On death and disappearing

Tucked into this list in Hebrews 11 is a name that is not nearly as familiar as the others.  Enoch is not necessarily a character that you'd hear about on your average Sunday morning from your average preacher.  I don't know that I've ever really heard an entire message based around him.  Like the rest of those contained in this list we can look back and find reference to him in the Old Testament, this time again in Genesis.  Before you get too excited, when you wander back in to Genesis 5 to read about him, you find him hidden in another list.  It's a genealogy actually ... One of those "this guy lived, and his son was, and his son was, and his son was" kind of lists that we tend to gloss over.  This time he is tucked into a list of nine defendants of Adam.  Each lived a number of years, had sons of their own and "then he died"... All except for one.  Seven times the story goes this way, then for Enoch it records that he disappeared " for God took him".  Then for the last name it goes back to the expected "then he died" ending.  You might overlook it as just an oddity with the recording method of the author of Genesis except for one other interesting difference.  Each of these others are recorded simply as having lived x number of years and then dying.  Enoch is recorded as having "walked with God" before disappearing.  Sunday we are going to dig into what the authors of Hebrews and Genesis might be telling us about Enoch's uniqueness and what does it mean that someone could "walk with God" in such a way as to have it recorded and commended.