Walking with God

“And all the days of E?ioch were three hundred sixty and five years: and Enoch walked with God: a?id he was not; for God took him” — Gen. v. 23, 24.

Great men, it hath been said, have short biographies. So is it with Enoch. He is the greatest figure of that old world, head and shoulders above all the antediluvians, yet his was the shortest life of all. The number of his outward years does not attain to the number of the years of his fathers; there is less to tell of him than of them. Why is there less to tell? It is because he is greater than they. His life was more inward, and therefore it was more hidden. The part that lived most intensely was just the part which men do not see — the spirit, the heart, the soul. His life was hid with God, because in its essence it was the life of God — love. It was too inward a life to make an impression on the world; its walk was divine, and therefore it was deemed a lowly walk, a tiling to be forgotten. Yet nothing else has been remembered in all that world. Its wars and rumours of wars, its marryings and givings in marriage, its buyings and sellings and banquetings have been numbered with the dead; but Enoch, by his walk with God, is alive for evermore.

My soul, thy walk with God is thy evidence of immortality. What is it that separates thee from the beast of the field? It is the path of duty. There thou walkest with God aloft and alone. Thou hast already a portion unshared by the life of the lower creation. Thou hast transcended the seen and temporal; thou hast entered the unseen and eternal, thou hast passed from death unto life. No human theory can rob thee of thy hope. It is not a hope, it is not a faith, it is not even a proof; it is a sight, a fact, an experience, a life begun. Thy hope of glory is Christ already in thee. Thou art immortal before death. Thou hast reached even now the promised land, and canst look smiling from the other bank of Jordan. When death shall come to seek thee, he shall see thee already escaped from the 18 MOMENTS ON THE MOUNT.

fowler’s snare, and shall write this verdict of his own discomfiture, “He was not found; for God took him.”