The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

by Dallas Willard

The Old Testament book of Psalms comes to a joyous, breathtaking celebration of God’s kingdom in Psalms 145–150.

The picture there presented must be kept in mind whenever we try to understand his kingdom.

But Jesus’ own gospel of the kingdom was not that the kingdom was about to come, or had recently come, into existence. If we attend to what he actually said, it becomes clear that his gospel concerned only the new accessibility of the kingdom to humanity through himself.

The “gospel” of the Old Testament, if you wish, was simply “Our God reigns!” (Isa. 52:7; Pss. 96, 97, 99). Everyone knew that. It was the cry of deliverance as Israel emerged from Egypt through the Red Sea (Exod. 15:18). It was understood by all that “God caused His glorious arm to go at the right hand of Moses” (Isa. 63:12). That “arm” was, simply, God’s rule in action.

The reality of God’s rule, and all of the instrumentalities it involves, is present in action and available with and through the person of Jesus. That is Jesus’ gospel.

Those who have been touched by forgiveness and new life and have thus entered into God’s rule become, like Jesus, bearers of that rule.

One thing that may mislead us about the meaning of “at hand” in Jesus’ basic message is the fact that other “kingdoms” are still present on earth along with the kingdom of the heavens. They too are “at hand.” That is the human condition.

Sometimes the places where God’s effective or actual rule is not yet carried out, and his will is not yet done, lie within the lives and little kingdoms of those who truly have been invaded by the eternal kind of life itself—those who really do belong to Christ because his life is already present and growing within them.

And, similarly, the kingdom of God is also right beside us. It is indeed The Kingdom Among Us. You can reach it from your heart with your mouth—through even a shaky and stumbling confidence and confession that Jesus is the death-conquering Master of all (Rom. 10:9).

To be sure, that kingdom has been here as long as we humans have been here, and longer. But it has been available to us through simple confidence in Jesus, the Anointed, only from the time he became a public figure.

It is so available that everyone who from the center of his or her being calls upon Jesus as Master of the Universe and Prince of Life will be heard and will be delivered into the eternal kind of life.

We need not, as earlier described, stagger onward in darkness concerning what is truly good and really right. We need not fly upside down. There is a right-side up, and we can find it.—But we don’t have to. We are free. For now.

Just forgiven? And is that really all there is to being a Christian? The gift of eternal life comes down to that? Quite a retreat from living an eternal kind of life now!

What the slogan really conveys is that forgiveness alone is what Christianity is all about, what is genuinely essential to it.

Many are distressed about this disjunction between faith and life, but they remain firmly pinned to it by their ideas about salvation.

Any arrangement God has established will be right for him and right for us. We can count on it. The real question, I think, is whether God would establish a bar code type of arrangement at all.

Can we seriously believe that God would establish a plan for us that essentially bypasses the awesome needs of present human life and leaves human character untouched?

Can we believe that the essence of Christian faith and salvation covers nothing but death and after? Can

But now let us try out a subversive thought. Suppose our failures occur, not in spite of what we are doing, but precisely because of it.

A leading American pastor laments, “Why is today’s church so weak? Why are we able to claim many conversions and enroll many church members but have less and less impact on our culture? Why are Christians indistinguishable from the world?”6 Should we not at least consider the possibility that this poor result is not in spite of what we teach and how we teach, but precisely because of it?

History has brought us to the point where the Christian message is thought to be essentially concerned only with how to deal with sin: with wrongdoing or wrong-being and its effects. Life, our actual existence, is not included in what is now presented as the heart of the Christian message, or it is included only marginally. That is where we find ourselves today.

we see that the only thing made essential on the right wing of theology is forgiveness of the individual’s sins. On the left it is removal of social or structural evils. The current gospel then becomes a “gospel of sin management.” Transformation

What right and left have in common is that neither group lays down a coherent framework of knowledge and practical direction adequate to personal transformation toward the abundance and obedience emphasized in the New Testament, with a corresponding redemption of ordinary life. What is taught as the essential message about Jesus has no natural connection to entering a life of discipleship to him.

In this way what is only one theory of the “atonement” is made out to be the whole of the essential message of Jesus. To continue with theological language for the moment, justification has taken the place of regeneration, or new life.8 Being let off the divine hook replaces possession of a divine life “from above.” For all of the talk about the “new birth” among conservative Christians, there is an almost total lack of understanding of what that new birth is in practical terms and of how it relates to forgiveness and imputed or transmitted righteousness.

