January 14, 2018

Walking with God

“After he begot Methuselah, Enoch walked with God three hundred years, and had sons and daughters. So all the days of Enoch were three hundred and sixty-five years. And Enoch walked with God; and he was not, for God took him”

(Genesis 5:22-24).

Even though our surroundings in this world have been marred by sin, God has made it possible for us to “walk” with God. We can yield our decisions and our deeds to God in such a way that we actually become “companions” of the very God who created us. The possibility of such a thing suggests some important truths about God, God’s self, does it not?

For one thing, it is remarkable that God offers to every single one of us the possibility of walking with God. No matter how any of us have wrecked our pasts, God is willing for us to walk with God the rest of the way home, if we’ll accept God’s pardon on God’s terms. This privilege is not limited to those born into any certain class of humanity, nor does it require any special intellectual powers. Walking with God just means that we faithfully follow whatever truth becomes clear to us. “What we need in religion is not new light, but new sight; not new paths, but new strength to walk in the old ones; not new duties, but new strength from on high to fulfill those that are plain to us” (Tyron Edwards).

But if there can be such a thing as walking with God, there must also be such a thing as not walking with God. If, for example, the lifestyle of Enoch’s degraded contemporaries constituted just as much a walk with God as that of Enoch himself, then the statement “Enoch walked with God” would mean very little. But surely this is not a meaningless statement. We are being told that Enoch made certain choices concerning God and that these choices had their consequence in a “walk” that would have been impossible otherwise. To realize this is to be sobered in our thinking.

Neither the freedom of walking with God nor the destination can be ours without radical repentance and redirection of our hearts. “Father, set me free in the glory of thy will, so that I will only as thou willest. Thy will be at once thy perfection and mine. Thou alone art deliverance – absolute safety from every cause and kind of trouble that ever existed, anywhere now exists, or ever can exist in thy universe” (George MacDonald).

“When we walk with God, we get where He is going.”

Anonymous