The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

by Dallas Willard

Those spiritually impoverished ones present before Jesus in the crowd are blessed only because the gracious touch of the heavens has freely fallen upon them. 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. We escape the humiliation of spiritual incompetence because, strange to say, we have managed to turn it into spiritual attainment just by acknowledging it. And we escape the embarrassment of receiving pure mercy, for our humble recognition makes blessedness somehow appropriate. We have egg on our face perhaps, but at least we know it—and then can wear it defiantly, even proudly, like a badge of virtue. We have salvaged an impressive bit of righteousness for ourselves. And anyway, aren’t all good people humble-minded? So all good people have the kingdom of the heavens! What necessary place does Jesus have in this—other than having the good sense to see it and say it? And of course this also means that we can v...