Two Steps Forward, One Step Back!

Those who walk by sight walk alone. Walking by sight is just this—“I believe in myself,” whereas walking by faith is, “I believe in God.”—12.116

Charles Spurgeon

If I walk with the world, I can’t walk with God.

Dwight L. Moody

The harder I work the farther behind I get!

WALK. Of the very many occasions when this verb is used in Scripture, the vast majority have the strictly literal sense of moving along or making one’s way. It was the normal activity of men, but where the ability to walk had been lost it was capable of being restored by Christ. This outward healing corresponded to an inward renewal which Jesus claimed to be able to effect (Mk. 2:9). Jesus is further represented in the Gospels as walking and enabling others to walk under conditions not normally given to men (Mk. 6:48). Here again, as Matthew’s Gospel makes clear, the physical act has a spiritual significance (Mt. 14:31). Walking can be understood as representative of the whole range of human activity to which an impotent man is restored (Acts 3:6).

The term is used in an anthropomorphic sense of God who walks in the garden in the cool of the evening (Gn. 3:8), and metaphorically it is applied to the heart (Jb. 31:7), to the moon (Jb. 31:26), to the tongue of the wicked (Ps. 73:9) and to the pestilence (Ps. 91:6). More frequently it stands for the whole manner of a man’s life and conduct, and to the attitude which God takes up towards him, so that God can say: ‘If you … walk contrary to me, then I also will walk contrary to you’ (Lv. 26:23–24).

On occasion the term can be used in a more limited sense, referring to specific laws and observances enjoined upon men (Acts 21:21; cf. Heb. halāḵâ, ‘rule’, lit. ‘walk’), while in John’s Gospel it sometimes assumes the connotation of unwearied activity (Jn. 11:9), and sometimes of public appearance (Jn. 7:1). Metaphorically it denotes a studied observance of the new rule of life, and it is this sense which dominates the usage of all the forms in the Epistles, where there is a frequent contrasting of the walk which was characteristic of believers in their unregenerate days, and that to which they are called through faith in Christ. Baptism is to mark decisively the dividing-point between these two (Rom. 6:4), which is as clear as the distinction between the life of Christ before and after his resurrection. This renewal of life can equally well be expressed as walking in the spirit in contrast to walking according to the flesh. The word stoicheō, which appears once in Acts and four times in the Pauline Epistles, is used of the setting of plants in rows, and of soldiers walking in file, but the choice of verb appears to have no special significance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. G. Ebel, NIDNTT 3, pp. 933–947.

F. S. FITZSIMMONDS.