Only One Way to Walk with God

Only One Way to Walk with God: Christian Discipleship for New Expressions of Church

By John M. Hull

[Louise Nelstrop, Martyn Percy, (eds) Evaluating Fresh Expressions: explorations of the emerging church, London, SCM press, 2009, pp 105 – 121]

As a teenage Christian, I always felt uncomfortable when we sang the hymn by William Cowper, published in the Olney Hymn Book in 1779, which begins ‘O for a closer walk with God’. The poet had, it seemed to me, committed or perhaps we should say that he had indulged in some sin which, or so he thought, had caused the Holy Spirit to depart from him, leaving ‘an aching void the world can never fill’. The sin was not named, but I was pretty sure it had something to do with sex. When one announced a hatred of it, the holy dove would return. But how could one hate sex? This threw me (and I am sure the same has been felt by hundreds of thousands of people) into a desperate collision course between faith in God and on the other hand the attractiveness of one of life’s most exciting options. This struggle culminates in the third verse, when the singer cries out:

The dearest idol I have known,

What e’er that idol be,

Help me to tear it from thy throne

and worship only thee.

I now believe that these adolescent agonies were induced by a spirituality of inwardness, in which emotional satisfaction and religious demands were opposed to one another, in such a way as to make it quite impossible for one to realise what it might be to walk closely with God.

Not until my adult life, and indeed my later adulthood, did I gradually realise that I had been duped by a spirituality which had made me insensitive to the world’s sufferings, had given me the idea that my feelings were the most important thing in being Christian, which had created a psychological tension that afflicted my life for several years.

All this time, the Bible itself was telling me how to walk closely with God, but I was unable to hear it. This was not only because of the preoccupation with my inner life and my struggles of conscience, which had given me a misguided concept of purity, but a kind of inability to penetrate the veil which hung between me and the Bible.

The veil was the image left on the imagination of the church by its struggle for legitimation during its first few centuries.

Walking with God

When the Old Testament speaks of walking with God in the sense of pursuing a certain way of life, the reference is usually to obediently observing the laws and commandments of God. In Deuteronomy the giving of the Decalogue concludes with the following exhortation.

So be careful to do what the LORD your God has commanded you; do not turn aside to the right or to the left. Walk in obedience to all that the Lord your God has commanded you, so that you may live and prosper and prolong your days in the land that you will possess. (Deut. 5.32-33)[1]

Similar expressions are found in Deuteronomy 8.6; 11.22; 19.9; 26.17; 28.9; and 30.16. This ideal of the religious life is summed up in Deuteronomy 10.12-13:

And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to observe the Lord's commands and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good?

To keep God’s commandments is to walk in justice because ‘The Lord loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of his unfailing love.’ (Ps. 33.5) and ‘And the heavens proclaim his righteousness, for he is a God of justice.’ (Ps. 50.6) Walking with God in this way is to know God for ‘The Lord is known by his acts of justice.’ (Ps. 9.16)

This is why those who follow the way of the Lord are said to walk in justice. ‘he is a shield to those whose walk is blameless, for he guards the course of the just and protects the way of his faithful ones.’ (Prov. 2.7b-8) In Proverbs, wisdom calls out ‘I walk in the way of righteousness, along the paths of justice’ (Prov. 8.20). And if you follow wisdom, ‘Thus you will walk in the ways of the just and keep to the paths of the righteous.’ (Prov. 2.20) This is why those who seek an end to warfare and fore peace between the nations are described as walking in the light of the Lord. (Isa. 2.4-5) The whole teaching of the Hebrew Bible on what it is to walk with God is summed up in Micah verse 6.8, ‘He has shown all you people what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.’

In the New Testament letters, the verb peripateo which literally means ‘walk’ is frequently used to describe the way of life expected of Christian disciples. In many of the modern translations, however, this rather beautiful, concrete image, with its hint of making steady progress on the journey, is rendered by expressions such as living or even simply doing. So the King James Bible, the authorized version, translated Ephesians 4.1 ‘I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called,’ where as Today’s New International Version says ‘As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received.’ Similarly, the AV of Ephesians 2.10 reads ‘For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them,’ but the TNIV has ‘For we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.’

In order to highlight the metaphor of walking we will take further illustrations from the AV. To walk with God through Christ is to live the ethical life, characterized by honesty, sincerity, acts of mercy, and above all by love. ‘Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying.’ (Romans 13.13) Christians ‘have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully; but by manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God.’ (2 Cor. 4.2) This walking is an imitation of Christ: As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in him (Col 2.6), and its climax is love: And walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us’ (Eph. 5.2) This love continues and enriches the Old Testament walking in obedience to the Lord, so that ‘Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.’ (Rom. 13.10), and ‘And this is love: that we walk in obedience to his commands. As you have heard from the beginning, his command is that you walk in love.’ (2 John 1.6)

It is clear that to walk with God, to be in a state of steady fellowship with God through Jesus Christ according to the Bible is essentially a horizontal relationship.[2] God is loved through the neighbour, and obedience to God is shown through seeking after justice for others. Any personal or direct relation with God must be on the far side of that walking not on this side. It is not a matter of loving God first and then as an outcome loving our neighbour but rather the biblical model is that as we love the neighbour and seek justice for him and her, our love to God finds concrete expression, is enriched, and finds a closeness with God who has commanded us so to walk. This is to be in Christ, to walk the way of Jesus Christ, to seek to live as he did, the man for others. But if someone believes that he or she is walking with God and neglects the ethical, interpersonal character of this walking, such a person has a faith that is dead.

