The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

by Dallas Willard

“Spiritual” is not just something we ought to be. It is something we are and cannot escape, regardless of how we may think or feel about it. It is our nature and our destiny.

Each of these dimensions or aspects of the personal or spiritual is something we find in ourselves, even though not by sight, hearing, smell, or other physical senses. And we find them flowing there so richly that it is impossible for us to describe our own existence in anything like its actual fullness of detail.

It is the “will” aspect of personal/spiritual reality that is its innermost core. In biblical language the will is usually referred to as “heart.”

Thus the center point of the spiritual in humans as well as in God is self-determination, also called freedom and creativity.

The heart, or will, simply is spirit in human beings. It is the human spirit, and the only thing in us that God will accept as the basis of our relationship to him. It is the spiritual plane of our natural existence, the place of truth before God, from where alone our whole lives can become eternal.

We pull all these thoughts together by saying that spirit is unbodily personal power. It is primarily a substance, and it is above all God, who is both spirit and substance.

The mind or the minding of the spirit is life and peace precisely because it locates us in a world adequate to our nature as ceaselessly creative beings under God. The “mind of the flesh,” on the other hand, is a living death. To it the heavens are closed. It sees only “That inverted Bowl they call the Sky, Whereunder crawling cooped we live and die.”22 It restricts us to the visible, physical world where what our hearts demand can never be. There, as Tolstoy saw with disgust, we find we constantly must violate our conscience in order to “survive.”

To one group of his day, who believed that “physical death” was the cessation of the individual’s existence, Jesus said, “God is not the God of the dead but of the living” (Luke 20:38). His meaning was that those who love and are loved by God are not allowed to cease to exist, because they are God’s treasures. He delights in them and intends to hold onto them. He has even prepared for them an individualized eternal work in his vast universe.

Consciousness continues while we are asleep, and likewise when we “sleep in Jesus” (1 Thess. 4:14; Acts 7:60). The difference is simply a matter of what we are conscious of. In fact, at “physical” death we become conscious and enjoy a richness of experience we have never known before.

It is not hard to see the concrete and oppressive form that the flight from God takes today. There is, for example, no field of expertise in human affairs where interaction with God is a part of the subject matter or practice that must be mastered in order to be judged competent. This is true of chemistry and public administration, but it is also true of education, nursing, police work, and often, astonishingly, Christian ministry itself. It is true of marriage and parenting. Just observe how people are taught and certified or judged competent in any of these fields, and you will be staring the flight from God straight in the face.

When this cheerleading approach to the “real world” triumphs among those who profess Christ, they may then have faith in faith but will have little faith in God. For God and his world are just not “real” to them. They may believe in believing but not be able to rely on God—like many in our current culture who love love but in practice are unable to love real people. They may believe in prayer, think it quite a good thing, but be unable to pray believing and so will rarely, if ever, pray at all. I personally have become convinced that many people who believe in Jesus do not actually believe in God. By saying this I do not mean to condemn anyone but to cast light on why the lives of professed believers go as they do, and often quite contrary even to what they sincerely intend.

The powerful though vague and unsubstantiated presumption is that something has been found out that renders a spiritual understanding of reality in the manner of Jesus simply foolish to those who are “in the know.” But when it comes time to say exactly what it is that has been found out, nothing of substance is forthcoming.

Though this is not the place to discuss it, you can be very sure that nothing fundamental has changed in our knowledge of ultimate reality and the human self since the time of Jesus.

In any case, we can say with even greater certainty that, if we go with the currents of modernity, we shall never make sense of Jesus’ gospel for life and discipleship. Quite simply, his work and teaching, as well as the main path of historical Christianity that sprang from him, is essentially based upon the substantial reality of the spirit and of the spiritual world.

Our commitment to Jesus can stand on no other foundation than a recognition that he is the one who knows the truth about our lives and our universe. It is not possible to trust Jesus, or anyone else, in matters where we do not believe him to be competent. We cannot pray for his help and rely on his collaboration in dealing with real-life matters we suspect might defeat his knowledge or abilities.

What we have come to call the Sermon on the Mount is a concise statement of Jesus’ teachings on how to actually live in the reality of God’s present kingdom available to us from the very space surrounding our bodies.

