Of both aEnoch and Noah It was said, “They walked with God”. He was their companion and they experienced His presence. In fact all the worthy men of old participated in the same joyous reality. When Abraham was ninety-nine years old, God appeared to him and said, “Walk before me, and be thou perfect”. Abraham obeyed, and they enjoyed such intimate fellowship that God called him “My friend” (Isaiah 41. 8). -I know him,” God said, “that he will command his children and his household after him, and they shall keep the way of the Lord.”
Indeed this is God’s great requirement before mortal man can walk with Him: a “man’s ways must please the Lord”. It has always been so and will be throughout eternity. Not so much his words, certainly not his claims—but his ways!
Of Noah it was said, “He was a just man and perfect in all his generations, and Noah walked with God”. “Thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation”, was God’s personal tribute to him. As for Moses, there is no doubt that he walked with God, for we are told that the Lord spoke to him “face to face as a man speaketh unto his friend” (Exod. 33. 11 ). Likewise, Joshua was conscious of God’s continual presence during the conquest of the promised land. When the land was subdued, he exhorted the people to live as he had: “Take diligent heed to do the commandments of law, to love the Lord your God, to walk in all His ways, and to cleave unto Him, and to serve Him with all your heart and with all your soul.”
These men truly walked with God; they saw Him face to face. But they were comparatively few in number. He did not walk with all those who claimed to be His people. Of many of them He said, “Your ways have separated between you and your God”. Those were the people to whom God had declared, “If you walk in my statutes and observe my commandments and do them, I will walk among you and will be your God, and you shall be my people” (Lev. 26. 3).
“Can two walk together, except they be agreed? The sad story of Israel testifies to the negative. There must be agreement on direction, objective, ideals and desires. There must be identity of will, of purpose, of thought and of action. Even in common paths, people don’t go far together unless there is mutual trust, mutual harmony and mutual respect.
And that brings us right down to our own lives. right into our innermost being; for we have claimed to be God’s people. But does He respect us as such? Am I a fit person for Him to walk beside? Do we love the things that God loves, and hate the things that He hates? Certainly every one of us made that profession at our baptism. Israel of old made the same profession, “All that the Lord bath said we will do”. But did they? Their long, sad history was a continual walk in the wrong direction, away from God, culminating in the attitude of the Pharisees, of whom Jesus said, “Be ye not like unto them, for they say and do not”.
The promise of fellowship with God and with His Son, even now, is not to “him that heareth these sayings of mine”, but to him that “heareth and doeth them (Math. 7). “If any man love me, he will keep my words and my father will love him, and we will come in unto him and make our abode with him”. “If we say we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not live according to the truth; but, if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanseth us from all sin (1 John 1. 6, 7 R.S.V.).
The implication of these words is clear, reminding us that the relationship between light and darkness ran be applied to the believer according to the way he lives. “He that saith, I know Him, and keepeth not His commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him.” “He that saith he is in the light and loveth not his brother is in darkness, and walketh in darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth, because the darkness hath blinded his eyes” (1 John 2. 4, 6, I 1 ). These are indeed soul-searching words for each one of us for they bear the undeniable testimony of God’s Word. They declare in clarion tones that as truly as the unbeliever is separated from God by his false conceptions so the believer can be separated from God by the way he lives.
It is all a matter of the direction in which we are walking, the company we are keeping on the way, and the things we are doing. It is not a matter of not knowing, but of not doing! “For He hath showed thee, 0 man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require, of thee, but to do justly to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.” If we but fulfill our part in this direction, making it possible for God to remain with us in every avenue of our lives, in ow dealings with our fellow-man, in our business activities, our homes, only then will we enjoy that intimate fellowship with Him.
Our walk today of necessity is “in the spirit”. We do not see him “face to face”, as did Noah, Abraham and Moses. But if we can but experience in measure that nearness, that oneness with Him now, in these the days of our pilgrimage, then, in the glorious day to come we shall “see Him as He is “For they shall walk with me in white, for they are worthy.”
Being Compassionate