He was shown how it ends.It ends in a garden.

He has come through a wall of crystal and a house of fire, and now he is standing in a hall that has no far wall — ranks of burning figures going back past anywhere the eye can follow, and at the centre of it something too bright to resolve. And the first thing this old man does, the man who has been walking with God his whole life, is put both hands over his eyes. Jude 1 : 14

He falls on his face and stays there, and nobody makes him get up — until a voice does, and he is raised gently back onto his own feet and told to come nearer. He is, as far as this book is concerned, the first human being to stand up in that room. Not summoned to be judged. Not struck down. Invited forward, and helped up first. Hebrews 11 : 5

And then he is handed a job, which is not what anyone expects to be given at the centre of heaven. He is to go back down and deliver a verdict to the Watchers — the ones who came down, who taught the world things it was not ready for, who asked him to petition on their behalf. And when the message is finished he asks one more question, carefully, the way you ask about somebody's children: and the giants, Lord? Jude 1 : 14–15

The answer is no. Not angry, and not negotiable — the petition he carried up on their behalf is refused, because they were the ones who knew exactly what they were doing and did it anyway. And the picture stays on Enoch's face while he takes that in, and something in it goes older. He came up here as a man who had been given wonders. He is going back down as a man who has to tell somebody the answer is no. Jude 1 : 6

Before he goes back, he is taken on a walk — and the walk is the strangest and most delightful stretch of the whole book. A guide leads him along cliffs with whole weather systems folded up asleep inside them: the storehouses of the winds, each coiled in its own hollow, waiting to be let out. And in a gorge further on they pass the place where the thunder is kept, and it is asleep, and it snores. Job 38 : 22

And then somewhere he is sorry to have been shown: a place of vertical white bars going down further than he can follow, and behind them, in chains, points of light. Stars that did not keep their courses. His guide does not moralise about it; he says one sentence and lets it sit — even stars are not too bright to fall — and Enoch, who has spent this whole journey being amazed, has nothing at all to say back. Jude 1 : 13

Then four hollow places cut into the side of an enormous mountain, where the dead are kept — and kept apart, the ones who were wronged separated from the ones who did the wronging, waiting. From one of them a voice is still audible: the first man whose blood was spilled, still making his complaint. And the angel beside Enoch gives him the line that is the whole reason he was shown this room at all: no one is forgotten. Genesis 4 : 10

Past seven mountains of jewels there is one more, and on it a tree Enoch has no vocabulary for — and beside the tree, a throne. He is told the fruit is not for now. It is for afterwards, for the people who came through, and it will be given to them in a garden. That is the sentence he carries down out of heaven: it ends in a garden. Not a courtroom. A garden, with fruit. Revelation 22 : 2

And then a second tree, on a different mountain — the tree of wisdom, whose fruit taught his great-great-grandparents what they were and got them sent out of the garden. Enoch stands in front of it for a long moment. He puts out one hand and touches the bark, the way you touch something that has a family history attached to it. And then he takes his hand away, and takes nothing, and walks on. Genesis 3 : 6

They go up to where the sun is carried, and he is allowed close enough to see how the thing is actually made. And then he meets someone whose entire occupation is the stars — leading them out at dusk and bringing them back at dawn, by name, the way a shepherd handles a flock, and who has never once lost one. Enoch spent his early life on a hillside counting animals. He understands this job immediately. Psalm 147 : 4

And at some point he notices the sound. Everything moving out here is also singing — the wheels, the winds, the stars going out at evening — and it has been going on underneath the whole tour and he only now has ears for it. Then he is shown the tablets of heaven, with everything written on them, and told to read, and remember, and write it down for people who are not born yet. Psalm 19 : 1–4

He is up there a year. Long enough to stop flinching, long enough to be taught, long enough to be given a job and shown the reason for it. And when he finally turns to go back down — carrying a refusal he has to deliver to people who asked him for help — the last thing on his face is not dread. He has seen where it all ends. He is smiling. Hebrews 11 : 5–6