Your faith is His pleasure, His delight.
Here is what we’re going to be looking at today in Hebrews 11:5-6, and that is that a Christian is a person who finds his or her ultimate pleasure in pleasing God. For the Christian who has been awakened by grace our greatest pleasure lies in pleasing God, in bringing delight to His heart through our trust in Him.
This is authentic Christianity—a constraining desire to bring God pleasure, to delight His heart. But the reality is, not every Christian has the ultimate pleasure of pleasing God. Far too often our hearts are captured by other pleasures, other delights. It will be a lifelong struggle to divest ourselves of these idols, to destroy them so that our ultimate joy can be found in God Himself and our greatest desire is to please Him.
If our greatest desire is to please God, how do we do that? Fortunately we are not left to guess the answer to that question. It appears quite clearly in Hebrews 11:6, “without faith it is impossible to please God.” What brings pleasure to our God is the life of faith, a life that is governed, shaped, molded, fashioned by the promises of God. A life in which decisions are made on the basis of the Word of God.
To illustrate this kind of faith, we’re going to look at a little known man in the Bible by the name of Enoch. If you were to ask for a list of the names of great men and women of faith, his name would likely be left off many lists. One of the reasons is that the Bible says very little about him.
So, we know that Enoch lived over three and a half centuries on this earth. This means that if Enoch’s 365-year life span had ended in 2023, he would have been born in 1658, more than one hundred years before our nation declared its independence.
Not only that, his son Methusaleh, who lived 969 years, wouldn’t die until the year 2992. So Enoch’s life was relatively short compared to others of that era. But it was nonetheless an amazing stint of time—and those three-hundred-plus years were given to righteous living in the midst of a terribly evil antediluvian world that was destroyed precisely because of its depravity (cf. Genesis 6:11–13).
Not only that, but Enoch served as a prophet for over three centuries, preaching the unwelcome message of coming judgment. Jude 14, 15 records this, saying:
Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied, saying, “Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousands of his holy ones, to execute judgment on all and to convict all the ungodly of all their deeds of ungodliness that they have committed in such an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things that ungodly sinners have spoken against him.”
Enoch lived in the time before Noah’s flood. Genesis 5:21–24 devotes only fifty-one words (in English) to describing Enoch:
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. Thus all the days of Enoch were 365 years. Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.
Enoch is unique because “he was not, for God took him.” Whereas Abel was murdered, Enoch never died, yet both demonstrated faith. Throughout Genesis 5 you would be reading the repeated refrain, “and then he died…and then he died…and then he died.” But this didn’t happen to Enoch. He did not die. Instead, God took Him. He was an anomaly in the litany of deaths that were all due to the fact that Adam and Eve had rebelled against God.
Hebrews interprets it for us like this.
By faith Enoch was taken from this life, so that he did not experience death: “He could not be found, because God had taken him away.” For before he was taken, he was commended as one who pleased God. (Hebrews 11:5)
The Scriptures do not say exactly how this happened. Sometimes the idea of the word “found” (“He could not be found”) simply means to come up empty after doing an exhaustive and thoroughgoing search.
Remember that the same thing happened to Elijah and he was taken up in a chariot of fire. And people searched for him for three days and couldn’t find him. He, too, was not “found.” Enoch lived in a very dark and wicked time, with evil rampant everywhere and Enoch was likely not well liked because of his righteous life and preaching judgment (like Noah). So people were probably aware that he was not around anymore. Maybe some looked for him, but couldn’t find him.
The word “taken” or “taken up” is used three times in Hebrews 11:5.
By faith Enoch was taken from this life, so that he did not experience death: “He could not be found, because God had taken him away.” For before he was taken, he was commended as one who pleased God. (Hebrews 11:5)
This is a compound Greek word that means “to alter the place” or “to take someone or something from one place and put it in another.” It is a beautiful picture of what faith does in our lives—taking us from alienation from God to reconciliation with God. Colossians 1:13 expresses this idea when Paul says “For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves,” and 1 Peter 2:9 says that God “called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” A change of location.
How did God do this with Enoch? We don’t know. Maybe he just said, “Come” and poof, Enoch was gone. However it happened, it does serve as a prototype of what will happen for us someday, what is called the rapture, when we will be taken up, transferred bodily out of this world without dying.
Ultimately, it is a picture of our transition from earth to glory. For some that will come through death, with an eventual transformation of the body. 1 Corinthians 15:51-53 speaks of this: “51 Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed—52 in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. 53 For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality.”
Doesn’t that sound wonderful? I know the older I get and the more this body breaks down, I get more excited about that change.
For those who are still alive this exhilarating event will take place, explained by Paul in 1 Thessalonians 4.
16 For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. 17 After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.
Like these believers who will be “caught up together,” Enoch was “taken up” so that he would not see death.
