THE COURSE AND CROWN OF A DEVOUT LIFE
by
Alexander Maclaren
'And Enoch walked with God; and he was not, for God took
him.' GENESIS v. 24.
This notice of Enoch occurs in the course of a catalogue of the
descendants of Adam, from the Creation to the Deluge. It is
evidently a very ancient document, and is constructed on a
remarkable plan. The formula for each man is the same. So-and-so
lived, begat his heir, the next in the series, lived on after that
so many years, having anonymous children, lived altogether so long,
and then died. The chief thing about each life is the birth of the
successor, and each man's career is in broad outline the same. A
dreary monotony runs through the ages. How brief and uniform may be the
records of lives of striving and tears and smiles and love that
stretched through centuries! Nine hundred years shrink into less
than as many lines.
The solemn monotony is broken in the case of Enoch. This paragraph begins as
usual--he 'lived'; but afterwards, instead of that word, we read that he
'walked with God'--happy they for whom such a phrase is equivalent to
'live'--and, instead of 'died,' it is said of him that 'he _was not_.' That
seems to imply that he, as it were,
slipped out of sight or suddenly disappeared; as one of the psalms
says, 'I looked, and lo! he was not.' He was there a moment ago--now he is
gone; and my text tells how that sudden withdrawal came about. God, with
whom he walked, put out His hand and took him to Himself. Of course. What
other end could there be to a life that was all passed in communion with God
except that apotheosis and crown of it all, the lifting of the man into
closer communion with his Father and his Friend?
So, then, there are just these two things here--the noblest life and
its crown.
1. The noblest life.
'He walked with God.' That is all. There is no need to tell what he
did or tried to do, how he sorrowed or joyed, what were his
circumstances. These may all fade from men's knowledge as they have somewhat
faded from his memory up yonder. It is enough that he walked with God.
Of course, we have here, underlying the phrase, the familiar
comparison of life to a journey, with all its suggestions of constant change
and constant effort, and with the suggestion, too, that each life should be
a progress directly tending to one clearly recognised goal. But passing from
that, let us just think for a moment of the characteristics which must go to
make up a life of which we can say that it is walking with God. The first of
these clearly is the one that the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews puts
his finger upon, when he makes faith the spring of Enoch's career. The first
requisite to true communion with God is vigorous exercise of that faculty by
which we realise the fact of His presence with us; and that not as a
jealous-eyed inspector, from whose scrutiny we would fain escape, but as a
companion and friend to whom we can cleave. 'He that cometh to God,' and
walks with God, must first of all 'believe that He _is_'; and passing by all
the fascinations of things seen, and rising above all the
temptations of things temporal, his realising eye must fix upon the
divine Father and see Him nearer and more clearly than these. You
cannot walk with God unless you are emancipated from the dominion of sense
and time, and are living by the power of that great faculty, which lays hold
of the things that are unseen as the realities, and smiles at the false and
forged pretensions of material things to be
the real. We have to invert the teaching of the world and of our
senses. My fingers and my eyes and my ears tell me that this gross,
material universe about me is the real, and that all beyond it is
shadowy and (sometimes we think) doubtful, or, at any rate, dim and
far off. But that is false, and the truth is precisely the other way. The
Unseen is the Real, and the Material is the merely Apparent. Behind all
visible objects, and giving them all their reality, lies the unchangeable
God.
Cultivate the faculty and habit of vigorous faith, if you would walk
with God. For the world will put its bandages over your eyes, and
try to tempt you to believe that these poor, shabby illusions are the
precious things; and we have to shake ourselves free from its harlot kisses
and its glozing lies, by very vigorous and continual efforts of the will and
of the understanding, if we are to make real to ourselves that which is
real, the presence of our God.
Besides this vigorous exercise of the faculty of faith, there is another
requisite for a walk with God, closely connected with it, and yet capable of
being looked at separately, and that is, that we shall keep up the habit of
continual occupation of thought with Him. That is very much an affair of
habit with Christian people, and I am afraid that the neglect of it is the
habitual practice of the bulk of professing Christians nowadays. It is hard,
amidst all our work and thought and joys and sorrows, to keep fresh our
consciousness of His presence, and to talk with Him in the midst of the rush
of business. But what do we do about our dear ones when we are away from
them? The measure of our love of them is accurately represented by the
frequency of our remembrances of them. The mother parted from
her child, the husband and the wife separated from one another, the
lover and the friend, think of each other a thousand times a day.
