The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

by Dallas Willard

My hope is to gain a fresh hearing for Jesus, especially among those who believe they already understand him. In his case, quite frankly, presumed familiarity has led to unfamiliarity, unfamiliarity has led to contempt, and contempt has led to profound ignorance.

Jesus’ good news, then, was that the Kingdom of God had come, and that he, Jesus, was its herald and expounder to men. More than that, in some special, mysterious way, he was the Kingdom. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE, JESUS: THE MAN WHO LIVES

Leo Tolstoy’s A Confession

What is the point of standing up for rights in a world where few stand up for their responsibilities?

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

Every last one of us has a “kingdom”—or a “queendom,” or a “government”—a realm that is uniquely our own, where our choice determines what happens.

John Calvin remarked rather balefully, “Everyone flatters himself and carries a kingdom in his breast.”14

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.

The present situation of kingdoms in conflict is one eloquently portrayed in the Twenty-third Psalm: “In the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil.” Yes, but the “evil” is very much here to be feared. And: “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.” The “enemies” are certainly here, but we are safe in God’s hands even though other “kingdoms” loom over us and threaten us.

As a child I lived in an area of southern Missouri where electricity was available only in the form of lightning. We had more of that than we could use. But in my senior year of high school the REA (Rural Electrification Administration) extended its lines into the area where we lived, and electrical power became available to households and farms. When those lines came by our farm, a very different way of living presented itself. Our relationships to fundamental aspects of life—daylight and dark, hot and cold, clean and dirty, work and leisure, preparing food and preserving it—could then be vastly changed for the better. But we still had to believe in the electricity and its arrangements, understand them, and take the practical steps involved in relying on it. You may think the comparison rather crude, and in some respects it is. But it will help us to understand Jesus’ basic message about the kingdom of the heavens if we pause to reflect on those farmers who, in effect, heard the message: “Repent, for electricity is at hand.” Repent, or turn from their kerosene lamps and lanterns, their iceboxes and cellars, their scrubboards and rug beaters, their woman-powered sewing machines and their radios with dry-cell batteries. The power that could make their lives far better was right there near them where, by making relatively simple arrangements, they could utilize it. Strangely, a few did not accept it. They did not “enter the kingdom of electricity.” Some just didn’t want to c...

Helmut Thielicke points out that we often wonder if the celebrities who advertise foods and beverages actually consume what they are selling.3 He goes on to say that this is the very question most pressing for those of us who speak for Christ. Surely something has gone wrong when moral failures are so massive and widespread among us. Perhaps we are not eating what we are selling. More likely, I think, what we are “selling” is irrelevant to our real existence and without power over daily life.

Widespread acceptance of this interpretation of salvation within the evangelical and conservative churches of North America is what has produced the situation sketched earlier, in which those who profess Christian commitment consistently show little or no behavioral and psychological difference from those who do not. This in turn has led to what is called the “Lordship salvation” debate among leading evangelicals and their followers.

As a professor of education at Bradley University recently stated, the American dream is that “people can do or be what they want if they just go ahead and do it.”22 Desire becomes sacred, and whatever thwarts desire is evil or sin. 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.

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.”25 Dr. I. Howard Marshall of the University of Aberdeen has commented, “During the past sixteen years I can recollect only two occasions on which I have heard sermons specifically devoted to the theme of the Kingdom of God…. I find this silence rather surprising because it is universally agreed by New Testament scholars that the central theme of the teaching of Jesus was the Kingdom of God.”26

Peter Wagner, perhaps the best-known leader in the worldwide “church growth” movement, also refers to the unanimous opinion of modern scholarship that the kingdom of God was the message of Jesus. Then he adds, I cannot help wondering out loud why I haven’t heard more about it in the thirty years I have been a Christian. I certainly read about it enough in the Bible…. But I honestly cannot remember any pastor whose ministry I have been under actually preaching a sermon on the Kingdom of God. As I rummage through my own sermon barrel, I now realize that I myself have never preached a sermon on it. Where has the Kingdom been?27

A well-known Christian teacher, Sundar Singh, was born and raised a Sikh in Rampur, India, around the turn of the twentieth century. As a boy he was placed in a Presbyterian mission school, where he developed a “love/hate” relationship with the Christian gospel. For some time he had been in a condition of inner turmoil. Then one morning he arose very early to pray, as was Sikh custom. In his distress he cried out, “Oh God, if there be a God, show me the right way, and I will become a Sadhu [holy man]; otherwise I will kill myself.” At about a quarter to five in the morning, his room was filled with light. He looked outside, thinking there must be a fire, but he saw none. Continuing to pray, he suddenly saw before him a glorious face filled with love. At first he thought it was Buddha or Krishna or some other deity. But a voice in Hindustani said, “How long will you persecute me? Remember, I died for you; I gave my life for you.” Seeing the scars on his body, Sundar Singh recognized Jesus and saw that he was alive, not someone who died centuries ago. He fell at his feet and accepted him as master and worshiped him. Afterward he became a world-famous example of God’s life present among human beings.8

