The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

by Dallas Willard

And we also care for this astonishingly rich and beautiful physical realm, the earth itself, of which both we and our neighbors are parts. “You have established the earth and it continues. All things stand this day according to your directions. For all things are your servants” (Ps. 119:91). God himself loves the earth dearly and never takes his hands off it. And because he loves it and it is good, our care of it is also eternal work and a part of our eternal life.

Not only can we have complete protection and security of our treasures in this way, but our life as a whole, our living, also now comes into proper alignment with reality. Our souls are now suited to deal with things because we see clearly.

The person who treasures what lies within the kingdom sees everything in its true worth and relationship. The person who treasures what is “on earth,” by contrast, sees everything from a perspective that distorts it and systematically misleads in practice.

You cannot be the servant of both God and things “on earth,” because their requirements conflict. Unless you have already put God first, for example, what you will have to do to be financially secure, impress other people, or fulfill your desires will invariably lead you against God’s wishes.

There is, I think, a tendency to regard this treasure in heaven as something that is only for the “by-and-by.” It is thought to be like life insurance, so called, whose benefits only come after death.

But the treasure we have in heaven is also something very much available to us now. We can and should draw upon it as needed, for it is nothing less than God himself and the wonderful society of his kingdom even now interwoven in my life.

What is most valuable for any human being, without regard to an afterlife, is to be a part of this marvelous reality, God’s kingdom now. Eternity is now ongoing. I am now leading a life that will last forever. Upon my treasure in the heavens I now draw for present needs. If, with a view to my needs in this life, I had to choose between having good credit with a bank and having good credit with God, I would not hesitate a moment. By all means, let the bank go!

I recognize how strange, even strained, it sounds. But that is only because the entire posture of our embodied self and its surroundings is habitually inclined toward physical or “earthly” reality as the only reality there is. Hence, to treasure anything else must be wrong. It is to rest on illusions. We must be prepared to be treated as more or less crazy unless we value what is “on earth” as supreme for human existence.

But of course if we do value “mammon” as normal people seem to think we should, our fate is fixed. Our fate is anxiety. It is worry. It is frustration. The words anxious and worry both have reference to strangling or being choked.

In the Sermon on the Mount he emphasizes his Father’s provision for us by asking rhetorically, “Aren’t you better than birds?” But in Matthew 10 he is teaching about freedom from fear of physical death: “Do not fear those who kill the body,” he says, “but are unable to kill the soul.” Of course physical death only concerns the treasures that are “upon the earth.” For most people, perhaps, the thing they most treasure is staying alive on earth. As a result they live their entire lives in bondage to fear of physical death (Heb. 2:15).

“will he not do much more for you? You little-faiths!” (6:30). Here Jesus uses a term that may have been his own invention: oligopistoi, “little-faiths.” It occurs ten times in five verses in the Gospels. It seems to have been a nickname that he invented as a way of gently chiding his apprentices for their lack of confidence in God and in himself.

Paul, once again, got it: “Don’t be anxious about anything,” he says, “but in every situation, with prayer and supplications, with thanksgiving, let God know what you want. And the peace which God himself has will, beyond anything we can intellectually grasp, stand guard over your hearts and minds, which are within the reality of Jesus the Anointed” (Phil. 4:6–7).

So we want to be clear, as we come to the end of this chapter, that the one who takes on the character of the Prince of Life will not be exempted from the usual problems of life, and in addition will have the problems that come from “not fitting in” and being incapable of conforming to the world order, new or old.

The “Western” segment of the church today lives in a bubble of historical illusion about the meaning of discipleship and the gospel. We are dominated by the essentially Enlightenment values that rule American culture: pursuit of happiness, unrestricted freedom of choice, disdain of authority. The prosperity gospels, the gospels of liberation, and the comfortable sense of “what life is all about” that fills the minds of most devout Christians in our circles are the result. How different is the gritty realization of James: “Friends of the world (kosmou) are enemies of God” (James 4:4) And John: “If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (2 John 2:15).

We must start at the point Jesus himself chose—the nature of true well-being, or “blessedness”—and follow his order through the setting aside of anger, contempt, absorbing lust, manipulation, and payback, and on to the forsaking of dependence upon human reputation and material wealth.

If we would really help those close to us and dear, and if we would learn to live together with our family and “neighbors” in the power of the kingdom, we must abandon the deeply rooted human practice of condemning and blaming.