Whenever the spring is taken off, then the natural bent of the
inclination and heart assert themselves, and the mind goes back
again, as into a sanctuary, into the sweet thought. Is that how we
do with God? Do we so walk with Him, as that thought, when released,
instinctively sets in that direction? When I take off the break, does my
spirit turn to God? If there is no hand at the helm, does the bow always
point that way? When the magnet is withdrawn for a moment, does the needle
tremble back and settle itself northwards? If we are walking with God, we
shall, more times a day than we can count when the evening comes on, have
had the thought of Him coming into our hearts 'like some sweet beguiling
melody, so sweet we know not we are listening to it.' Thus we shall 'walk
with God.'
Then there is another requisite. 'How can two walk together except
they be agreed?' 'He that saith he abideth in Him ought himself also
so to walk even as He walked.' There is no union with God in such
communion possible, unless there be a union with Him by conformity
of will and submission of effort and aim to His commandments. Well,
then, is that life possible for us? Look at this instance before us. We know
very little about how much knowledge of God these people in
old days had, but, at all events, it was a great deal less than you and I
have. Their theology was very different from ours; their religion was
absolutely identical with ours. Their faith, which grasped the God revealed
in their creed, was the same as our faith, though the creed which their
faith grasped was only an outline sketch of yours and mine. But at all times
and in all generations, the element and essence of the religious life has
been the same-that is, the realising sense of the living divine presence,
the effort and aspiration after communion with Him, and the quiet obedience
and conformity of the practical life to His will. And so we can reach out
our hands across all the centuries to this pre-Noachian, antediluvian
patriarch, dim amongst the mists, and feel that he too is our brother.
And he has set us the example that in all conditions of life, and under the
most unfavourable circumstances, it is possible to live in this close touch
with God. For in his time, not only was there, as I have said, an incomplete
and rudimentary knowledge of God, but in his time the earth was filled with
violence, and gigantic forms of evil are represented as having dominated
mankind. Amidst it all, the Titanic pride, the godlessness, the scorn, the
rudeness, and the violence, amidst it all, this one 'white flower of a
blameless life' managed to find nutriment upon the dunghill, and to blossom
fresh and fair there. You and I cannot, whatever may be our hindrances in
living a consistent Christian life, have anything like the difficulties that
this man had and surmounted. For us all, whatever our conditions, such a
life is possible.
And then there is another lesson that he teaches us, viz. that such
a life is consistent with the completest discharge of all common duties. The
outline, as far as appearance was concerned, of this man's life was the same
as the outline of those of his ancestors and
successors. They are all described in the same terms. The formula is
the same. Enoch lived, Mahalaleel, and all the rest of the
half-unpronounceable names, they lived, they begat their heirs, and sons
and daughters, and then they died. And the same formula is used
about this man. He walked with God, but it was while treading the
common path of secular life that he did so.
He found it possible to live in communion with God, and yet to do
all the common things that men did then. Anybody's house may be a
Bethel--a house of God--and anybody's work may be worship; and
wherever we are and whatever we do, it is possible therein to serve
God, and there to walk with Him.
2. And now a word about the crown of this life of communion. 'He was not,
for God took him' What wonderful reticence in describing, or rather hinting
at, the stupendous miracle that is here in question! Is that like a book
that came from the legend-loving and legend-making brains of men; or does it
sound like the speech of God, to whom nothing is extraordinary and nothing
needs to have a mark of admiration after it? It was the same to Him whether
Enoch died or whether He simply took him to Himself. If one wants to know
what men would have made of such a thing, if _they_ had had to tell it, let
them read those wretched Rabbinical fables that have been stitched on to
this verse. There they will see how men describe miracles; and here they
will see how God does so.
'_He was not_.' As I have said, he disappeared; that was what the world
knew. 'God took him'; that was what God tells the world.
Thus this strange exception to the law of death stood, as I suppose,
to the ancient world as doing somewhat the same office for them that
the translation of Elijah afterwards partially did for Israel, and that the
resurrection of Jesus Christ does completely for us, viz. it brought the
future life into the realm of fact, and took it out of the dim region of
speculation altogether. He establishes a truth who proves it, and he proves
a fact that shows it. A doctrine of a future state is not worth much, but
the fact of a future state, which was established by this incident then, and
is certified for us all now, by the Christ risen from the dead, is
all-important. Our gospel is all built upon facts, and this is the earliest
fact in man's history which made man's subsistence in other conditions than
that of earthly life a certainty.