Accordingly, a difference in terminology that at first seems insignificant in fact reaches deeply into the heart of Jesus’ message about this world we live in. The phrase kingdom of the heavens occurs thirty-two times in Matthew’s Gospel and never again in the New Testament. By contrast, the phrase kingdom of God occurs only five times in that Gospel but is the usual term used in the remainder of the New Testament. What is the significance of this variation in terminology? Generally speaking, scholars have treated the variation as of no significance at all. This is unfortunate, for reasons that should now be clear. C. H. Dodd is characteristic with his statement: “The two expressions, ‘The Kingdom of God’ and ‘The Kingdom of Heaven,’ the latter of which is peculiar to the First Gospel, are synonymous, the term ‘heaven’ being common in Jewish usage as a reverential periphrasis for the divine name.”11

For many years in Moscow there was a scientific institute where the brains of great Communists—leaders, scientists, and artists—were preserved and slices taken to be analyzed under the microscope. Technicians hoped to find the secret of great Communist personalities right there in their great Communist brains. Of course, they found nothing of personal greatness there. They were looking in the wrong place and in the wrong way. To be sure, the brain is a relatively more important and interesting piece of flesh, but nothing of intellect, creativity, or character is to be found in it.

Persons rarely become present where they are not heartily wanted.

The hymn Amazing Grace was found in a recent USA Today poll to be America’s favorite hymn. It is sung at Boston Pops concerts and played at military and police funerals. It is now a solid part of American if not Western culture, and it accurately presents the future of redeemed humanity: When we’ve been there ten thousand years, Bright shining as the sun, We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise, Than when we first begun.

When Mickey Mantle was dying of diseases brought on by a life of heavy drinking, he said that he would have taken better care of himself had he only known how long he was going to live.

The American evangelist Dwight Moody remarked toward the end of his life, “One day soon you will hear that I am dead. Do not believe it. I will then be alive as never before.” When the two guards came to take Dietrich Bonhoeffer to the gallows, he briefly took a friend aside to say, “This is the end, but for me it is the beginning of life.’”24

I personally have become convinced that many people who believe in Jesus do not actually believe in God.

The word here translated “blessed,” makarios, is the same as that used in Matthew 5 and Luke 6. It refers to the highest type of well-being possible for human beings, but it is also the term the Greeks used for the kind of blissful existence characteristic of the gods. More important, however, note here the list of “hopeless cases” that are blessed through the sufficiency of God to meet them in their appalling need. The personal ministry of Jesus from his present kingdom brings them beatitude.

The historian of morals W. E. H. Lecky describes the teachings of Jesus as “an agency which all men must now admit to have been, for good or for evil, the most powerful moral lever that has ever been applied to the affairs of man.”1

A contemporary historian, Michael Grant, comments, The most potent figure, not only in the history of religion, but in world history as a whole, is Jesus Christ: the maker of one of the few revolutions which have lasted. Millions of men and women for century after century have found his life and teaching overwhelmingly significant and moving. And there is ample reason…in this later twentieth century why this should still be so.2

First, what is now called his Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7) should indeed be read as a sermon, as one unified discourse. To be sure, it is not what might be called a sermon today. Neither was it given in the seclusion of a genuine mountain. It is not “preachy,” of course, and is far too dense in content to function as a sermon in contexts where “sermons” now occur. It is “a talk,” we would probably say, and one given for the benefit of a large crowd of common folk, who heard it and enjoyed it on gently rolling pastures by the Sea of Galilee.

Finally, Jesus gives us urgent warnings about failing to actually do what he calls us to do in his teachings and mentions the specific things that are most likely to trip us up in this regard. Dietrich Bonhoeffer forcefully states, “The only proper response to this word which Jesus brings with him from eternity is simply to do it.”6 Remarkably, almost one sixth of the entire Discourse (fifteen of ninety-two verses) is devoted to emphasizing the importance of actually doing what it says. Doing and not just hearing and talking about it is how we know the reality of the kingdom and integrate our life into it. This final section therefore concludes with the well-known images of the wise man who builds his house upon the rock (he is the one doing the words of Jesus), as compared with the other man, who does not.

