The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

by Dallas Willard

It restricts us to the visible, physical world where what our hearts demand can never be.

“Blessed are the spiritual zeros—the spiritually bankrupt, deprived and deficient, the spiritual beggars, those without a wisp of ‘religion’—when the kingdom of the heavens comes upon them.”

Real poverty in the human order is almost automatically taken as a sign of failure in every respect.

This struggle with the translation reflects our intense need to find in the condition referred to something good, something God supposedly desires or even requires, that then can serve as a “reasonable” basis for the blessedness he bestows. But that precisely misses the point that the very formulation of the Beatitudes should bring to our attention.

Those poor in spirit are called “blessed” by Jesus, not because they are in a meritorious condition, but because, precisely in spite of and in the midst of their ever so deplorable condition, the rule of the heavens has moved redemptively upon and through them by the grace of Christ.

It is not because a man is poor in spirit that his is the Kingdom of Heaven, in the sense that the one state will grow into the other, or be its result;

Here we have full-blown, if not salvation by works, then possibly salvation by attitude.

Such an interpretation readily accounts for the fact that among Evangelicals, up until about twenty years ago, one could not teach kingdom principles for present living without being regarded as preaching a mere “social” gospel. Such a gospel sought to realize the kingdom of God by emphasizing legal and social reforms in line with Christian imperatives. And it was indeed, for all its good intent, a form of “works salvation”—one that now lives on in the fully secularized “social ethics” movement. Of course the only salvation in question for it was one from deprivation and suffering in this life.

It is true that Jesus’ call to the kingdom now, just like that psalm, is of such a radical nature, is so utterly subversive of “life as usual,” that anyone who takes it seriously will be under constant temptation to disconnect it from “normal” human existence.

the clear intent of the New Testament as a whole is that Jesus’ teachings are meant to be applied now. For if they are not, neither is the remainder of what the New Testament says about life. You cannot consistently say that the great passages such as Romans 8, 1 Corinthians 13, Colossians 3, and Galatians 5, for example, are for now—as everyone admits—while relegating the Sermon on the Mount and other Gospel passages to the next dispensation or life. This cannot be, simply because they actually say the same things.

They single out cases that provide proof that, in him, the rule of God from the heavens truly is available in life circumstances that are beyond all human hope.

It is crucial to note here what Jesus did not say. He did not say that the rich cannot enter the kingdom. In fact he said they could—with God’s help, which is the only way anyone can do it. Nor did he say that the poor have, on the whole, any advantage over the rich so far as “being saved” is concerned. By using the case at hand, he simply upset the prevailing general assumption about God and riches. For how could God favor a person, however rich, who loves him less than wealth?

provide for more than our little circle of mutual appreciation,

Jesus deftly rejects the question “Who is my neighbor?” and substitutes the only question really relevant here: “To whom will I be a neighbor?”

he teaches us that we cannot identify who “has it,” who is “in” with God, who is “blessed,” by looking at exteriors of any sort.

What he is saying cannot be understood unless we appreciate how he teaches, and we cannot appreciate how he teaches unless we take into account something of the world within which his teaching occurred.

is a peculiarly modern notion that the aim of teaching is to bring people to know things that may have no effect at all on their lives.

They serve to clarify Jesus’ fundamental message: the free availability of God’s rule and righteousness to all of humanity through reliance upon Jesus himself, the person now loose in the world among us.

But as the kingdom of the heavens enfolds them, the whole earth is their Father’s—and theirs as they need it. The Lord is their shepherd, they shall not want.

We want to be good but are ready to do evil, and we come prepared with lengthy justifications.

fulfillment of God’s law is important because the law is good. It is right for human life. And the presence of the kingdom brings us all that is right for human life.

Doing and not just hearing and talking about it is how we know the reality of the kingdom and integrate our life into it.

They quite naturally see this as impossible or as something that would make their life wretched. For they are thinking of their life as the one they now have, untouched by the more fundamental parts of Jesus’ teaching, given earlier.

The various scenes and situations that Jesus discusses in his Discourse on the Hill are actually stages in a progression toward a life of agape love.