Why did God do that for Enoch, and why will he do that people who are alive when this great event takes place? Hebrews 11:5 tells us, “For before he was taken, he was commended as one who pleased God.”
What a eulogy! This is the greatest eulogy that a person could ever receive. Mainly because it comes from God.
How did Enoch please God? Because he acted on the basis of faith. We have already made some mention as to why Enoch was taken away—namely, the character of his life. Helpfully, Hebrews 11:5 is very explicit in exploring this, giving us two specific reasons he was taken. First, because of his faith —“By faith Enoch was taken up” (v. 5a). And second, because he pleased God —“Now before he was taken he was commended as having pleased God” (v. 5b).
Faith and pleasing God are opposite sides of the same coin, and it is profitable to examine each side.
There are two important factors that mark the character of Enoch’s faith. Like Abel’s and everyone else’s in Hebrews 11, it was an active faith, a faith that obeys. First, he pleased God by turning away from the godlessness that was present in his society at the time. In other words, he wasn’t concerned about pleasing others, bowing to peer pressure and following the crowd. He was focused on pleasing God. Second, he maintained a daily walk with God (like Adam did) which grew so intimate that God one day said to him, “Why don’t you just come on to my house today.”
The Genesis account (Genesis 5:21-24) suggests that for the first 65 years of his life, Enoch did not walk with God. It’s quite possible that for a while he went along with the deteriorating morality of his times, which Genesis 6:5 describes. As Genesis 5:25 suggests, the event which changed Enoch’s outlook was the birth of his son, whom he named Methusaleh. Some scholars derive the meaning of Methuselah’s name from the Hebrew root muth, which means “death,” and translate the name “His death shall bring (it).” The “it” was the “flood” that Noah was preaching about. And, of course, that is exactly what would happen. On the day Methusaleh’s died, the heavens opened up.
So, it was possibly the revelation of this coming judgment, bring on the fear of God, along with the animal sacrifices that many of those in the line of Seth were still offering, that his heart was stirred towards God. At some point he began to live by faith and walk with God.
God was well-pleased enough with Enoch’s faith that he rewarded him and exempted him from the experience common to every son of Adam—death.
Genesis 5 twice says “Enoch walked with God.” It doesn’t say that Enoch “walked after” or “before” God, two common phrases that refer to a life of obedience or openness before God. Adam had “walked with God” in the Garden, and since their lives overlapped Enoch could have questioned Adam about his experience and learned how to walk with God. Adam had shared the glories of walking with God and that sparked a desire in Enoch’s heart.
“Walked with God” and “pleased God” mean the same thing.
R. Kent Hughes comments on this, bringing out these three ideas with regard to what it meant to “walk with God.”
But the metaphor of walking more exactly reveals how Enoch pleased God. Walking with another person suggests a mutual agreement of soul, as the prophet Amos understood when he asked, “Do two walk together, unless they have agreed to meet?” (Amos 3:3). It is impossible to walk together unless there are several mutual agreements. To begin with, you must agree on the destination. Husbands and wives know that the paths to Bloomingdale’s and Eddie Bauer are not the same! You cannot walk together and go to separate destinations. Enoch was heading in God’s direction.
Of course, it is quite possible to be headed to the same destination but by separate paths. But again, two cannot walk together unless they have the same destination and follow the same path. This Enoch did with God!
There is one other requirement in walking together. Two must not only be traveling to the same place on the same path, but they must also go at the same pace. Enoch was in step with God. We too must “keep in step with the Spirit” (Galatians 5:25).
Enoch’s great walk produced two wonderful things—fellowship and righteousness. When two walk toward the same place on the same path at the same pace for three hundred years, they are in fellowship! And this is the primary meaning of walk: fellowship, sacred communion.
Matching God stride for stride along the path of life while headed for the city of God also produced in Enoch a righteous walk. Malachi 2:6 describes such a walk: “True instruction was in his [Levi’s] mouth, and unrighteousness was not found on his lips; he walked with Me in peace and uprightness, and he turned many back from iniquity” (NASB). Enoch walked in profound fellowship with God and had a profound righteousness. Thus, Enoch pleased God.
We can also refer to the words of the apostle John, that fellowship with God entails “walking in the light as He is in the light” (1 John 1:7). That is how we maintain fellowship with God. We lose that fellowship (not our relationship, but our fellowship) when we sin. We regain that fellowship through confessing our sin.
Warren Wiersbe writes,
Enoch had been walking with God for so many years that his transfer to heaven was not even an interruption. Enoch had been practicing Colossians [chapter] three centuries before Paul wrote the words: “. . . keep seeking the things above. . . . Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth” (vv. 1, 2).
It was little wonder that God took him!
Enoch was pleasing to God and set an example of walking by faith all his life that readers would do well to follow. The Lord may return at any time to take modern Enochs into His presence, just as He took that great saint.
So Enoch pleased God by walking with God. Next week we will look at Enoch’s faith.
Grace Still Amazes 