The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

by Dallas Willard

I think we finally have to say that Jesus’ enduring relevance is based on his historically proven ability to speak to, to heal and empower the individual human condition. He matters because of what he brought and what he still brings to ordinary human beings, living their ordinary lives and coping daily with their surroundings. He promises wholeness for their lives. In sharing our weakness he gives us strength and imparts through his companionship a life that has the quality of eternity.

He lived for thirty years among socially insignificant members of a negligible nation—though one with a rich tradition of divine covenant and interaction. He grew up in the home of the carpenter for the little Middle-Eastern village of Nazareth. After his father, Joseph, died, he became “the man of the house” and helped his mother raise the rest of the family. He was an ordinary workman: a “blue-collar” worker. He did all this to be with us, to be one of us, to “arrange for the delivery” of his life to us. It must be no simple thing to make it possible for human beings to receive the eternal kind of life. But, as F. W. Faber opens one of his profound works, now “Jesus belongs to us. He vouchsafes to put Himself at our disposal. He communicates to us everything of His which we are capable of receiving.”10 If he were to come today as he did then, he could carry out his mission through most any decent and useful occupation. He could be a clerk or accountant in a hardware store, a computer repairman, a banker, an editor, doctor, waiter, teacher, farmhand, lab technician, or construction worker. He could run a housecleaning service or repair automobiles. In other words, if he were to come today he could very well do what you do. He could very well live in your apartment or house, hold down your job, have your education and life prospects, and live within your family, surroundings, and time. None of this would be the least hindrance to the eternal kind of life that was his by na...

Unlike egotism, the drive to significance is a simple extension of the creative impulse of God that gave us being. It is not filtered through self-consciousness any more than is our lunge to catch a package falling from someone’s hand. It is outwardly directed to the good to be done. We were built to count, as water is made to run downhill. We are placed in a specific context to count in ways no one else does. That is our destiny.

This is a call for us to reconsider how we have been approaching our life, in light of the fact that we now, in the presence of Jesus, have the option of living within the surrounding movements of God’s eternal purposes, of taking our life into his life.

When we see Jesus as he is, we must turn away or else shamelessly adore him. That must be kept in mind for any authentic understanding of the power of Christian faith. This woman, unlike nice Simon, was not about to turn away.

Of course they had no general understanding of what was involved, but they knew Jesus meant that he was acting with God and God with him, that God’s rule was effectively present through him.

From the very beginning of his work, those who relied on him had, at his touch, entered the rule, or governance, of God and were receiving its gracious sufficiency. Jesus was not just acting for God but also with God—a little like the way, in a crude metaphor, I act with my power steering, or it with me, when I turn the wheel of my car. And this “governance” is projected onward through those who receive him. When we receive God’s gift of life by relying on Christ, we find that God comes to act with us as we rely on him in our actions. That explains why Jesus said that the least in the kingdom of the heavens are greater than John the Baptist—not, of course, greater in themselves, but as a greater power works along with them. The “greater” is not inherent, a matter of our own substance, but relational. So, C. S. Lewis writes, our faith is not a matter of our hearing what Christ said long ago and “trying to carry it out.” Rather, “The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself. He is beginning, so to speak, to ‘inject’ His kind of life and thought, His Zoe [life], into you; beginning to turn the tin soldier into a live man. The part of you that does not like it is the part that is still tin.”13

Our “kingdom” is simply the range of our effective will. Whatever we genuinely have the say over is in our kingdom. And our having the say over something is precisely what places it within our kingdom. In creating human beings God made them to rule, to reign, to have dominion in a limited sphere. Only so can they be persons.

However unlikely it may seem from our current viewpoint, God equipped us for this task by framing our nature to function in a conscious, personal relationship of interactive responsibility with him. We are meant to exercise our “rule” only in union with God, as he acts with us. He intended to be our constant companion or coworker in the creative enterprise of life on earth. That is what his love for us means in practical terms.

Now God’s own “kingdom,” or “rule,” is the range of his effective will, where what he wants done is done. The person of God himself and the action of his will are the organizing principles of his kingdom, but everything that obeys those principles, whether by nature or by choice, is within his kingdom.18

Thus, contrary to a popular idea, the kingdom of God is not primarily something that is “in the hearts of men.” That kingdom may be there, and it may govern human beings through their faith and allegiance to Christ. At the present time it governs them only through their hearts, if at all. But his kingdom is not something confined to their hearts or to the “inner” world of human consciousness. It is not some matter of inner attitude or faith that might be totally disconnected from the public, behavioral, visible world. It always pervades and governs the whole of the physical universe—parts of planet earth occupied by humans and other personal beings, the satanic, slightly excepted for a while.

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. The obvious present reality of the kingdom is what provoked the responses we have just discussed. New Testament passages make plain that this kingdom is not something to be “accepted” now and enjoyed later, but something to be entered now (Matt. 5:20; 18:3; John 3:3, 5). It is something that already has flesh-and-blood citizens (John 18:36; Phil. 3:20) who have been transformed into it (Col. 1:13) and are fellow workers in it (Col. 4:11).

come. Rather, they have now become available. 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).

