64. If, then, those godly patriarchs of old so anxiously looked forward to the eternal life and desired it to come, on account of Abel and Enoch, whom they knew to be living with God, how much greater ought to be our expectation and desire, who have Christ for our leader unto eternal life, who is gone before, as Peter says in Acts 3, 20-26. They believed in him as one to come; we know that he has become manifest, and has gone to the Father to prepare for us a home, and to sit at the right hand of the Father to intercede for us. Ought we not, therefore, to sigh for those future things, and to hate those of the present? It is not an Enoch or an Abel who sets before us, as those patriarchs did before their people, the hope of a better life to come; but Christ, the leader and author of life himself. It becomes us, therefore, firmly to despise this life and world, and with swelling breast to pant after the coming glory of eternal life. 65. Herein we feel how great is the infirmity of our flesh which lusts after these present things with eager desire but fails to rejoice in the certainties of the life to come. How is it possible that a fact should not be most certain which has for witnesses not only Abel and Enoch and Elijah, but also Christ himself, the head and the first fruits of those that rise? Most worthy, therefore, the hatred of both God and men are the wicked Epicureans; and most worthy our hatred also is our own flesh, when we wholly plunge into temporal cares and securely disregard the eternal blessings. 66. Worthy of note and carefully to be remembered is the statement that Enoch was taken up and received, not by some patriarch or angel, but by God himself. This was the very consolation which rendered the deaths of the patriarchs endurable; yea, which enabled them to depart from this life with joy. They saw that the seed which had been promised them warred, even before he was revealed, with Satan, and bruised, through Enoch, his head. Such was the hope entertained by them concerning themselves and all their believing descendants, and, in perfect security, they despised death as having ceased to be death, as having become a sleep from which they were to awaken into life eternal. "To them that believe," death is not really death, but a sleep. When the terror, the power, and the sting of death are taken away, it can no longer be considered death. The greater the faith of the dying man, the weaker is death. On the other hand, the weaker the faith of the dying man, the more bitter is death.