Genesis chapter five reads like a drumbeat of mortality. It lists ten generations of Adam’s descendants, each one ending with the same somber refrain: “And he died.” The roll call of the dead continues until we almost stop noticing. Methuselah, the record holder, lived 969 years, but even he could not escape the final line. It is as if the writer wanted us to feel the weight of death’s inevitability. Yet in the middle of this graveyard of names, one stands out like a candle in a dark room—Enoch. His obituary reads differently: “Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.” There is no mention of death, only divine companionship. While the others faded from the earth, Enoch simply stepped into eternity. He lived 365 years—a “year of years,” if you like—and then went home early. As they say, “only the good die young,” though in this case, the good did not die at all.
We might think Enoch was shortchanged, missing out on the longevity his ancestors enjoyed. But the text makes it clear that being “taken by God” was a blessing, not a loss. Death is inevitable, but for those who walk with God, it is not final. Someone once described life this way: “Tender teens, teachable twenties, tireless thirties, fiery forties, forceful fifties, serious sixties, sacred seventies, aching eighties, shortening breath, death, the sod, God.” However many decades we get, the destination is the same. The Hebrew writer reminds us, “It is appointed unto man once to die, but after this the judgment” (Hebrews 9:27). The key question, then, is not how long we live but how we walk. Enoch’s secret was simple: he walked with God—step by step, day by day. That is not a bad life plan. We could all use a little less running and a little more walking with God.
Paul took that same theme and gave it a New Testament twist. “And he died for all,” Paul wrote, “that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again” (2 Corinthians 5:15). Jesus broke the “and he died” cycle once and for all. Charles Simeon once read an epitaph that captured it perfectly: “When from the dust of death I rise… this shall be all my plea—Jesus hath lived and died for me.” In Christ, death no longer gets the last line. For those who walk with Him, it now reads: “And he lived—forever.”