Bible Wonders - ENOCH & Methuselah

Did you ever wonder? Did you ever wonder?

I do. Did you ever wonder? Why the sun always rises, but the stars never fall?

Why dry land is never satisfied by water? And why fire never says enough? Well, today I just want to wonder about their names as they are written there in Hebrew in the Bible and some of the things that are also taught about them that kind of match up with these things.

So Enoch, me and the dad, will take him first. So when you look at his name in Hebrew, the first letter is a het. Which is a beautiful picture of marriage to a great extent, which leads to life. It's a union of a male energy and a female energy under a hoopah. So this is a real picture of life.

I mean, it just is. And it's the first letter of the word life in Hebrew. The second letter is a nun, which means seeds.

And so here you have, when you have a union like this that we talked about in a marriage, quite often you have children. So we have this union and then we have the seeds of the nun. And which another way to think about that letter to a great extent is fruit. The next letter is a vav, which means it's something coming down from heaven.

And the last letter is a kuf, which is like this crown. Now the interesting thing about this word is, yeah, it means dedicated, and you'll see that throughout the Old Testament. But there's also a unique place you've seen this word before, or the root of this word, is in that famous proverb, train up a child in the way he should go. So that word train up is the word enoch. So it's very interesting because what the Jews teach about Enoch, but he was very much an educator. And so as we see this marriage bearing seeds, clearly he was sowing seeds about the kingdom.

And based on what we talked about yesterday about a kuf, you know, this was both his pleasure and his desire. Now if we just take the actual Midrash story about Enoch, which I find fascinating because we all know that Enoch walked with God and then was no more. They teach a little bit more about it in the Midrash, which we don't know, again, this is somewhat legend. It was certainly an oral tradition.

This is the stories that were passed down. And then the cool thing about Enoch is he knew Adam. You know, Adam lived a long time, you know, 900 years. So, you know, Enoch was certainly one of his great, great, great grandsons and certainly spent time with him, as did Methuselah. And so these people had an understanding of God that came straight from the horse's mouth. So Enoch walked with God.

We know that from the Bible. And through that, he had an amazing relationship. And like most people that you know that walk with God, they are teachers, they are rabbis, they are educators, which lines up perfect with his name. But when you begin to think of the idea of dedication, because a lot of those times that we see that word used in the Old Testament is talking about the temple being dedicated to God or some house being dedicated to God. And so here we have somebody that was dedicated, but also very much in that word is this idea of train up from Proverbs 22 six. So for me, it's kind of an interesting thing to wonder about is how is the word dedicated similar or in some way used here by Solomon as meaning to train up a child.

And when you think about it, the people that you've known in your life, that were very, very dedicated to God, just naturally taught about their experience with God, it just seems to be part and parcel of who they are. So in this form of educator, the Jews said that he was so knowledgeable about God and such an educator, that they elected him a leader over the people. However, they had a problem because Enoch would go away for extended times and isolate himself.

And he would come into town just basically to resolve issues or come between two people that had a disagreement and resolve those kind of things. But they teach that the day that Adam died, that Enoch, because we know he was a contemporary, and this would have been after Methuselah had been born, and he'd been a leader of the people for some time. The day that Adam died, Enoch withdrew again, went into seclusion, and nobody ever saw him again, which leads you now to Methuselah. Now, Methuselah also was very clearly a man of God and very much a man after God's own heart, but his name, when you look at it, really is interesting because the way a lot of Christian commentators have defined that word, Methuselah, they're saying it is a man of the dart, which is interesting.

The Jews, however, say it's something completely different, that it's a contraction of the word 230. And they teach in the Midrash that Methuselah had 230 proverbs that he went about teaching all his 969 years. And they say that, again, like his father Enoch, that this was a fabulous man of God that would share his relationship with God. And you may know that Methuselah died seven days before the rain hit, that his grandson Noah was ordered to build the ark, and of course that was done. Well, now what the Midrash teaches about Methuselah, which I think is beautiful, is that God wanted to mourn Methuselah for seven days before he brought the rain. And they also teach that there was this wonderful light coming down from heaven, which was part of the way that heaven was sharing how much Methuselah meant to God. His father was a teacher Enoch, and Methuselah was a teacher. And so it would just appear to me that the fruit of walking with God, the fruit of studying the Bible, is naturally to share what it is that you've learned. And in doing so, you spread seeds of faith, which lead to a crown, which is what Enoch's name means to a great extent. Of course, we don't know what happened to Enoch. We're going to find out when we get to heaven. But it's a beautiful thing that these men lived so many years and got to walk with God and just plant a lot of seeds that we still reap the harvest of to this very day. I hope you enjoy wondering with me about the names of Enoch and Methuselah.