But what is it, exactly, that we do when we condemn someone? When we condemn another we really communicate that he or she is, in some deep and just possibly irredeemable way, bad—bad as a whole, and to be rejected. In our eyes the condemned is among the discards of human life. He or she is not acceptable. We sentence that person to exclusion. Surely we can learn to live well and happily without doing that.

Third, the “correcting” to be done is not a matter of “straightening them out.” It is not a matter of hammering on their wrongness and on what is going to happen to them if they don’t change their ways. It is a matter of restoration. The aim in dealing with the one “caught” is to bring them back on the path of Jesus and to establish them there so their progress in kingdom character and living can continue.

Most families would be healthier and happier if their members treated one another with the respect they would give to a perfect stranger.

I can trust Jesus to go into the temple and drive out those who were profiting from religion, beating them with a rope. I cannot trust myself to do so.

If, as Christians often say, we really are “different” as followers of Christ, this is a point where it should be most obvious.

Condemnation always involves some degree of self-righteousness and of distancing ourselves from the one we are condemning. And self-righteousness always involves an element of comparison and of condemnation.

Shame seems most widespread and deepest among the very people who take rightness and goodness most seriously. It is a dimension of condemnation that reaches into the deepest levels of our souls. In shame we are self-condemned for being the person we are. It touches our identity and causes self-rejection. We feel ourselves to be a failure just for being the person we are. We wish to be someone else. But of course we cannot.

This explains why discrimination against people because of the kind of person they are, their identity, is so hateful and destructive. It also explains why the gospel of the kingdom has such transforming power in human life. For that gospel opens the kingdom to everyone, no matter their classification, and it enables us really to become a different kind of person, beyond all condemnation, blame, and shame, and to know it.

How does he know that those who “judge,” in the sense of condemning others, are hypocrites? Is it merely that there must be something wrong with us, because there is something wrong with everyone, and that we should not condemn others until we are perfect? Is it just the let-him-who-is-without-sin-cast-the-first-stone routine? No, that’s not it. Rather, it is because he understands what condemnation is and involves.

Condemnation is the board in our eye. He knows that the mere fact that we are condemning someone shows our heart does not have the kingdom rightness he has been talking about. Condemnation, especially with its usual accompaniments of anger and contempt and self-righteousness, blinds us to the reality of the other person.

We cannot “see clearly” how to assist our brother, because we cannot see our brother. And we will never know how to truly help him until we have grown into the ...

We do not have to—we cannot—surrender the valid practice of distinguishing and discerning how things are in order to avoid condemning others. We can, however, train ourselves to hold people responsible and discuss their failures with them—and even assign them penalties, if we are, for example, in some position over them—without attacking their worth as human beings or marking them as rejects.

It is interesting and important to observe that today the old phrase “hate the sin and love the sinner” no longer is accepted. If you disapprove of what I do or how I do it, it is now generally thought, you can only be condemning me and rejecting me.

We simply cannot forsake discernment, and Jesus himself devotes the last half of Matthew 7 to urging us precisely to discern and, in that sense, to “judge.” But we must forsake the practice of condemning people, and that will not be difficult at all once we see clearly what it is to condemn and have previously rid ourselves of anger and contempt.

Among them, I quickly noticed, children were to be heard as well as seen. (How brutal that saying is, “Children are to be seen and not heard.”) And as I watched their children through the years, and grew up along with their grandchildren, the same noncondemnatory spirit seemed on the whole to prevail throughout their lives.

When we enter the life of friendship with the Jesus who is now at work in our universe, we stand in a new reality where condemnation is simply irrelevant. There is before God, Paul says, “no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1). And as for the condemnation we may receive from others, I endeavor not to receive it, to just ignore or drop it. I have learned to look at it only while simultaneously holding in full view the fact that Jesus, so far from condemning me, died for me and is right now intervening on my behalf in the heavens. This helps me stay out of countercondemnation, with its pain and anger.

Our practice of “condemnation engineering,” as it might be called, usually goes hand in hand with another device mistakenly used to manage the lives of those we truly care about. That is the practice of pushing the things of God upon them whether they want or are ready for them or not. Or it may just be good things generally we are pushing, for example, education or proper diet.

