The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

by Dallas Willard

When Jesus himself comes to deal with the rightness of persons in divorce, he does not forbid divorce absolutely, but he makes it very clear that divorce was never God’s intent for men and women in a marriage. The intent in marriage is a union of two people that is even deeper than the union of parents and children or any other human relationship.

Rather, it is the hardness of the human heart that Jesus cites as grounds for permitting divorce in case of adultery. In other words, the ultimate grounds for divorce is human meanness.

Divorce also powerfully disrupts one of the major natural cycles of human existence. And the individuals involved can never be the same—whether or not a divorce was, everything considered, justifiable. That is why no one regards a divorce as something to be chosen for its own sake, a “great experience,” perhaps.

And we must remember, of course, what we have been saying all along about the order in the Sermon on the Mount. It is not an accident that Jesus deals with divorce after having dealt with anger, contempt, and obsessive desire.

But Jesus goes right to the heart of why people swear oaths. He knew that they do it to impress others with their sincerity and reliability and thus gain acceptance of what they are saying and what they want. It is a method for getting their way.

The problem with “swearing” or the making of oaths—which was really a huge part of life in Jesus’ world—is not just that it involves taking the name of God in vain, or using it lightly and without love and respect for him. It does that often, no doubt, but not always. The evil of it that he addresses is that it is an inherently wrong approach to other human beings.

Kingdom rightness respects the soul need of human beings to make their judgments and decisions solely from what they have concluded is best.

What are characteristic ways in which one fully alive in and to The Kingdom Among Us may respond to personal affronts, injuries, and impositions?

I think it is perhaps these four statements, more than any others in the Discourse, that cause people to throw up their hands in despair or sink into the pit of grinding legalism. This is because the situations referred to are familiar, and they can only imagine that Jesus is laying down laws about what they have to do regardless of what else may be at issue.

All is changed when we realize that these are illustrations of what a certain kind of person, the kingdom person, will characteristically do in such situations.

By contrast, the way of law avoids individual responsibility for decision. It pushes the responsibility and possible blame onto God. That is one reason why people who must have a law for all their actions lead such pinched and impoverished lives and develop very little in the way of genuine depth in godly character.

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?”

Loving those who love us and lavishing care and honor on those of our own group is something that traitorous oppressors, the Mafia, and terrorists do. How, then, could that serve to distinguish the goodness of someone born into God’s family or the presence of a different kind of reality and life? Even those with no knowledge of God at all, “the gentiles,” do it.

People usually read this, and are taught to read it, as telling them to be patient, kind, free of jealousy, and so on—just as they read Jesus’ Discourse as telling them to not call others fools, not look on a woman to lust, not swear, to go the second mile, and so forth. But Paul is plainly saying—look at his words—that it is love that does these things, not us, and that what we are to do is to “pursue love” (1 Cor. 14:1). As we “catch” love, we then find that these things are after all actually being done by us.

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.

From Jesus’ Discourse on the Hill we have learned thus far his answers to the two great questions forced on all of us by human life: Who is really well off? and Who is a genuinely good person? One is blessed, we now know, if one’s life is based upon acceptance and intimate interactions with what God is doing in human history. Such people are in the present kingdom of the heavens.

Desire for religious respect or reputation will immediately drag us into the rightness of scribes and Pharisees because that desire always focuses entirely upon the visible action, not on the source of action in the heart.

“Don’t seek to be called ‘Professor’ or ‘Doctor,’” Jesus says, “for you have only one teacher, and all of you are students. And call no one on earth ‘Father,’ for you have only one Father, the one in the heavens. Also, do not be called ‘leader.’ The Anointed One is your leader, and it is not the leaders but the servants who are greatest among you” (vv. 8–11).

The fact that I call someone “Father” as a formality does not mean I regard that person as my father, just as my taking an oath before giving testimony in court does not mean I am trying to manipulate my hearers.

What matters are the intentions of our heart before God.

Not did we look at someone and sexually desire them, as we have seen, but did we look at someone in order to sexually desire them. And now: not are we seen doing a good deed, but are we doing a good deed in order to be seen.