We would now say, and say correctly, “Trust Jesus Christ.” But we have already seen in previous chapters how the idea of having faith in Jesus has come to be totally isolated from being his apprentice and learning how to do what he said.

We know that one is not saved by keeping the law and can think of no other reason why one should try to do it.

As they wanted to add obedience to ritual law to faith in Christ, we want to subtract moral law from faith in Christ. How to combine faith with obedience is surely the essential task of the church as it enters the twenty-first century.

To be sure, law is not the source of rightness, but it is forever the course of rightness.

It is the elimination of anger and contempt that he presents as the first and fundamental step toward the rightness of the kingdom heart.

Some degree of malice is contained in every degree of anger.9 That is why it always hurts us when someone is angry at us.

Most people carry a supply of anger around with them.

But there is nothing that can be done with anger that cannot be done better without it.

To belong is a vital need based in the spiritual nature of the human being. Contempt spits on this pathetically deep need. And, like anger, contempt does not have to be acted out in special ways to be evil. It is inherently poisonous. Just by being what it is, it is withering to the human soul. But when expressed in the contemptuous phrase—in its thousands of forms—or in the equally powerful gesture or look, it stabs the soul to its core and deflates its powers of life.

Likewise, when I treasure those around me and see them as God’s creatures designed for his eternal purposes, I do not make an additional point of not hating them or calling them twerps or fools. Not doing those things is simply a part of the package. “He that loves has fulfilled the law,” Paul said (Rom. 13:8). Really.

We do not control outcomes and are not responsible for them, but only for our contribution to them. Does our heart long for reconciliation? Have we done what we can? Honestly? Do we refuse to substitute ritual behaviors for genuine acts of love? Do we mourn for the harm that our brother’s anger is doing to his own soul, to us, and to others around us?

it is important never to forget that many things that cannot be called wrong or evil are nevertheless not good for us.

outright pornography we can see, if we have eyes and brains left, that it always involves some element of contempt or even disgust. Those presented in it are obviously being used, hence are even regarded by the viewer as “deserving” disgust or even pain.

No translation of scripture can be correct that contradicts basic principles of biblical teaching as a whole.

sexual wrongness can still be present when one does not look on persons to fantasize sex with them. To avoid just this is no guarantee of being sexually sound. And to make a law that says, “Don’t look to lust,” and assume that obeying it is to be righteous is a mistake.

Jesus is saying that if you think that laws can eliminate being wrong you would, to be consistent, cut off your hand or gouge out your eye so that you could not possibly do the acts the law forbids.

In their view, the law could be satisfied, and thus goodness attained, if you avoided sinning. You are right if you have done nothing wrong. You could avoid sinning if you simply eliminated the bodily parts that make sinful actions possible. Then you would roll into heaven a mutilated stump.

The mutilated stump could still have a wicked heart.

The goodness of the kingdom heart, by contrast, is the positive love of God and of those around us that fills it and crowds out the many forms of evil. From that goodness come deeds of respect and purity that characterize a sexuality as it was meant by God to be.

in the order of nature some things can simply never be regained if they are lost.

the resources of the kingdom of the heavens were sufficient to resolve difficulties between husband and wife and to make their union rich and good before God and man—provided, of course, that both are prepared to seek and find these resources.

Though we are not talking about things one must do to “be Christian” or “go to heaven when we die,” we are looking at how people live who stand in the flow of God’s life now. We see the interior rightness of those who are living—as a matter of course, not just in exceptional moments—beyond the rightness of the scribe and Pharisee.

The presumption is precisely reversed once we stand within the kingdom. There the presumption is that I will return good for evil and “resist” only for compelling reasons, that I will do more than I strictly must in order to help others, and that I give to people merely because they have asked me for something they need.

In every concrete situation we have to ask ourselves, not “Did I do the specific things in Jesus’ illustrations?” but “Am I being the kind of person Jesus’ illustrations are illustrations of?”

He does not call us to do what he did, but to be as he was, permeated with love. Then the doing of what he did and said becomes the natural expression of who we are in him.

The Pharisee takes as his aim keeping the law rather than becoming the kind of person whose deeds naturally conform to the law.