The 70s through the 90s were full of “Holy Spirit-filled” men. Charismatic preachers who talked to God, prophesied, prayed for miracles, filled stadiums. People paid premium to watch these God-filled, powerful men cross the barrier between the natural and the spiritual.
But we’re in the 2020s. Almost all of them have been caught — lies, schemes, the usual list. I won’t name names. None held up. Power, sex, and money caught every last one, and they left behind a generation of skeptics. I’m one of them.
The problem isn’t just that the men lost credibility. It’s that the miracles, the experiences, the Mystery itself — all of it went into the same trash bin with them.
Disconnecting myself from the teenager who read Good Morning, Holy Spirit many times a year and pursued that kind of friendship with the Mystery took years. Finding my way back to Jesus through the swamp and dirt those bad “men of God” left behind has been a hard, mostly lonely road.
In the search for a real and faithful Christianity, I land most days as a modern Christian. I reason my faith. I read history and books. I see the signs of Jesus’s redemption across the last 2000 years of Western civilization — Tom Holland does this brilliantly in Dominion. The Christian witness has shaped the West more deeply than any other force.
But that road sometimes leaves me with a scientific religion. I can see, touch, taste many of the goods Christianity brought to my society. But if Christianity is just that — an evolution in human ethics — then it’s no different from politics or human effort.
For the last five years at least, I’ve been looking for the Mystery.
I don’t fall for churches that copycat what the secular world clearly does better. I don’t care if church is fun. I don’t care if the music sounds like a concert. AC, lights, coffee at reception — all good, all fine. But I look for the Mystery when I go to church.
I want to experience the body of Christ. The sacrament. The inaugurated eschatology. I want to touch the transcendent and receive an eternal answer — something I can’t find at a Tony Robbins event or an epic Foo Fighters show.
So that led me to one question:
Does God still walk among us?
As the story tells it, God went for an “evening walk” in the Garden. And from here on, we get really Bible Nerd — verses, Greek, Hebrew, a walk (pun intended) through Scripture. Grab a cup of tea and sit down. This is gonna be fun.
A Note on Hebrew Before We Start
Hebrew verbs are built from three-letter roots. The root we care about is h-l-k (ה-ל-ך) — “to walk” or “to go.” But the root by itself doesn’t say much. Hebrew puts every root through seven different “stems” (called binyanim) that modify what the verb actually means. Think of them as gears the same root can shift into:
- Qal — simple action (“he walked”)
- Niphal — passive (“he was walked”)
- Piel — intensive (“he walked vigorously”)
- Pual — intensive passive
- Hiphil — causative (“he made someone walk”)
- Hophal — causative passive
- Hithpael — reflexive, iterative, or habitual (“he walked himself about / walked back and forth / customarily walked”)
Hold onto that last one.
The hithpael stem of halak shows up in a small but loaded set of verses where God moves among his people. The stem itself signals habit, pattern, ongoing motion. Not a one-time visit. A way of being.
English doesn’t have stems like this. We just have one verb — “walk.” Hebrew has gears. And the gear God is in when he walks in Eden is the same gear he’s in when he walks in the tabernacle, the camp of Israel, and — through the Greek NT echo — the church.
Let’s trace it.
1. Eden — God Walks Habitually with Humanity
“And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.” — Genesis 3:8
The verb is mithallek — hithpael participle of halak. Habitual walking. Adam and Eve recognize the sound of it, which suggests this wasn’t God’s first visit. It was a pattern.
Communion in Eden was direct, unmediated, embodied. No tabernacle. No priests. No veil. God walks. Humans walk with him.
2. The Fall — The Walking Is Interrupted
Same passage, immediately after: “the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden.”
The walking doesn’t stop because God leaves. It stops because humans hide. God comes looking — “Where are you?” — and the rest of the Bible is, in one sense, the story of God re-opening that walk.
3. The Patriarchs — Exceptional Cases
A few individuals in early Genesis get described with the same verb form:
- Enoch — “walked (hithhallek) with God; and he was not, for God took him.” (Genesis 5:22, 24)
- Noah — “Noah walked (hithhallek) with God.” (Genesis 6:9)
- Abraham — “Walk (hithhallek) before me, and be blameless.” (Genesis 17:1)
Same root. Same stem. The Eden posture, partially recovered, in individual lives. These men aren’t the rule — they’re the exceptions that show the rule is still possible.