The simple but powerful structure of the Discourse on the Hill can therefore be represented as follows: Background assumption: life in the kingdom through reliance upon Jesus (Matt. 4:17–25; chapters 1 through 3 of this book are devoted to this topic). It is ordinary people who are the light and salt of the world as they live the blessed life in the kingdom (5:1–20, and chapter 4 of this book). The kingdom heart of goodness concretely portrayed as the kind of love that is in God (5:21–48, and the present chapter of this book). Warning: against false securities—reputation and wealth (Matt. 6, and chapter 6 of this book). Warning: against “condemnation engineering” as a plan for helping people. A call to the community of prayerful love (Matt. 7:1–12, and chapter 7 of this book). Warnings: about how we may fail actually to do what the Discourse requires, and the effects thereof (7:13–27).

The Deeper “Beyond” from Which Actions Come But the question is, How can one keep the law? Jesus well knew the answer to this question, and that is why he told those who wanted to know how to work the works of God to put their confidence in the one God had sent (John 6:29). He knew that we cannot keep the law by trying to keep the law. To succeed in keeping the law one must aim at something other and something more. One must aim to become the kind of person from whom the deeds of the law naturally flow. The apple tree naturally and easily produces apples because of its inner nature. This is the most crucial thing to remember if we would understand Jesus’ picture of the kingdom heart given in the Sermon on the Mount. And here also lies the fundamental mistake of the scribe and the Pharisee. They focus on the actions that the law requires and make elaborate specifications of exactly what those actions are and of the manner in which they are to be done. They also generate immense social pressure to force conformity of action to the law as they interpret it. They are intensely self-conscious about doing the right thing and about being thought to have done the right thing. But the inner dimensions of their personality, their heart and character, are left to remain contrary to what God has required. That heart will, of course, ultimately triumph over their conscious intentions and arrangements, and they will in fact do what they know to be wrong. Their words, especially, will re...

Dikaiosune Jesus’ account of dikaiosune, or of being a really good person, is given in Matt. 5:20–48. We need to stop for a comment on this special term that plays such a large part in the thought world of classical and Hellenistic Greek culture, as well as in the language of the Bible and in the early form of Christianity that emerged to conquer the Greco-Roman world of the second and third centuries. The human need to know how to live is perennial. It has never been more desperate than it is today, of course—in Los Angeles and New York, in London, Paris, and Berlin. But this need is always desperate. That is an unalterable part of the human condition. It is especially urgent in times and places where there is social instability. Such instability does not allow us to maintain the illusion that being a good Jones or Catholic or American or Armenian or Jew solves the problem. We have to have something deeper. The search for something deeper had become a serious intellectual and spiritual project in the Mediterranean world by the fifth century B.C. or even earlier. That search was, in fact, worldwide in scope,8 but nowhere did it achieve a higher result than in the great prophets of Israel, such as Amos, Micah, and Isaiah. Its first thorough and systematic treatment within the powers of human reason is found in Plato’s Republic, which would be more accurately translated The City. This book is really a study of the human soul and of the condition in which the soul must be in ...

Situation Old Dikaiosune Kingdom Dikaiosune 1. Irritation with one’s associates, (vv. 21–26) No murder. Intense desire to be of help. No anger or contempt. 2. Sexual attraction. (vv. 27–30) No intercourse. No cultivation of lust. 3. Unhappiness with marriage partner. (vv. 31–32) If you divorce, give “pink slip.” No divorce, as then practiced. 4. Wanting someone to believe something, (vv. 33–37) Keep vows or oaths made to convince. Only say how things are or are not. No verbal manipulation. 5. Being personally injured. (vv. 38–42) Inflict exactly the same injury on the offender. Don’t harm, but help, the one who has damaged you. 6. Having an enemy, (vv. 43–48) Hate your enemy. Love and bless your your enemy, as the heavenly Father does.

What Anger Is And when we look carefully at anger we can see why such a strong statement is justified. In its simplest form, anger is a spontaneous response that has a vital function in life. As such, it is not wrong. It is a feeling that seizes us in our body and immediately impels us toward interfering with, and possibly even harming, those who have thwarted our will and interfered with our life. Indeed, anger is in its own right—quite apart from “acting it out” and further consequences—an injury to others. When I discover your anger at me, I am already wounded. Your anger alone will very likely be enough to stop me or make me change my course, and it will also raise the stress level of everyone around us. It may also evoke my anger in return. Usually it does, precisely because your anger places a restraint on me. It crosses my will. Thus anger feeds on anger. The primary function of anger in life is to alert me to an obstruction to my will, and immediately raise alarm and resistance, before I even have time to think about it. And if that were all there was to anger, all would be well. Anger in this sense is no sin, even though it is still better avoided where possible. (Headaches are no sin, but do we really need them?) Anger would then perform its vital function, as physical pain does, and pass with the occasion. But the anger that is a reality among us is much more than this and quickly turns into something that is inherently evil. To understand why, we need to take a...

