'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 he 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.

1. 'Enoch walked _with_ God.'