Asking Questions and Seeking Answers About the Divine

College is often the time you ask the big questions of life and seek the deep answers. I asked girls out and sought Gamecube.I've had the fortunate and privilege to go at my own pace with questioning, discovering, learning, and growing.And now, a decade later, I'm ready to ask, to be challenged, to be rocked around and bowled over.The Divine Conspiracy was an amazing place to start. Full and complete answers to the most important questions you can ever ask---how do you know you're saved, what does it mean to live a Christ-like life, where do we go when we die. Yes, actual answers to where we go when we die (or as close as you can get to actual answers).I was amazed and grateful for the depth of this book and the lessons it taught. And I left with a few more answers to questions I finally felt good asking.Highly recommended.

The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard

The following are excerpts taken from Dallas Willard's The Divine Conspiracy. Bold, italics, and notes are mine. The rest is Dallas's.

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Must one not wonder about people willing to wear a commercial trademark on the outside of their shirts or caps or shoes to let others know who they are? And just think of a world in which little children sing, “I wish I were a [certain kind of] wiener. That is what I really want to be. For if I were [that certain kind of] wiener. Everyone would be in love with me.” Think of what it would mean to be a weenie, or for someone to love you as they “love” a hot dog. Think of a world in which adults would pay millions of dollars to have children perform this song in “commercials” and in which hundreds of millions, even billions, of adults find no problem in it. You are thinking of our world.--Today, from countless paintings, statues, and buildings, from literature and history, from personality and institution, from profanity, popular song, and entertainment media, from confession and controversy, from legend and ritual—Jesus stands quietly at the center of the contemporary world, as he himself predicted. He so graced the ugly instrument on which he died that the cross has become the most widely exhibited and recognized symbol on earth.--

"I have come into their world that they may have life, and life to the limit.”

- Jesus, Matthew 3:3--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.--

Bar-Code Faith

Think of the bar codes now used on goods in most stores. The scanner responds only to the bar code. It makes no difference what is in the bottle or package that bears it, or whether the sticker is on the “right” one or not. The calculator responds through its electronic eye to the bar code and totally disregards everything else. If the ice cream sticker is on the dog food, the dog food is ice cream, so far as the scanner knows or cares. ...The theology of Christian trinkets says there is something about the Christian that works like the bar code. Some ritual, some belief, or some association with a group affects God the way the bar code affects the scanner. Perhaps there has occurred a moment of mental assent to a creed, or an association entered into with a church. God “scans” it, and forgiveness floods forth. An appropriate amount of righteousness is shifted from Christ’s account to our account in the bank of heaven, and all our debts are paid. We are, accordingly, “saved.” Our guilt is erased. How could we not be Christians?--Helmut Thielicke points out that we often wonder if the celebrities who advertise foods and beverages actually consume what they are selling. 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.--To the right, being a Christian is a matter of having your sins forgiven. To the left, you are Christian if you have a significant commitment to the elimination of social evils. A Christian is either one who is ready to die and face the judgment of God or one who has an identifiable commitment to love and justice in society. That’s it.--And so the only sure outcome of belief is that we are “just forgiven.” We are justified, which is often explained by saying that, before God, it is “just-as-if-I’d” never sinned at all. We may not have done or become anything positive to speak of. But when we come to heaven’s gate, they will not be able to find a reason to keep us out. The mere record of a magical moment of mental assent will open the door.--Practically, there has always been a great problem with knowing for sure that you have performed the right private or mental act, because its only essential effect is a change in the books of heaven, and these cannot be seen now. Thus there occurs the familiar and often bitter struggle in the Protestant tradition to know whether or not you are “among the elect” and will certainly “get in.”--The sensed irrelevance of what God is doing to what makes up our lives is the foundational flaw in the existence of multitudes of professing Christians today.--They have been led to believe that God, for some unfathomable reason, just thinks it appropriate to transfer credit from Christ’s merit account to ours, and to wipe out our sin debt, upon inspecting our mind and finding that we believe a particular theory of the atonement to be true—even if we trust everything but God in all other matters that concern us.--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.--The real Jesus, as is now commonly said, is “one who identified with and loves oppressed people and those who are different,” calling us to do the same. These words now express the redemptive vision of the Christian left, just as “trusted Christ for forgiveness” or “prayed to receive Jesus” does for the right.--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.--Who among us has personal knowledge of a seminar or course of study and practice being offered in a “Christian Education Program” on how to “love your enemies, bless those that curse you, do good to those that hate you, and pray for those who spit on you and make your life miserable”? (Matt. 5:44).--A saying among management experts today is, “Your system is perfectly designed to yield the result you are getting.”--The kingdom of God was the message of Jesus.--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. To his eyes this is a God-bathed and God-permeated world. It is a world filled with a glorious reality, where every component is within the range of God’s direct knowledge and control—though he obviously permits some of it, for good reasons, to be for a while otherwise than as he wishes. It is a world that is inconceivably beautiful and good because of God and because God is always in it. It is a world in which God is continually at play and over which he constantly rejoices.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.--The novelist Vladimir Nabokov writes of a moment of awakening in one of his characters who, watching an old woman of the streets drink a cup of coffee given to her,

became aware of the world’s tenderness, the profound beneficence of all that surrounded me, the blissful bond between me and all of creation; and I realized that joy…breathed around me everywhere, in the speeding street sounds, in the hem of a comically lifted skirt, in the metallic yet tender drone of the wind, in the autumn clouds bloated with rain. I realized that the world does not represent a struggle at all, or a predaceous sequence of chance events, but shimmering bliss, beneficent trepidation, a gift bestowed on us and unappreciated.

