'Enoch walked with God,'--GENESIS v. 22.
'Walk before Me.'--GENESIS xvii. 1.
'Ye shall walk after the Lord your God.'--DEUTERONOMY xiii. 4.
You will have anticipated, I suppose, my purpose in doing what I very
seldom do--cutting little snippets out of different verses and putting
them together. You see that these three fragments, in their
resemblances and in their differences, are equally significant and
instructive. They concur in regarding life as a walk--a metaphor which
expresses continuity, so that every man's life is a whole, which
expresses progress, which expresses change, and which implies a goal.
They agree in saying that God must be brought into a life somehow, and
in some aspect, if that life is to be anything else but an aimless
wandering, if it is to tend to the point to which every human life
should attain. But then they diverge, and, if we put them together,
they say to us that there are three different ways in which we ought to
bring God into our life. We should 'walk _with_ Him,' like Enoch; we
should 'walk _before_' Him, as Abraham was bade to do; and we should
'walk _after_' Him, as the command to do was given to all Israel. And
these three prepositions, _with_, _before_, _after_, attached to the
general idea of life as a walk, give us a triple aspect--which yet is,
of course, fundamentally, one--of the way in which life may be
ennobled, dignified, calmed, hallowed, focussed, and concentrated by
the various relations into which we enter with Him. So I take the three
of them.