WALKING WITH GOD by H. Clay Trumbull

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Feb 10, 1887

WALKING WITH GOD.

By H. Clay Trumbull

NOAH walked with God. Not because God would have no other man than Noah to walk with him, but because Noah preferred to walk in God’s way, while all other men preferred to walk in their own way, does the record stand that Noah walked with God. God welcomes every one of his human family to his holy companionship; but he gives to every one of these the privilege of walking with God or of walking apart from God. In order to walk with God, Noah had to choose another way than the way of his fellow-men. He must be all by himself, in his conduct and in his course. It required courage, it required independence of character, it required faith to walk with God when no one else on earth was going in that direction. Yet Noah was the gainer above all his fellows, through his walking with God, at the cost of parting with his fellows. And no man was ever the loser through walking with God. Yet it is not an easy matter to walk with God, when all one’s fellows are walking in the opposite direction, and are insisting that theirs is the way to walk.

He who walks with God has nothing to fear from the power of God, or from the judgments of God. Being at one with God, he is a sharer in all that promotes the glory of God. But he who chooses the way of evil enters upon a campaign against God. Unless he can overthrow God, he must be overthrown of God; for God and evil are in necessary and in inevitable conflict. It is not that God issues an arbitrary decree of destruction against individual sinners as such; but it is that God is against evil, and that he who is with God has a part in God’s triumph over evil; while he who is against God must fall with the evil to which he has given himself up.—H. Clay Trumbull.