And so the only sure outcome of belief is that we are “just forgiven.” We are justified, which is often explained by saying that, before God, it is “just-as-if-I’d” never sinned at all. We may not have done or become anything positive to speak of. But when we come to heaven’s gate, they will not be able to find a reason to keep us out. The mere record of a magical moment of mental assent will open the door.

The Christian tradition certainly deals with guilt and the afterlife, but by no means does it take them to be the only issues involved in salvation.

If, by contrast, we understand the kingdom of God to be simply what God is actually doing, as previously explained, then the “kingdom” passages in the Gospels all make sense, and yet leave plenty of room to deal with future dimensions of the kingdom, including a millennial reign of a political nature.

They agree that being lost or saved is solely a matter of demerit and merit, on what it is for faith to be saving faith, and on what being “saved” amounts to. These points form the heart of the gospel on the theological right.

Finally, the two sides agree that getting into heaven after death is the sole target of divine and human efforts for salvation.

It is what such efforts are aimed at, rather than a by-product or natural outcome of something else that is the target.

But we get a totally different picture of salvation, faith, and forgiveness if we regard having life from the kingdom of the heavens now—...

The words and acts of Jesus naturally suggest that this is indeed salvation, with discipleship, forgiveness, and heaven to come as natural parts. And in this he only continues the teachings of the Old Testament. The entire biblical tradition from beginning to end is one of the intimate involvement of God in hum...

He trusted God, of course, but it was for things involved in his current existence.

In the face of such faith, God declared Abraham to be righteous. Does that mean he declared he would go to heaven when he died? Not precisely that, but certainly that Abraham’s sins and failures would not cut him off from God in the present moment and in their ongoing relationship in life together.

But would he go to heaven when he died? Of course! What else would God do with such a person? They were friends, a fact made much of in scripture (2 Chron. 20:7; Isa. 41:8; James 2:23), as we are to be friends of Jesus by immersing ourselves in his work (John 15:15).

We must be reconciled to God and he to us if we are going to have a life together. But such a reconciliation involves far more than the forgiveness of our sins or a clearing of the ledger.

And the faith and salvation of which Jesus speaks obviously is a much more positive reality than mere reconciliation.

The issue, so far as the gospel in the Gospels is concerned, is whether we are alive to God or dead to him.

What must be emphasized in all of this is the difference between trusting Christ, the real person Jesus, with all that that naturally involves, versus trusting some arrangement for sin-remission set up through him—trusting only his role as guilt remover.

The sensed irrelevance of what God is doing to what makes up our lives is the foundational flaw in the existence of multitudes of professing Christians today. They have been led to believe that God, for some unfathomable reason, just thinks it appropriate to transfer credit from Christ’s merit account to ours, and to wipe out our sin debt, upon inspecting our mind and finding that we believe a particular theory of the atonement to be true—even if we trust everything but God in all other matters that concern us.

When all is said and done, “the gospel” for Ryrie, MacArthur, and others on the theological right is that Christ made “the arrangement” that can get us into heaven.

In the Gospels, by contrast, “the gospel” is the good news of the presence and availability of life in the kingdom, now and forever, through reliance on Jesus the Anointed.

By the late 1950s and early 1960s, the older liberal theology, with its “social gospel,” had pretty well proven itself unable to accomplish the transformation of human existence that it had envisioned and promised.

James Traub, in an essay published in 1994, speaks of “those like me, who grew up listening to Martin Luther King, Jr., and who found in the redemptive language of the civil rights movement a virtual substitute for religious belief.”

However, for many in the liberal church, clergy and layperson alike, that language was not just a substitute for religious belief. It became their faith.

To be committed to the oppressed, to liberation, or just to “community” became for many the whole of what is essential to Christian commitment.

The gospel, or “good news,” on this view, was that God himself stood behind liberation, equality, and community; that Jesus died to promote them, or at least for lack of them; and that he “lives on” in all efforts and tendencies favoring them. For the theological left, simply this became the message of Christ.

This is the gospel of the current Christian left: Love comes out on top.

But this “gospel” turns out in practice to be little more than another version of the world-famous American dream.

Desire becomes sacred, and whatever thwarts desire is evil or sin.