We must ask how it came about that the plain teaching of the Bible appears to have been lost, to some extent, and the inter-personal relationship was turned into an introspective one, as we saw in the famous hymn.

The Old Testament and the Struggle for Christian Legitimacy

Nearly all the authors of the New Testament were Jews, and they were caught up in a dispute about their legitimacy as inheritors of the traditions of Israel, and about their claim that the crucified Jesus was the promised Messiah.[3] Early Christian faith was a form of Judaism,[4] at a time when there were many groups claiming the right to be true Jews, and the issue hung on an interpretation of the Jewish scriptures.[5] Christians tried to prove that their faith, although new, was not a novelty. That mattered a great deal in a society in which antiquity was a mark of authenticity. The classical world valued antiquity highly, as can be illustrated by the disputes about the relative chronology of Greek and Hebrew culture and law.[6]

One of the things the Jews, gathered in Jerusalem for the feast of Pentecost, found impressive about the speech of Peter was his claim that ‘This is what was promised by the prophets.’ (Acts 2.16) The criterion of quality was prediction, and every aspect of the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ was soon found to have been predicted. So the use of parables by Jesus had been foretold (Matt. 13.14, 35); his miracles were anticipated (Matt. 8.17), even the soldiers throwing dice for his clothes were fulfilling scripture (John 19.24). This element of foretelling gave an air of normality, of expectation, to what otherwise must have seemed claims of enormous originality. To those who knew their Bibles, the message proclaimed, even the resurrection of Christ need come as no surprise (Acts 2.27). These things had to be, and to recognise this necessity was to be converted to Christian faith (Luke 24.25-34; Acts 8.30-38).[7]

In spite of the urgency of the demand for legitimation, significant traces of the character of the God of Israel do remain in the Gospels, and perhaps particularly in the Gospel of Luke. The concern of Luke for the marginalised and the outcast seems to have made him more ready to hear the message of the Bible (Luke 1.52-53), as it then was, or maybe it was the other way round: Luke’s deep knowledge and love for the Bible made him more open to the cry of the outcast (Luke 4.18; 19.10.20). Perhaps this might have been expected of Matthew’s Gospel as well, and we do find many examples of it in Matthew, but on the whole the concern of Matthew to give a theological rationale for the emergence of the Gentile church in which strong Jewish elements remained proved the stronger motive.[8]

There is some evidence that at least some elements within the later first century church were well aware of the way that foretelling was taking the place of forth-telling in the understanding of the Bible. One example of this may be found in the story of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16.19-31). This passage is often read under the influence of John 5:46, ‘If you believe Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me,’ but there is no Christological element in the Lukan story. The rich man had completely ignored the presence of Lazarus although the destitute man was sitting at his very gate.[9] Perhaps he had never even noticed Lazarus was there. He was punished in the next life because he had not listened to the voice of the poor. He now wants to warn his family about the dangers of the fiery torment but Abraham’s reply is ‘They have Moses and the Prophets, let them listen to them.’ (v. 29) They were to listen to the judgment of God upon those who failed to hear the cry of the destitute.[10] The one who returns from the dead is the poor man Lazarus, but even when the poor rise up against them, the rich cannot perceive the justice of God. (Job 20.19-27) The Christian readers of Luke’s Gospel might have seen this as a reference to the resurrection of Jesus. The idea, however, is not that the resurrection of Christ was foretold in Moses and the Prophets but that if you ignore the claims of justice, you will still do so even as a Christian believing in the resurrection. Christ’s resurrection inaugurated the Kingdom of God, and the great reversal spoken by Jesus was now in full force but to those who do not pay attention to the God of justice the resurrection becomes just a sensational nature miracle.

The need to establish worthy credentials did not cease when Christian faith was clearly distinguishable from Judaism, but continued with even greater vigour, because it had become an important aspect of a struggle between what had, by the middle of the second century, become two religions. This can be seen very clearly in the works of Justin Martyr in the middle of the second century, where the details of the life of Jesus are proven by prophecy.[11]

The result of this long drawn out situation of rivalry was that the meaning of the Old Testament, as it came to be known, for the New Testament was that of promise and fulfilment. The two covenants were related as type and ante-type, as looking forward and as realizing that vision of the future.[12] What was concealed in the old is revealed in the new, covert in the first, overt in the second.[13] The Old Testament became preliminary, and so the foundations of a theology of supercession were laid. The message of the law and the prophets could no longer be heard in its own integrity but only as a foreshadowing of Christian faith.

This way of approaching the Old Testament continued throughout the middle ages, and became even more prominent during the Reformation. Martin Luther’s Christ-centred interpretation of the Old Testament led to him dismissing everything that was not clearly to do with Jesus Christ.[14] He rejected the apostolic authority of James because ‘he names Christ several times; however he teaches nothing about Him, but only speaks of general faith in God.’[15]

This approach to the first covenant is still inculcated into every Christmas, when traditional services such as the nine lessons and carols teach congregations and the general public that the Hebrew Bible is basically a series of adumbrations of the coming of Jesus,[16] and such influential music as Handel’s Messiah adds to this impression. There is a messianic strand running through parts of the Old Testament, but this is by no means its major theme. Not until the twentieth century theologies of the Old Testament by Eichrodt, von Rad, and above all Walter Brueggemann was the message of the Hebrews Scriptures heard in its own characteristic voice.[17]