Enoch never died. With spiritual significance the Bible tells of one whose days "were three hundred sixty and five years: and Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him."Gen. 5:23, 24 The possibility of a deathless life hinted here Christian Science reveals as fact. Man never really dies. Life is Spirit, God. In Spirit, man's eternal Life, there is no death.
That someone in the human sense of life could leave it without surrendering his conscious existence is a definite part of Christ Jesus' teaching. He said, after Lazarus had been four days in the grave, "I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die."John 11:25, 26 And he proved his authority for this statement by raising Lazarus. But in spite of this resurrection experience Lazarus later died and had to be buried, or so it appeared. But do we know what Lazarus' experience was like when he passed?
At the time the Enoch story was written it was evidently easier to accept the concept of translation without a death process. Today the rigidity of belief in material life and death does not appear to allow for such a possibility. To begin to break the fixity of this belief and accept the hint of Enoch and the promise of Christ Jesus, we need to realize what Christian Science teaches: the body of an individual is a mental concept. It is made up of his own thoughts of himself and also of what he has accepted of the thoughts others have of life in general and of this individual in particular. This is the human view. But what the individual really is, is what God knows of him. One who is learning of this spiritual reality—his real Life and identity—is advancing out of the material, mortal sense of life into the spiritual and immortal.
