The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

by Dallas Willard

We are destined for a time when our life will be entirely sustained from spiritual realities and no longer dependent in any way upon the physical.

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.

Thus our posture of confident reliance upon him in all we do allows us to make our life undying, of eternal worth, integrated into the eternal vistas and movements of the Spirit.

Human existence understood in the context of this full world of God—” all things visible and invisible,” to use the biblical language—can be as good as we naturally hope for it to be and think it ought to be, though perhaps not in the precise terms that would first come to our minds. In far better terms, really, because God is constantly poised to do “exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or imagine, in terms of the energy that is working in us” (Eph. 3:20).

How should we “take care of ourselves” when we are never to cease? Jesus shows his apprentices how to live in the light of the fact that they will never stop living. This is what his students are learning from him.

In fact, at “physical” death we become conscious and enjoy a richness of experience we have never known before.

It will be our birthday into God’s full world.

The context of The Kingdom Among Us transforms the respective actions. “Little is much,” we say, “when God is in it.” And so it is. Really.

There are none in the humanly “down” position so low that they cannot be lifted up by entering God’s order, and none in the humanly “up” position so high that they can disregard God’s point of view on their lives.

To see everything from the perspective of “the heavens opened” is to see all things as they are before God. The Kingdom Among Us is simply God himself and the spiritual realm of beings over which his will perfectly presides—“as it is in the heavens.”

To become a disciple of Jesus is to accept now that inversion of human distinctions that will sooner or later be forced upon everyone by the irresistible reality of his kingdom.

Our souls are, accordingly, soaked with secularity. In any context in which people are supposed to be smart and informed, even the most thoughtful and devout Christian will find it hard to make a convincing presentation of the relevance of God and his spiritual world to “real life.”

Charles Ryder, the protagonist in that novel, comments on the religion of the other central character: Sebastian’s faith was an enigma to me at that time, but not one which I felt particularly concerned to solve…. The view implicit in my education was that the basic narrative of Christianity had long been exposed as a myth, and that opinion was now divided as to whether its ethical teaching was of present value, a division in which the main weight went against it; religion was a hobby which some people professed and others not; at the best it was slightly ornamental, at the worst it was the province of “complexes” and “inhibitions”—catchwords of the decade—and of the intolerance, hypocrisy, and sheer stupidity attributed to it for centuries. No one had ever suggested to me that these quaint observances expressed a coherent philosophic system and intransigent historical claims; nor, had they done so, would I have been much interested.28 These words perfectly express the crushing weight of the secular outlook that permeates or pressures every thought we have today.

The multitudes of theories, facts, and techniques that have emerged in recent centuries have not the least logical bearing upon the ultimate issues of existence and life.

He is not just nice, he is brilliant. He is the smartest man who ever lived. He is now supervising the entire course of world history (Rev. 1:5) while simultaneously preparing the rest of the universe for our future role in it (John 14:2). He always has the best information on everything and certainly also on the things that matter most in human life.

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.

Who has the kind of goodness found in God himself, constituting the family likeness between God and his children?

More common than such outright rejection of Christianity so understood is a constant burden of guilt conscientiously borne for not being, or not wanting to be, on this list of the supposedly God-preferred.

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.

And since great teachers and leaders always have a coherent message that they develop in an orderly way, we should assume that his teaching in the 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?

But he does not, as is so often suggested, withdraw from the crowd to give an esoteric discourse of sublime irrelevance to the crying need of those pressing upon him.

I believe he used the method of “show and tell” to make clear the extent to which the kingdom is “on hand” to us.

There were directly before him those who had just received from the heavens through him.

The poor in spirit are blessed as a result of the kingdom of God being available to them in their spiritual poverty.

But today the words “poor in spirit” no longer convey the sense of spiritual destitution that they were originally meant to bear.

Amazingly, they have come to refer to a praisew...

Standing around Jesus as he speaks are people with no spiritual qualifications or abilities at all. You would never call on them when “spiritual work” is to be done. There is nothing about them to suggest that the breath of God might move through their lives. They have no charisma, no religious glitter or clout.

They would be the last to say they have any claim whatsoever on God. The pages of the Gospels are cluttered with such people. And yet: “He touched me.” The rule of the heavens comes down upon their lives through their contact with Jesus. And then they too are blessed—healed of body, mind, or spirit—in the hand of God.

This struggle with the translation reflects our intense need to find in the condition referred to something good, something God supposedly desires or even requires, that then can serve as a “reasonable” basis for the blessedness he bestows. But that precisely misses the point that the very formulation of the Beatitudes should bring to our attention.

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.

But the mistranslations noted remain attractive because they suit our human sense of propriety, which cries out against God’s blessing on people just because of their need and just because he chooses—or perhaps just because someone asked him to.

This same sense of propriety may even allow us to totally bypass contact with Jesus in his own Beatitudes. Indeed, most interpretations of his words manage to forget that he is even on the scene. If all we need to be blessed in the kingdom of the heavens is to be humble-minded through recognizing our spiritual poverty, then let’s just do that and we’ve got bliss cornered.

If Jesus’ aim here is to tell us how to qualify for kingdom life, must we not believe he gave us a complete list? If that were his aim, would he have failed to mention other possible ways of attaining the kingdom?

But to suppose that Jesus’ teaching about the kingdom of the heavens is not for today is exactly like holding that the Twenty-third Psalm is not for today.

On the other hand, the clear intent of the New Testament as a whole is that Jesus’ teachings are meant to be applied now.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That is a matter of the heart. There alone the kingdom of the heavens and human kingdoms great and small are knit together.

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.

Of course that may require an information transfer, but it is a peculiarly modern notion that the aim of teaching is to bring people to know things that may have no effect at all on their lives.

The teacher in Jesus’ time—and especially the religious teacher—taught in such a way that he would impact the life flow of the hearer, leaving a lasting impression without benefit of notes, recorders, or even memorization.

Whatever did not make a difference in that way just made no difference.

We automatically remember what makes a real difference in our life. The secret of the great teacher is to speak words, to foster experiences, that impact the active flow of the hearer’s life.

Now, Jesus not only taught in this manner; he also taught us, his students in the kingdom, to teach in the same way. He taught about teaching in the kingdom of the heavens—using, of course, a parable. “So every bible scholar who is trained in the kingdom of the heavens is like someone over a household that shows from his treasures things new and things old” (Matt. 13:52 REV). By showing to others the presence of the kingdom in the concrete details of our shared existence, we impact the lives and hearts of our hearers, not just their heads. And they won’t have to write it down to hold onto it.