And the first question is, Who is it, according to Jesus, that has the good life?

Certainly this man was not perfect as he stood and could have made several changes for the better. But is that what we’re supposed to do with the Beatitudes—“Be like that”? Frankly, most people think so. But they could hardly be more mistaken.

It will help us know what to do—and what not to do—with the Beatitudes if we can discover what Jesus himself was doing with them.

Beatitudes is a clarification or development of his primary theme in this talk and in his life: the availability of the kingdom of the heavens.2 How, then, do they develop that theme?

A minister tells of trying to lead home Bible studies among the poor of northern Mexico. In such studies participation is, of course, always encouraged. He related that, at the beginning, he would read a passage from scripture and ask, “What do you think?” No response. Just silence. Over and over this happened. Finally he realized that no one ever asks the poor what they think. That also is a part of what it means to be poor “in spirit.” No one imagines you could have any thoughts worth sharing. Real poverty in the human order is almost automatically taken as a sign of failure in every respect.

Jesus did not say, “Blessed are the poor in spirit because they are poor in spirit.” He did not think, “What a fine thing it is to be destitute of every spiritual attainment or quality. It makes people worthy of the kingdom.”

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.

Those spiritually impoverished ones present before Jesus in the crowd are blessed only because the gracious touch of the heavens has freely fallen upon them.

We round out this popular approach to the Beatitudes with its final, fatal step. Not only are the conditions cited—poverty of spirit, mourning, meekness, and so on—meritorious ones that somehow make it “only right” for God to match them with beatitude, and not only can you be sure of being in the kingdom if you appropriately flee or fall into these conditions, but if you are not in these conditions, you certainly cannot be blessed. If you’re not on the list, you’re not in the kingdom. Perhaps you will not even make it into “heaven” when you die.

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.

Instead of denying the relevance of Jesus’ teachings to the present, we must simply acknowledge that he has been wrongly interpreted. The Beatitudes, in particular, are not teachings on how to be blessed. They are not instructions to do anything. They do not indicate conditions that are especially pleasing to God or good for human beings.

No one is actually being told that they are better off for being poor, for mourning, for being persecuted, and so on, or that the conditions listed are recommended ways to well-being before God or man. Nor are the Beatitudes indications of who will be on top “after the revolution.” They are explanations and illustrations, drawn from the immediate setting, of the present availability of the kingdom through personal relationship to Jesus. 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.

the Greek word paraballein, literally means to throw one thing down alongside another. Parables are not just pretty stories that are easy to remember; rather, they help us understand something difficult by comparing it to, placing it beside, something with which we are very familiar, and always something concrete, specific.

But his use of concreteness in teaching takes yet another form, one absolutely necessary for our understanding of the Beatitudes. This use is found where he corrects a general assumption or practice thought to govern the situation at hand. He does this by pointing out that the case before him provides an exception and shows the general assumption or practice to be an unreliable guide to life under God.

The common assumption of the time, as in many times since, was that the prosperity of the rich indicated God’s special favor. How else could they be rich, since it is, supposedly, God himself who controls the wealth of the earth?

Jesus then commented to his students on how hard it was for the rich to put themselves under the rule of God, to enter the kingdom. Because of the common assumption that wealth meant God’s favor, they were stunned. In response to their amazement he went on to explain, “How hard it is for those who trust wealth to enter the kingdom! A camel can pass through the eye of a needle easier than a rich man can enter the kingdom of God.” But this “explanation” totally lost them. They were “astonished out of measure” and muttered to one another, “Who then can be saved?” (v. 26).

So being rich does not mean that one is in God’s favor—which further suggests that being poor does not automatically mean one is out of God’s favor. The case of the rich young ruler corrects the prevailing assumption, shocking the hearers but making it possible to think more appropriately of God’s relation to us.

But we must say it, and we must understand what it means. It means that the general assumptions of Jesus’ hearers about who has eternal life have to be revised in the light of the condition of people’s hearts. The story does not teach that we can have eternal life just by loving our neighbor. We cannot get away with that nice legalism either. The issue of our posture toward God still has to be taken into account. But in God’s order nothing can substitute for loving people. And we define who our neighbor is by our love. We make a neighbor of someone by caring for him or her.