Anger and the Wounded Ego But it is a third possible involvement of the will in anger that makes it so deadly as to deserve the censure Jesus places upon it. We can and usually do choose or will to be angry. Anger first arises spontaneously. But we can actively receive it and decide to indulge it, and we usually do. We may even become an angry person, and any incident can evoke from us a torrent of rage that is kept in constant readiness. This is actually the case with those who are caught up in the current epidemic of “road rage.” The explosion of anger never simply comes from the incident. Most people carry a supply of anger around with them. Perhaps it comes along with that “quiet desperation” that, according to Henry David Thoreau, characterizes the life of most people. Increasingly, now, the desperation is not so quiet. But why, one might ask, would people embrace anger and indulge it? Why would they, as they do so often, bloat their bodies with anger or wear it like a badge of honor while it radiates real and potential harm, not only to its proper object, the one who thwarted their will in the first place, but to others standing by—often with deadly effects on their own life and health and happiness? It is well established today that many people are killed by their own anger.10 Untold many others die of secondhand anger, like secondhand smoke. In Los Angeles and other cities, hardly a week goes by without the death of a child from bullets fired at others in anger. Th...

Find a person who has embraced anger, and you find a person ...

The importance of the self and the real or imaginary wound done to it is blown out of all proportion by those who indulge anger. Then anger can become anything from a low-burning resentment to a holy crusade to inflict harm on the one who has thwarted me or my wishes or bruised my sense of propriety. It may explode on anything and anyone within reach. I may become addicted to the adrenaline rush and never feel really alive except when my anger is pumping. Only this element of self-righteousness can support me as I retain my anger long after the occasion of it or allow its intensity to heat to the point of totally senseless rage. To rage on I must regard myself as mistreated or as engaged in the rectification of an unbearable wrong, which I all too easily do. Anger embraced is, accordingly, inherently disintegrative of human personality and life. It does not have to be specifically “acted out” to poison the world. Because of what it is, and the way it seizes upon the body and its environment just by being there, it cannot be hidden. All our mental and emotional resources are marshaled to nurture and tend the anger, and our body throbs with it. Energy is dedicated to...

Anger As Now Practiced and Encouraged In the United States there are around 25,000 murders each year. There are 1,000 murders in the workplace, and a million people are injured in the workplace by violent attacks from co-workers.11 Most of the workplace murders occur after long periods of open rage and threats, and many involve multiple murders of innocent bystanders. It is a simple fact that none of the 25,000 murders, or only a negligible number of them, would have occurred but for an anger that the killers chose to embrace and indulge. Anger and contempt are the twin scourges of the earth. Mingled with greed and sexual lust (to be discussed later), these bitter emotions form the poisonous brew in which human existence stands suspended. Few people ever get free of them in this life, and for most of us even old age does not bring relief. Once you see those emotions for what they are, the constant stream of human disasters that history and life bring before us can also be seen for what they are: the natural outcome of human choice, of people choosing to be angry and contemptuous. It is a miracle there are not more and greater disasters. We have to remember this when we read what...

But there is nothing that can be done with anger that cannot be do...

The sense of self-righteousness that comes with our anger simply provokes more anger and self-righteousness on the other side. Of course, when nothing is done about things that are wrong, anger naturally builds and finally will break into action, whether in a family or a nation. That is inevitable and even necessary outside The Kingdom Among Us. But the answer is to right the wrong in persistent love, not to harbor anger, and thus to right it without adding further real or imaginary wrongs. To retain anger and to cultivate it is, by contrast, “to give the devil a chance” (Eph. 4:26–27). He will take the chance, and there will be hell to pay. The delicious morsel of self-righteousness...

Contempt Is Worse Than Anger But contempt is a greater evil than anger and so is deserving of greater condemnation. Unlike innocent anger, at least, it is a kind of studied degradation of another, and it also is more pervasive in life than anger. It is never justifiable or good. Therefore Jesus tells us, “Whoever says ‘Raca’ to his brother shall stand condemned before the Sanhedrin, the highest court of the land” (v. 22). The Aramaic term raca was current in Jesus’ day to express contempt for someone and to mark out him or her as contemptible. It may have originated from the sound one makes to collect spittle from the throat in order to spit. In anger I want to hurt you. In contempt, I don’t care whether you are hurt or not. Or at least so I say. You are not worth consideration one way or the other. We can be angry at someone without denying their worth. But contempt makes it easier for us to hurt them or see them further degraded. Today, of course, we would not say, “Raca.” But we might call someone a twit or a twerp, maybe a dork or a nerd. These are the gentler words in our vocabulary of contempt; when it really gets going, it becomes filthy. Our verbal arsenal is loaded with...