The very idea of “compulsory education,” of forcing young people to be in school—except where, very wisely and gently, quite small children are concerned—illustrates this misguided practice of pushing valuable things on people; and its disastrous outcome in contemporary society exactly confirms the truth of what Jesus had to say.

The long-standard use of this verse is directly opposed to the spirit of Jesus and his teachings. That use suggests that we may have certain wonderful treasures, of truth and of service perhaps, that we could give to others. Perhaps the “treasure” is the very gospel itself. But there are some who are not worthy of those treasures. We have to watch for such people. Normally they are thought of as people who will not accept our “treasure” or would not use it rightly. They are the “pigs” or the “dogs” in question. And we are not to waste our good things on these worthless or evil people. So goes the standard reading of verse 6. But it is hard to imagine anything more opposed to the spirit of Jesus than this. Indeed, the very coming of Christ, the pearl of God, into the world, would be a case of pearls before pigs thus understood.

Forcing religion upon the young even though it makes no sense to them is a major reason why they “graduate” from church about the same time they graduate from high school and do not return for twenty years, if ever.

What we are actually doing with our proper condemnations and our wonderful solutions, more often than not, is taking others out of their own responsibility and out of God’s hands and trying to bring them under our control.

God has paid an awful price to arrange for human self-determination. He obviously places great value on it. It is, after all, the only way he can get the kind of personal beings he desires for his eternal purposes. And just as we are not to try to manipulate others with impressive language of any kind (Matt. 5:37), so we are not to harass them into rightness and goodness with our condemnings and our “pearls” or holy things.

The most important element in the transformation is this: As long as I am condemning my friends or relatives, or pushing my “pearls” on them, I am their problem. They have to respond to me, and that usually leads to their “judging” me right back, or “biting” me, as Jesus said.

To understand Jesus’ teachings, we must realize that deep in our orientations of our spirit we cannot have one posture toward God and a different one toward other people. We are a whole being, and our true character pervades everything we do.

The power of asking is so great that it makes many people uncomfortable. Don’t you know of people who will go considerably out of their way to avoid someone who is apt to ask them for something? It may even be someone whom they do not know and will never meet again. But they do not wish to feel the power of the request.

And here, finally, is the basic answer to the urgent need we all feel to influence others for good. That answer is prayer, asking God. This is the sure way in which the good that we can accomplish in others can be accomplished. Our confidence in God is the only thing that makes it possible to treat others as they should be treated.

We need to love our neighbors as ourselves, do to them as we would be done to. Receiving the good news of the kingdom will enable us to do that, for it obliterates scarcity and win-lose relationships. Then, in deed as well as in prayer we will seek their good as well as our own. A life of prayer shows us the way to what we need and harmonizes the desires of everyone in the group. Because we are living in the kingdom of the heavens, we are released from absorbing desires that would deflect us from what is really good. In many ways it is the life of prayer that discovers a space in which all can live.5

Another way of saying this is that among those who live as Jesus’ apprentices there are no relationships that omit the presence and action of Jesus.

I never think simply of what I am going to do with you, to you, or for you. I think of what we, Jesus and I, are going to do with you, to you, and for you.

Christian brotherhood is not an ideal that we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate. The more clearly we learn to recognize that the ground and strength and promise of all our fellowship is in Jesus Christ alone, the more serenely shall we think of our fellowship and pray and hope for it.6

We have commented several times on how the currently accepted image of Jesus all but makes it impossible to find him interesting and attractive, lovable. The responses of common people to him throughout the pages of the gospel show how false that image is. He was such an attractive person and such a powerful speaker that, from the human point of view, the leaders of the day killed him out of envy of his popularity (Matt. 27:18). He was a master of humor and often used it to drive home the truths he imparted, as any good speaker does.7 But few today would put him on their guest list for a party—if it were really going to be a party. Just as we don’t think of Jesus as intelligent, so we don’t think of him as pleasant company, someone to enjoy being around. Is it any wonder that someone would rather not be his student?

Accordingly, I believe the most adequate description of prayer is simply, “Talking to God about what we are doing together.” That immediately focuses the activity where we are but at the same time drives the egotism out of it.

God is great enough that he can conduct his affairs in this way. His nature, identity, and overarching purposes are no doubt unchanging. But his intentions with regard to many particular matters that concern individual human beings are not.

On the physical side of this universe, many scientists now tell us, every thing and event is totally derived from and determined by certain subparticle entities called quarks.