Jesus deftly rejects the question “Who is my neighbor?” and substitutes the only question really relevant here: “To whom will I be a neighbor?” And he knows that we can only answer this question case by case as we go through our days. In the morning we cannot yet know who our neighbor will be that day. The condition of our hearts will determine who along our path turns out to be our neighbor, and our faith in God will largely determine whom we have strength enough to make our neighbor.

In the story of the good Samaritan, Jesus not only teaches us to help people in need; more deeply, 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.

We must recognize, first of all, that the aim of the popular teacher in Jesus’ time was not to impart information, but to make a significant change in the lives of the hearers.

We have already indicated the key to understanding the Beatitudes. 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.

This fact of God’s care and provision proves to all that no human condition excludes blessedness, that God may come to any person with his care and deliverance. God does sometimes help those who cannot, or perhaps just do not, help themselves. (So much for another well-known generalization!) The religious system of his day left the multitudes out, but Jesus welcomed them all into his kingdom. Anyone could come as well as any other. They still can. That is the gospel of the Beatitudes.

Thus by proclaiming blessed those who in the human order are thought hopeless, and by pronouncing woes over those human beings regarded as well off, Jesus opens the kingdom of the heavens to everyone.

Jesus directed John’s students simply to report back to him what they had heard and seen around Jesus: “The blind see, the lame walk, lepers are made clean, the deaf hear, the dead are revived, and the poor hear some real good news.” Then he added, in beatitude language, “And blessed are those who are not disappointed with me” (Matt. 11:4–6). The word here translated “blessed,” makarios, is the same as that used in Matthew 5 and Luke 6. It refers to the highest type of well-being possible for human beings, but it is also the term the Greeks used for the kind of blissful existence characteristic of the gods.

Indeed, such transformation of status for the lowly, the humanly hopeless, as they experience the hand of God reaching into their situation, is possibly the most pervasive theme of the biblical writings. Certainly it is a major component of the great inversion discussed in our previous chapter.

If you look at advertising and current events in the print and other media—for example, as you encounter them in supermarket checkouts, newsstands, and bookstores or on television and radio—you might think that the most unfortunate people in the world today are the fat, the misshapen, the bald, the ugly, the old, and those not relentlessly engaged in romance, sex, and fashionably equipped physical activities.

So we must see from our heart that: Blessed are the physically repulsive, Blessed are those who smell bad, The twisted, misshapen, deformed, The too big, too little, too loud, The bald, the fat, and the old— For they are all riotously celebrated in the party of Jesus.

The complete obliteration of social and cultural distinctions as a basis for life under God was clearly understood by Paul as essential to the presence of Jesus in his people. It means nothing less than a new type of humanity, “Abraham’s seed.” Those who, in Paul’s language, have “put on Christ” make nothing of the distinctions between Jew and Greek, between slave and free, between male and female. If they “are Christ’s,” they inherit life in the kingdom, just as Abraham did through his faith (Gal. 3).

The Law and the Prophets had been twisted around to authorize an oppressive, though religious, social order that put glittering humans—the rich, the educated, the “well-born,” the popular, the powerful, and so on—in possession of God. Jesus’ proclamation clearly dumped them out of their privileged position and raised ordinary people with no human qualifications into the divine fellowship by faith in Jesus.

He takes this concrete approach because his aim is to enable people to be good, not just talk about it. He actually knows how to enable people to be good, and he brings his knowledge to bear upon life as it really is, not some intellectualized and sanctified version thereof.

Having illustrated concretely, in situations of grimy realism (Matt. 5:20–44), what it is like to be a really good person—one who has found the kingdom and is living in its ways—Jesus then proceeds, in the immediately following verses, to give his overall picture of moral fulfillment and beauty in the kingdom of the heavens. It is one of heartfelt love toward all, including those who would be happy if we dropped dead. This love does not consist of acts and projects but is a pervasive condition of vision, joy, and love in which we habitually reside.

But he never loses sight of the real-life context in which the theory must translate into action, for his purpose is not to give a theory—he can leave that to others—but to start a historical movement.

What Jesus taught was said by them to be contained in human rationality as such. Today it is more likely to be said that it is contained in “the human quest for meaning or wholeness.” Moral understanding can, allegedly, be established by careful human thought and experience apart from any historical tradition.