In his marvelous little talk “The Inner Ring,” C. S. Lewis comments that “in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to b...

To belong is a vital need based in the spiritual nature of the human being. Contempt spits on this pathetically deep need. And, like anger, contempt does not have to be acted out in special ways to be evil. It is inherently poisonous. Just by being what it is, it is withering to the human soul. But when expressed in the contemptuous phrase—in its thousands of forms—or in the equally powerful gesture or look, it stabs the soul to its core and deflates its powers of life. It can hurt so badly and destroy ...

“You Fool!” But Jesus notes one stage further in the progression of internal evil that may be there without murder occurring: “And whoever says ‘You fool!’ shall merit condemnation to the fires of gehenna” (v. 22). “You fool!” said with that characteristic combination of freezing contempt and withering anger that Jesus had in mind, is a deeper harm than either anger or contempt alone. Twerp or twit usually is not said in anger but even with a certain amusement. Fool, on the other hand, in the biblical sense, is an expression of malice as well as contempt. Actually, that word will no longer do to capture the sense of Jesus’ teaching here and, in fact, is now closer to twerp than it is to what he had in mind. Thus one who would follow Jesus’ “law” by not calling people fools today gets off easy. We have plenty of other terminology that would allow us to go ahead and do exactly what he was in fact condemning, without using the word fool. The dominant sense of fool in our culture is that of a benign folly, as in “Feast of Fools,” an ancient idea that became the title of a popular book some years back. Excuse the crudity, but the nearest equivalent of the biblical fool in today’s lan...

Just as the thief is the person who would steal if circumstances were right, so the adulterer is the one who would have wrongful sex if the circumstances were right.

The classical moralist Aristotle, who lived four centuries before Jesus, also held that adultery was simply wrong. There is no such thing, he says, as “committing adultery with the right woman, at the right time, and in the right way, for it is…simply wrong.”

More commonly, now, it is thought that sex is right with anyone you love in the sense of a “romantic” involvement. And on the other hand sex without romantic feelings is thought to be wrong even if the sexual partners are married. Often the “romantic love” in question turns out upon examination to be nothing more than precisely that fantasized lusting that Jesus called “adultery in the heart.” One is not in love but in lust, which glorifies itself as something deeper in order to have its way.

Perhaps one of the hardest things for the contemporary mind to accept is that life runs in natural cycles that cannot be disrupted without indelible damage to the individuals involved. For example, a child that does not receive proper nutrition in its early years will suffer negative effects for the rest of its life. The deficiency cannot be made up later. And failure of a newborn baby to bond with its mother in its early weeks is thought by many researchers to do irreparable psychological damage.21 These are representative of a wide range of natural cycles to be found in human life. We now know that even the physical structure of the brain will never develop in certain crucial directions unless it does so within a particular period of the individual’s life, in the order of nature some things can simply never be regained if they are lost.

Forced into “Adultery” Third, he very clearly gives his reasons for rejecting the old view of rightness in divorce by saying that anyone who sends away his wife on grounds other than “uncleanness” forces her into adultery, and whoever takes as wife a woman who has been sent away from another engages in adultery (Matt. 5:32; 19:9).22 This is not to forbid divorce, but it is to make clear what its effects are. What, exactly, do these statements mean? In the Jewish society of Jesus’ day, as for most times and places in human history, the consequences of divorce were devastating for the woman. Except for some highly unlikely circumstances, her life was, simply, ruined. No harm was done to the man, by contrast, except from time to time a small financial loss and perhaps bitter relationships with the ex-wife’s family members. For the woman, however, there were only three realistic possibilities in Jesus’ day. She might find a place in the home of a generous relative, but usually on grudging terms and as little more than a servant. She might find a man who would marry her, but always as “damaged goods” and sustained in a degraded relationship. Or she might, finally, make a place in the community as a prostitute. Society simply would not then, as ours does today, support a divorced woman to any degree or allow her to support herself in a decent fashion. These circumstances explain why Jesus says that to divorce a woman causes her to commit adultery and to marry a divorced woman is...

Few of us manage to go through life without collecting a group of individuals who would not be sorry to learn we have died.

He does not call us to do what he did, but to be as he was, permeated with love. Then the doing of what he did and said becomes the natural expression of who we are in him.