The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

by Dallas Willard

We have from the Christian left, after all, just another gospel of sin management, but one whose substance is provided by Western (American) social and political ideals of human existence in a secular world.

The current gospels, left and right, exhibit the very same type of conceptual disconnection from, and practical irrelevance to, the personal integrity of believers—and certainly so, if we put that integrity in terms of biblically specific “Christlikeness.”

And both lack any essential bearing upon the individual’s life as a whole, especially upon occupations or work time and upon the fine texture of our personal relationships in the home and neighborhood.

To reiterate, that irrelevance to life stems from the very content of those “gospels”: from what they state, what they are about. They concern sin guilt or structural evils (social sins) and what to do about them. That is all. That r...

But, once again, overall abundance of life and obedience to moral standards that we all know to be valid have no inherent connection to the gospels of sin management.

Right at the heart of this alienation lies the absence of Jesus the teacher from our lives. Strangely, we seem prepared to learn how to live from almost anyone but him.

The disappearance of Jesus as teacher explains why today in Christian churches—of whatever leaning—little effort is made to teach people to do what he did and taught.

We are flooded with what I have called “gospels of sin management,” in one form or another, while Jesus’ invitation to eternal life now—right in the midst of work, business, and profession—remains for the most part ignored and unspoken.

Must not all who speak for Christ constantly ask themselves these crucial questions: Does the gospel I preach and teach have a natural tendency to cause people who hear it to become full-time students of Jesus? Would those who believe it become his apprentices as a natural “next step”? What can we reasonably expect would result from people actually believing the substance of my message?

A saying among management experts today is, “Your system is perfectly designed to yield the result you are getting.” This is a profound though painful truth that must be respected by all who have an interest in Christian spiritual formation, whether for themselves as individuals or for groups or institutions.

And so we have the result noted: the resources of God’s kingdom remain detached from human life. There is no gospel for human life and Christian discipleship, just one for death or one for social action.

At the 1974 Lausanne Conference on World Evangelization, Michael Green asked rhetorically, “How much have you heard here about the Kingdom of God?” His answer was, “Not much. It is not our language. But it was Jesus’ prime concern.”

Jesus’ good news about the kingdom can be an effective guide for our lives only if we share his view of the world in which we live.

All of the good and beautiful things from which we occasionally drink tiny droplets of soul-exhilarating joy, God continuously experiences in all their breadth and depth and richness.

he was well known to those around him as a happy man. It is deeply illuminating of kingdom living to understand that his steady happiness was not ruled out by his experience of sorrow and even grief.

If you bury yourself in Psalms, you emerge knowing God and understanding life.

We learn from the psalms how to think and act in reference to God.

This bold and slyly humorous assurance about all the basic elements of our existence—food and drink and clothing and other needs of life—can only be supported on a clear-eyed vision that a totally good and competent God is right here with us to look after us.

Nothing—no human being or institution, no time, no space, no spiritual being, no event—stands between God and those who trust him.

But it is precisely from the space immediately around us that God watches and God acts.

But do we actually believe this? I mean, are we ready automatically to act as if we stand here and now and always in the presence of the great being described by Adam Clarke, who fills and overflows all space, including the atmosphere around our body?

In such passages “heaven” is never thought of as far away—in the clouds perhaps, or by the moon. It is always right here, “at hand.”

These and many other statements from God’s chosen people make clear their understanding that God is actually here.

all of these gave the early church the strongest possible impression of the reality and immediate presence of the kingdom of Christ.

Similarly, God spoke to Moses from the midst of the fire on Sinai and from above the “Mercy Seat” in the tabernacle (Num. 7:89). In each case it was from our “air.” But the ideology that dominates our education and thought today makes it hard to accept this straightforward fact.

The damage done to our practical faith in Christ and in his government-at-hand by confusing heaven with a place in distant or outer space, or even beyond space, is incalculable.

So, in summary, the reason the Judeo-Christian witness regards surrounding space as full of God is that that is where it has from time to time experienced him. That is where he has manifested himself. Jehovah naturally became known among the Israelites as “the God of the Heavens” through the progression of their historical experience.

Matthew, the quintessentially Judaic Gospel, as a matter of course utilizes the phrase the kingdom of the heavens to describe God’s rule, or “kingdom.” It captures that rich heritage of the Jewish experience of the nearness of God that is so largely lost to the contemporary mind. This heritage is a primary revelation of the nature of God. Thus it forms the mark of identification of the one we address in the central prayer of Christendom: “Our Father, the One in the heavens…” (Matt. 6:9).

If we are to make sense of Jesus’ teaching and practice of the kingdom of the heavens, we must understand what spirit and the spiritual are and how they are in space.

If he is not in space at all, he is not in human life, which is lived in space.

This ill-advised attempt to make God near by confining him to human hearts robs the idea of his direct involvement in human life of any sense.

We say that the eyes are the windows of the soul, and there is much truth to it. They and the face and hands are areas in space where the spiritual reality of the person becomes present to others.

Interestingly, “growing up” is largely a matter of learning to hide our spirit behind our face, eyes, and language so that we can evade and manage others to achieve what we want and avoid what we fear.

Those who have attained considerable spiritual stature are frequently noted for their “childlikeness.” What this really means is that they do not use their face and body to hide their spiritual reality. In their body they are genuinely present to those around them. That is a great spiritual attainment or gift.

Now, roughly speaking, God relates to space as we do to our body. He occupies and overflows it but cannot be localized in it. Every point in it is accessible to his consciousness and will, and his manifest presence can be focused in any location as he sees fit.

No doubt God wants us to see him. That is a part of his nature as outpouring love. Love always wants to be known.

The ability to see and the practice of seeing God and God’s world comes through a process of seeking and growing in intimacy with him.

The heavens progressively open to us as our character and understanding are increasingly attuned to the realities of God’s rule from the heavens.

We are more aware of God's presence as we better understand His present rule.

“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.

Spirit is a form of energy, for it does work, and whatever does work has power.

It is the “will” aspect of personal/spiritual reality that is its innermost core.

The will, or heart, is the executive center of the self.

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

Nothing other than God has this character of totally self-sufficient being, or self-determination.

We have in us the capacity to be self-determined to some significant degree. Without will we would have no life that is recognizably human.

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.

To understand spirit as “substance” is of the utmost importance in our current world, which is so largely devoted to the ultimacy of matter.

It means that spirit is something that exists in its own right—to some degree in the human case,...

Because we are spiritual beings, as just explained, it is for our good, individually and collectively, to live our lives in interactive dependence upon God and under his kingdom rule.

As we increasingly integrate our life into the spiritual world of God, our life increasingly takes on the substance of the eternal.