You cannot call upon Jesus Christ or upon God and not be heard. You live in their house, their ecos (Heb. 3:4). We usually call it simply “the universe.” But they fully occupy it. It is their place, their “kingdom,” where through their kindness and sacrificial love we can make our present life an eternal life. Only as we understand this, is the way open for a true ecology of human existence, for only then are we dealing with what the human habitation truly is.

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 eternal kind of life—as the target. 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 human life—or else alienation from it. That is the biblical alternative for life now.

He waited until God materialized fire “out of thin air.” God acted from surrounding space, the atmosphere—that is, from the “first heaven” of the Bible.

Certainly forgiveness and reconciliation are essential to any relationship where there has been offense, and also between us and God. We cannot pass into a new life from above without forgiveness. Certainly it is Christ who made possible such a transition, including forgiveness, through his life and his death. 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 stories of Abraham and other biblical characters beautifully illustrate this.

The issue, so far as the gospel in the Gospels is concerned, is whether we are alive to God or dead to him. Do we walk in an interactive relationship with him that constitutes a new kind of life, life “from above”? As the apostle John says in his first letter, “God has given undying life to us, and that life is in his Son. Those who have the Son have life” (1 John 5:11–12).

To trust the real person Jesus is to have confidence in him in every dimension of our real life, to believe that he is right about and adequate to everything.

It is left unexplained how it is possible that one can rely on Christ for the next life without doing so for this one, trust him for one’s eternal destiny without trusting him for “the things that relate to Christian life.” Is this really possible? Surely it is not! Not within one life.

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. This was Abraham’s faith, too. As Jesus said, “Abraham saw my time and was delighted” (John 8:56).

Some current critics of the U.S. Supreme Court like to point out that it does not allow the Ten Commandments, though written upon the walls of its own chambers, to be displayed in public schools. But where do we find churches, right or left, that put them on their walls? The Ten Commandments really aren’t very popular anywhere. This is so in spite of the fact that even a fairly general practice of them would lead to a solution of almost every problem of meaning and order now facing Western societies. They are God’s best information on how to lead a basically decent human existence.

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 ...

In the world of Faith the heavens above the city are friendly and near: they are the upper chamber of every house.

Until our thoughts of God have found every visible thing and event glorious with his presence, the word of Jesus has not yet fully seized us.

So we must understand that God does not “love” us without liking us—through gritted teeth—as “Christian” love is sometimes thought to do. Rather, out of the eternal freshness of his perpetually self-renewed being,

The “heavens” are always there with you no matter what, and the “first heaven,” in biblical terms, is precisely the atmosphere or air that surrounds your body. We saw what this meant for Abraham’s experience in an earlier chapter, and we will go more deeply into it in what follows. But it is precisely from the space immediately around us that God watches and God acts.

Vintage Willard for our morning.

Jacob on the run, asleep in a ditch on his pillow of stone, saw the earth and heaven connected by a passageway, with angels coming and going, and the Lord himself standing beside him. He awoke in awe, saying, “God lives here!…I’ve stumbled into his home! This is the awesome entrance to Heaven” (Gen. 28:12–19 LB).

These are just a few of the constant interactions of “heaven” with God’s people in the Old Testament. They show us that heaven is here and God is here, because God and his spiritual agents act here and are constantly available here.

God, Christ, angels, or other unusual phenomena are experienced in surrounding space, in the atmosphere—the “first heaven” of the biblical world.

I am a spiritual being who currently has a physical body.

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.

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

“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.

Jesus said, “God is not the God of the dead but of the living” (Luke 20:38). His meaning was that those who love and are loved by God are not allowed to cease to exist, because they are God’s treasures. He delights in them and intends to hold onto them. He has even prepared for them an individualized eternal work in his vast universe.

We are never-ceasing spiritual beings with an eternal destiny in the full world of God.

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

Our commitment to Jesus can stand on no other foundation than a recognition that he is the one who knows the truth about our lives and our universe. It is not possible to trust Jesus, or anyone else, in matters where we do not believe him to be competent.

The biblical and continuing vision of Jesus was of one who made all of created reality and kept it working, literally “holding it together”

At the literally mundane level, Jesus knew how to transform the molecular structure of water to make it wine.

He is Master only because he is Maestro. “Jesus is Lord” can mean little in practice for anyone who has to hesitate before saying, “Jesus is smart.”

First there is the question of which life is the good life. What is genuinely in my interest, and how may I enter true well-being?

The second question Jesus deals with in the sermon concerns who is truly a good person. Who has the kind of goodness found in God himself, constituting the family likeness between God and his children?

We can savor them, affirm them, meditate upon them, and engrave them on plaques to hang on our walls. But a major question remains: How are we to live in response to them?

He could point out in the crowd now this individual, who was “blessed” because The Kingdom Among Us had just reached out and touched them with Jesus’ heart and voice and hands.

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

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.

“What do you think?” No response. Just silence. Over and over this happened. Finally he realized that no one ever asks the poor what they think. That also is a part of what it means to be poor “in spirit.” No one imagines you could have any thoughts worth sharing. Real poverty in the human order is almost automatically taken as a sign of failure in every respect.