But the principle of “the audience of One” extends to all that we do, and not just to deeds of devotion or charity. The apostle Paul charges us to do all our work, whatever our situation, “with enthusiasm, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that he is the one who rewards you and whom you serve.” Indeed, we are to do all that we do “on behalf of the Lord Jesus, in that way giving thanks through him to God the Father” (Col. 3:17–24). Even more so for our “rightnesses.”

A special word about “the hypocrites” is required here. It is a term used by Jesus alone in the New Testament, and he uses it seventeen times. The term hypocrite in classical Greek primarily refers to an actor, such as one sees on the stage, but it came to refer also to anyone who practices deceit. It is clear from the literary records that it was Jesus alone who brought this term and the corresponding character into the moral vocabulary of the Western world.1 He did so because of his unique emphasis upon the moral significance of the inmost heart before God. As we are creative beings, our heart is who we really are. Jesus therefore made repeated and unmistakable distinctions between our face to the world and our person before God.

When Jesus spoke of “the hypocrites,” he was utilizing a very vivid image that effectively seized the minds of his hearers because of their familiarity with stage characters. They were thus able to see much of the most obvious religious behavior of their day as the sham it in fact was.

The kind of people who have been so transformed by their daily walk with God that good deeds naturally flow from their character are precisely the kind of people whose left hand would not notice what their right hand is doing—as, for example, when driving one’s own car or speaking one’s native language.

They hardly notice their own deed, and rarely remember it.

Prayer, it is rightly said, is the method of genuine theological research, the method of understanding what and who God is. God is spirit and exists at the level of reality where the human heart, or spirit, also exists, serving as the foundation and source of our visible life It is there that the individual meets with God “in spirit and in truth.”

The “gentiles” do not understand that prayer to the God of Israel and of Jesus, the living and personal God of the universe, is intelligent conversation about matters of mutual concern. This takes place in a society of shared ends and efforts, where agape love and the spirit of forgiveness are basic to every relationship (6:14–15). Hence they grind away at their senseless routines, hoping to use “god” to get what they want.

Kingdom praying and its efficacy is entirely a matter of the innermost heart’s being totally open and honest before God. It is a matter of what we are saying with our whole being, moving with resolute intent and clarity of mind into the flow of God’s action. In apprenticeship to Jesus, this is one of the most important things we learn how to do. He teaches us how to be in prayer what we are in life and how to be in life what we are in prayer.

The passage from Deuteronomy 8 gives us the key. The primary reference of “word that comes out of God’s mouth” was the “manna” that the Israelites lived on during their years of wandering in the desert between Canaan and Egypt. Now manna is an interesting term. It basically means “whatever it is,” or “what is it?” Manna was a form of physical substance that was unknown. It was, in fact, a digestible form of matter suited to the physical needs of human beings and produced directly by God’s action, or “word,” not by a process already in place in nature.

This God is master of all basic equations that govern reality, physical and otherwise, such as the famous e = mc2 discovered by Albert Einstein. (Here, e is energy, m is matter, and c is the speed of light.) Now, from the human perspective, it is mainly matter that is available to us. To meet our needs we are, within narrow limits, able to manipulate it to produce useable forms of energy, by processes such as digestion, combustion, atomic fission or fusion, and so forth. But to God, the “energy” side of the equation is also available. He has inexhaustible supplies of it. And so he can feed thousands by “multiplying” a few loaves and fishes, or he can directly supply the physical needs of the body of one fasting with faith toward him. His rhema “word” (Matt. 4:4) to me is a concrete reality that becomes, in fasting, physical sustenance to my needy body.

Here, as with so many of the biblical statements keyed to the realities of God’s full world, we have to decide whether or not these are just “pretty words.”

But before taking this approach we should at least ask, What would it be like for his statement, “I have some food you don’t know about,” to be true in the sense it was obviously taken by those who initially heard it. In the case of John 4, the issue being addressed with his disciples was precisely the need for physical nourishment and how it might be met. Jesus indicates that physical nourishment too was available directly from spiritual sources.

Of course what really comes into play in all such passages are the beliefs we actually hold concerning “reality,” especially about God and his world. Lack of confidence in the kingdom will force us to take the “pretty words” reading of the words of scripture. Many people simply put all of the scriptures and even religion as a whole in that category.