And then, again, this wonderful exception shows to us, as it did to
that ancient world, that the natural end of a religious life is union with
God hereafter. It seems to me that the real proofs of a future life are two:
one, the fact of Christ's resurrection, and the other, the fact of our
religious experience. For anything looks to me more likely, and less
incredible, than that a man who could walk with God should only have a poor
earthly life to do it in, and that all these aspirations, these emotions,
should be bounded and ended by a trivial thing, that touches only the
physical frame. Surely, surely, there is nothing so absurd as to believe
that he who can say 'Thou art my God,' and who has said it, should ever by
anything be brought to cease to say it. Death cannot kill love to God; and
the only end of the religious life of earth is its perfecting in heaven. The
experiences that we have here, in their loftiness and in their
incompleteness, equally witness for us, of the rest and the perfectness that
remain for the children of God.
Then, again, this man in his unique experience was, and is, a witness of the
fact that death is an excrescence, and results from sin. I suppose that he
trod the road which the divine intention had destined to be trodden by all
the children of men, if they had not sinned; and that his experience, unique
as it is, is a survival, so to speak, of what was meant to be the law for
humanity, unless there had intervened the terrible fact of sin and its
wages, death. The road had been made, and this one man was allowed to travel
along it that we might all learn, by the example of the exception, that the
rule under which we live was not the rule that God originally meant for us,
and that death has resulted from the fact of transgression. No doubt Enoch
had in him the seeds of it, no doubt there were the possibilities of disease
and the necessity of death in his physical frame, but God has shown us in
that one instance, and in the other of the great prophet's, how _He_ is not
subject to the law that men shall die, although men are subject to it, and
that if He will, He can take them all to Himself, as He did take these two,
and will take them who, at last, shall not die but be changed.
Let me remind you that this unique and exceptional end of a life of
communion may, in its deepest, essential character, be experienced
by each of us. There are two passages in the book of Psalms, both of which I
regard as allusions to this incident. The one of them is in
the forty-ninth Psalm and reads thus: 'He will deliver my soul from
the power of the grave, for He will take me.' Our version conceals
the allusion, by its unfortunate and non-literal rendering 'receive.' The
same word is employed there as here. Can we fail to see the reference? The
Psalmist expects his soul to be 'delivered from the power of the grave,'
because God _takes_ it.
And again, in the great seventy-third Psalm, which marks perhaps the
highwater mark of pre-Christian anticipations of a future state, we read:
'Thou wilt guide me by Thy counsel, and afterwards _take_
me' (again the same word) 'to glory.' Here, again, the Psalmist looks back
to the unique and exceptional instance, and in the rapture and ecstasy of
the faith that has grasped the living God as his portion, says to himself:
'Though the externals of Enoch's end and of mine may differ, their substance
will be the same, and I, too, shall cease to be seen of men, because God
takes me into the secret of His pavilion, by the loving clasp of His lifting
hand.'
Enoch was led, if I may say so, round the top of the valley, beyond
the head waters of the dark river, and was kept on the high level
until he got to the other side. You and I have to go down the hill,
out of the sunshine, in among the dank weeds, to stumble over the
black rocks, and wade through the deep water; but we shall get over
to the same place where he stands, and He that took him round by the top
will 'take' us through the river; and so shall we 'ever be with
the Lord.'
'Enoch walked with God and he was not; for God took him.' This verse is
like some little spring with trees and flowers on a cliff. The
dry genealogical table--and here this bit of human life in it! How
unlike the others--they _lived_ and they _died_; this man's life was
walking with God and his departure was a fading away, a ceasing to be found
here. It is remarkable in how calm a tone the Bible speaks of its
supernatural events. We should not have known this to be a miracle but for
the Epistle to the Hebrews.
The dim past of these early chapters carries us over many centuries.
We know next to nothing about the men, where they lived, how they
lived, what thoughts they had, what tongue they spoke. Some people
would say that they never lived at all. I believe, and most of you,
I suppose, believe that they did. But how little personality we give
them! Little as we know of environment and circumstances, we know the main
thing, the fact of their having been. Then we are sure that they had sorrow
and joy, strife and love, toil and rest, like the
rest of us, that whether their days were longer or shorter they were
filled much as ours are, that whatever was the pattern into which
the quiet threads of their life was woven it was, warp and weft, the
same yarn as ours. In broad features every human life is much the
same. Widely different as the clothing of these grey fathers in their tents,
with their simple contrivances and brief records, is from that of cultivated
busy Englishmen to-day, the same human form is beneath both. And further, we
know but little as to their religious ideas, how far they were surrounded
with miracles, what they knew of God and of His purposes, how they received
their knowledge, what served them for a Bible. Of what positive institutions
of religion they had we know nothing; whether for them there was sacrifice
and a sabbath day, how far the original gospel to Adam was known or
remembered or understood by them. All that is perfectly dark to us. But this
we know, that those of them who were godly men lived by the same power by
which godly men live nowadays. Whatever their creed, their religion was
ours. Religion, the bond that unites again the soul to God, has always been
the same.
Maclaren
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