Worth noting: Abraham gets a title nobody else gets.
In Jehoshaphat’s prayer: “Did you not, our God… give this land forever to the descendants of Abraham your friend?” (2 Chronicles 20:7). In Isaiah 41:8: “the offspring of Abraham, my friend.” And in James 2:23: “he was called a friend of God.”
Walking with God and friendship with God belong to the same vocabulary.
4. Tabernacle and Temple — Walking, But Mediated
The hithpael of halak shows up again at scale once Israel has the tabernacle:
“I will walk (hithhallakti) among you and will be your God, and you shall be my people.” — Leviticus 26:12
“The LORD your God walks (mithallek) in the midst of your camp to deliver you.” — Deuteronomy 23:14
“I have been moving about (mithallek) in a tent for my dwelling.” — 2 Samuel 7:6
Same verb. Same stem. But now the walking is mediated — through sacred space, priesthood, sacrifice. God still walks, but through a building.
Eden’s communion is being reconstructed in tabernacle form. G.K. Beale and others have argued (convincingly, I think) that the tabernacle and temple were designed as Eden in microcosm — gold, garden imagery, cherubim guarding the entrance just like at Eden’s gate.
5. Incarnation — God Tabernacles in Flesh
“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” — John 1:14
The Greek verb is eskēnōsen — from skēnoō, “to pitch a tent.” It’s the tabernacle word. John is making a deliberate claim: the same God who tabernacled with Israel in the wilderness has now tabernacled in human flesh in Jesus.
The presence becomes a person. The walking becomes a man you can have dinner with. The Mystery has a face.
6. Pentecost Onward — The Spirit Indwells the Church
Here’s where it gets personal.
The NT writers explicitly apply the Eden walking-and-dwelling language to the church age — the in-between time we’re living in now.
The Septuagint (the Greek translation of the OT that the apostles read) consistently translates the hithpael of halak with the Greek verb peripateō — “to walk about.” That’s the thread the NT picks up.
And then Paul, in 2 Corinthians 6:16, does something extraordinary:
“What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, ‘I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.’”
Paul is quoting Leviticus 26:12 directly. The Greek verbs are enoikēsō (“I will dwell in”) and emperipatēsō (“I will walk among”). Paul takes the Eden-echo, tabernacle promise — and says it’s being fulfilled right now, in the church.
Other texts in the same field:
- John 14:17, 23 — “He dwells with you and will be in you… we will come and make our home with him.”
- 1 Corinthians 3:16 — “You are God’s temple… God’s Spirit dwells in you.”
- 1 Corinthians 6:19 — your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit.
- Ephesians 2:21–22 — the church is “a holy temple in the Lord… a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.”
- Matthew 28:20 — “I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
- Revelation 2:1 — the risen Christ described as peripatōn — walking among — the seven lampstands (which are the seven churches).
Christ walking. Present tense. Among the churches. Now.
7. New Jerusalem — Fully Restored
“And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.’” — Revelation 21:3
No temple, because God himself is the temple (Rev 21:22). The tree of life restored (Rev 22:2). The river flowing again (Rev 22:1). Eden re-opened — but as a city this time.
Face to face. Walking resumed. Without mediation.
So, does God still walk among us?
I’d say the Bible says yes.
Jesus, Paul, and John all agree that this is what started to happen with Jesus. And if I may be so bold — it sounds like the main message of Jesus himself: “The Kingdom of God is near.”
We’re not in the New Jerusalem yet. The walking isn’t face-to-face. But the NT writers spent serious ink arguing that the Eden promise is active now — not waiting on the resurrection of the dead, but happening in the church, by the Spirit, in this in-between time. Paul calls it a mystery. He uses the word on purpose.
I will try to walk my way back to that teenage (childish?) faith. Find my way to be like Abraham — the friend of God. And why not — be bold enough to grab a cup of tea, open my door, walk outside without phones or headphones, take a deep breath, and say:
Good morning, Holy Spirit.