He told us that he was to be “eaten”: “He who eats me shall live by me,…and shall live forever” (John 6:51). He, not the manna, is “the bread which comes down out of heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die” (vv. 48–50). The practice of fasting goes together with this teaching about nourishing ourselves on the person of Jesus. It emphasizes the direct availability of God to nourish, sustain, and renew the soul. It is a testimony to the reality of another world from which Jesus and his Father perpetually intermingle their lives with ours (John 14:23). And the effects of our turning strongly to this true “food” will be obvious.

What Jesus is teaching us to do in this important passage from his Discourse is to be free of control by the opinions of others. Paul’s wonderful term for this type of control is eyeservice, or being enslaved to eyes (ophthalmodoulian; Col. 3:22; Eph. 6:6).

The effect of both action and nonaction for human approval is to push the presence of God aside as irrelevant and to subject ourselves to the human kingdom.

The discipline of secrecy will help us break the grip of human opinion over our souls and our actions. A discipline is an activity in our power that we do to enable us to do what we cannot do by direct effort. Jesus is here leading us into the discipline of secrecy. We from time to time practice doing things approved of in our religious circles—giving, praying, fasting, attending services of the church, and so on—but in such a way that no one knows.

This is a rather important point for understanding what Jesus is teaching us to do in this part of the Sermon on the Mount. In particular, because of the always threatening legalism—which thinks of rightness only in terms of particular actions—we must see why he does not make it a law that we only do good deeds, pray and fast in secrecy. Biblical practice and the practice of Jesus himself obviously show that it is not a law.

His teaching leads to a discipline, not a law, and a discipline that prepares us, precisely, to act in a way that fulfills the law of whole-person love of God.

A thoughtful examination of local gatherings of Christian believers may reveal that in this teaching Jesus lays his finger upon a primary cause of their ineffectiveness as schools of eternal living. Truthfully, it seems to be a general law of social/historical development that institutions tend to distort and destroy the central function that brought them into existence.

A few years ago Clyde Reid wrote a painfully incisive discussion of how our church activities seem to be structured around evading God. His “law of religious evasion” states, “We structure our churches and maintain them so as to shield us from God and to protect us from genuine religious experience.”

The adult members of churches today rarely raise serious religious questions for fear of revealing their doubts or being thought of as strange. There is an implicit conspiracy of silence on religious matters in the churches. This conspiracy covers up the fact that the churches do not change lives or influence conduct to any appreciable degree.4

Often the “eyeservice” that occurs in present-day church services comes in the form of trying to “move” people. “Wasn’t that a great service,” we often say. But what do we mean? Are we really thinking of how God felt about the service? What is the correlation between God’s view of a great service and the human view? We need to be very careful about this, or the rule, “Truly, they have their reward,” may apply to us.

Everyone is talking about you all the time. They say, “Come and let’s hear what the word is from the Lord.” And they sit before you as my people, and they hear your words, but they do not do them. For their mouths talk devotion but their hearts seek wicked gains. Why, you are just like one who sings about love with a beautiful voice and a well-played instrument. They hear what you are saying, but do not do it. (Ezek. 33:31–32)

The most important commandment of the Judeo-Christian tradition is to treasure God and his realm more than anything else. That is what it means to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. It means to treasure him, to hold him and his dear, and to protect and aid him in his purposes. Our only wisdom, safety, and fulfillment lies in so treasuring God. Then we will also treasure our neighbors rightly, as he treasures them.

Everyone has treasures. This is an essential part of what it is to be human. To have nothing that one treasures is to be in a nonhuman condition, and nothing degrades people more than to scorn or destroy or deprive them of their treasures.

So, to discuss our treasures is really to discuss our treasuring;. We are not to pass it off as dealing merely with “external goods,” which are “nonspiritual” or just physical stuff. It is to deal with the fundamental structure of our soul. It has to do precisely with whether the life we live now in the physical realm is to be an eternal one or not, and the extent to which it will be so.

Of course this means that we will invest in our relationship to Jesus himself, and through him to God. But beyond that, and in close union with it, we will devote ourselves to the good of other people—those around us within the range of our power to affect. These are among God’s treasures. “The Lord’s portion,” we are told, “is his people” (Deut. 32:9). And that certainly includes ourselves, in a unique and fundamental way. We have the care of our own souls and lives in a way no one else does, and in a way we have the care of no one else.