Get walking!

Enoch walked with God… Genesis 5:24

He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8

I don’t imagine that I will ever have an epitaph on a gravestone (nor particularly want one!), but if it ever happened, the glowing words spoken of Enoch, “he walked with God”, though far from deserved, would be all I could wish for.

It’s pretty well impossible for us to imagine what life was like for human beings way back before the flood. Generally speaking the feel of Genesis 1-11 is grim – from the glory of creation (Genesis 1-2), to the wretchedness of the fall (Genesis 3), to the account of the first murder, to the corruption of the ideal of marriage and the beginning of the ill-treatment of women (Genesis 4)… No wonder God decided that a radical cleansing, a very deluge, was needed (Genesis 6-11).

I’ve jumped over Genesis 5, which is mainly a dreary, repetitive account of “Adam’s family line” – a parade of men with strange names and startlingly long life-spans. Nothing much to excite us there.

But wait a minute… Tagged onto the end of chapter 4 we read the intriguing information that after the disgrace of Lamech and his two wives “people began to call on the name of the Lord”. Did they indeed! That begs all sorts of questions: How did they know the name of the Lord, given that the great leaders of the coming period, Abraham and Moses, were still far off in the distant future? How exactly did God communicate with them? How did they communicate with him? Did they set aside particular buildings or places as “sacred” places? Did they have people who they instinctively recognised as prophets or teachers? And if so, what exactly did such people teach? – there was no such thing as the “Bible”, remember. Fascinating questions, to which we have no answers.

But never mind, because in the midst of all this murky greyness there suddenly burns a bright light: a man called Enoch, who “walked with God” (5:25). That choice of words is particularly striking: the writer doesn’t say Enoch trusted God or obeyed God, though no doubt both are true; no, he walked with God, implying intimacy, a close personal relationship.

Walking… For many of us it’s largely a leisure pursuit; for them, of course, it was a necessity; how else would you get from A to B? And there would be at least two reasons why people might choose to share their walking with others. They both shed light on why the Bible takes up this image of walking as a metaphor for the godly life.

First, companionship.

In Enoch’s time it would be natural for friends or families to walk together: they would have interests to share and problems to offload. They would also, one hopes, simply enjoy one another’s company.

This clearly reflects our relationship with God, the privilege of being comfortable in his company. Being “religious” or “Christian” is not a matter of performing rituals or carrying out duties, though these have their place, if carried out in glad obedience. In the same way as Enoch enjoyed intimacy with God we too are invited to enter into a warm and loving relationship with him; indeed, if we have no personal relationship with God, our faith, however strong, is nothing.

I can only try to imagine Enoch starting to pray. It was, according to Genesis 5:21-22, “after he became the father of Methusaleh”, that he started to walk with God. I like to think that perhaps it was as Enoch looked in wonder at the face of his baby son that he felt a first powerful impulse to praise and thank God for this gift, and also to cry out for the love and wisdom he would need in order to be a good father.

A simple question arises: Do we, personally, walk with God? An old hymn that began with the words “When we walk with the Lord…” went on to say “Trust and obey, for there’s no other way to be happy in Jesus but to trust and obey”. Not the whole truth, no doubt - the Christian life is certainly not non-stop happiness. But a precious truth nonetheless.

The second reason why people - perhaps even strangers who met in an inn and discovered they were heading the same way – might agree to walk together was safety. “There’s safety in numbers”, the saying goes, and while there’s an element of danger in any form of travel, even to this day, there’s surely nobody more at risk than the solitary walker (witness Jesus’ story of the man who “fell among thieves”).

God not only walks with us, but also gives us other believers who we can walk with. (They’re called, collectively, “the church”.) And they need us as we need them.

Every so often you come across Christians who stand apart from the church, presumably feeling that they simply don’t need it. Well, at best they are ignorant or naïve, at worst arrogant. Who are we to reject a means of blessing that God has provided for us? Do we know better than him? We find some of our companions not particularly pleasant or agreeable? Well, tough! Perhaps God is wanting to teach us how to love them? even to learn some precious lessons from them?

A postscript to the story of Enoch: Genesis doesn’t say “he died”, as it does of all the others in the list. It says that “he was no more, because God took him away”. It seems that, in the Bible, just Enoch and Elijah (2 Kings 2), were spared the pangs of death. Not something that we are encouraged to expect, of course. Yet for us too death is a defeated enemy, so that while we may not be plucked direct from earth to heaven, we can expect to be raised from the sleep of death, when we shall “see Jesus as he is” (1 John 3:2). Are you looking forward to that?

I wonder if we may also meet Enoch?

Father, thank you that Enoch, and all the other Old Testament saints, are my brothers and sisters in Christ. Help me day by day to walk with Jesus in close intimacy and assured safety until that day when I shall see him as he is. Amen.