--If you bury yourself in Psalms, you emerge knowing God and understanding life.--In the grand and carefully phrased old words of Adam Clarke,

God is the eternal, independent, and self-existent Being; the Being whose purposes and actions spring from himself, without foreign motive or influence; he who is absolute in dominion; the most pure, the most simple, the most spiritual of all essences; infinitely perfect; and eternally self-sufficient, needing nothing that he has made; illimitable in his immensity, inconceivable in his mode of existence, and indescribable in his essence; known fully only by himself, because an infinite mind can only be fully comprehended by itself. In a word, a Being who, from his infinite wisdom, cannot err or be deceived, and from his infinite goodness, can do nothing but what is eternally just, and right, and kind.

--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. Of course God is there too. But instead of heaven and God also being always present with us, as Jesus shows them to be, we invariably take them to be located far away and, most likely, at a much later time—not here and not now. And we should then be surprised to feel ourselves alone?--Confusing God with his historical manifestations in space may have caused some to think that God is a Wizard-of-Oz or Sistine-Chapel kind of being sitting at a location very remote from us. The universe is then presented as, chiefly, a vast empty space with a humanoid God and a few angels rattling around in it, while several billion human beings crawl through the tiny cosmic interval of human history on an oversized clod of dirt circling an insignificant star.Of such a “god” we can only say, “Good riddance!”It seems that when many people try to pray they do have such an image of God in their minds. They therefore find praying psychologically impossible or extremely difficult. No wonder.--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.By contrast, the child’s face is a constant epiphany because it doesn’t yet know how to do this. It cannot manage its face.This is also true of adults in moments of great feeling—which is one reason why feeling is both greatly treasured and greatly feared....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.--God wishes to be seen, and he wishes to be sought, and he wishes to be expected, and he wishes to be trusted.--“To fill your mind with the visible, the ‘flesh,’ is death, but to fill your mind with the spirit is life and peace” (Rom. 8:6).As we increasingly integrate our life into the spiritual world of God, our life increasingly takes on the substance of the eternal. 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. Our dying, or “mortal” condition, will have been exchanged for an undying one and death absorbed in victory.--Of course that destiny flatly contradicts the usual human outlook, or what “everyone knows” to be the case. I take this to be a considerable point in its favor.Our “lives of quiet desperation,” in the familiar words of Thoreau, are imposed by hopelessness. We find our world to be one where we hardly count at all, where what we do makes little difference, and where what we really love is unattainable, or certainly is not secure. We become frantic or despairing.In his book The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley remarks,

Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.

They are relentlessly driven to seek, in H. G. Wells’s phrase, “Doors in the Wall” that entombs them in life.

On death and dying

“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....Christ is preparing places for his human sisters and brothers to join him. Some are already there—no doubt busy with him in his great works. We can hardly think that they are mere watchers. On the day he died, he covenanted with another man being killed along with him to meet that very day in a place he called Paradise....Anyone who realizes that reality is God’s, and has seen a little bit of what God has already done, will understand that such a “Paradise” would be no problem at all. And there God will preserve every one of his treasured friends in the wholeness of their personal existence precisely because he treasures them in that form. Could he enjoy their fellowship, could they serve him, if they were “dead”?...Immersed in Christ in action, we may be sure that our life—yes, that familiar one we are each so well acquainted with—will never stop. We should be anticipating what we will be doing three hundred or a thousand or ten thousand years from now in this marvelous universe....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.’”...How then are we to think about the transition? Failure to have a way of thinking about it is one of the things that continues to make it dreadful even to those who have every confidence in Jesus. The unimaginable is naturally frightening to us....There are two pictures that I believe to be accurate as well as helpful. They can help us know what to expect as we leave “our tent,” our body (2 Cor. 5:1–6).One was made famous by Peter Marshall some years ago. It is the picture of a child playing in the evening among her toys. Gradually she grows weary and lays her head down for a moment of rest, lazily continuing to play. The next thing she experiences or “tastes” is the morning light of a new day flooding the bed and the room where her mother or father took her. Interestingly, we never remember falling asleep. We do not “see” it, “taste” it.Another picture is of one who walks to a doorway between rooms. While still interacting with those in the room she is leaving, she begins to see and converse with people in the room beyond, who may be totally concealed from those left behind.Before the widespread use of heavy sedation, it was quite common for those keeping watch to observe something like this. The one making the transition often begins to speak to those who have gone before. They come to meet us while we are still in touch with those left behind. The curtains part for us briefly before we go through.--

On Jesus's intelligence

At the literally mundane level, Jesus knew how to transform the molecular structure of water to make it wine. That knowledge also allowed him to take a few pieces of bread and some little fish and feed thousands of people. He could create matter from the energy he knew how to access from “the heavens,” right where he was....He knew how to transform the tissues of the human body from sickness to health and from death to life. He knew how to suspend gravity, interrupt weather patterns, and eliminate unfruitful trees without saw or ax. He only needed a word.Surely he must be amused at what Nobel prizes are awarded for today.In the ethical domain he brought an understanding of life that has influenced world thought more than any other.And one of the greatest testimonies to his intelligence is surely that he knew how to enter physical death, actually to die, and then live on beyond death. He seized death by the throat and defeated it. Forget cryonics!--He plainly said, “Nobody takes my life! I give it up by choice. I am in position to lay it down, and I am in position to resume it. My father and I have worked all this out” (John 10:18).--

Blessed are the sat upon, spat upon, ratted on.

Paul Simon--

Love does not exalt itself, is not vain, does not do stupid things, is not acquisitive, is not easily irritated, does not dwell on what is bad. Love is not happy because of evil but rejoices in what is true. Love holds up under anything, has confidence in everything, hopes no matter what and puts up with everything imaginable

(1 Cor. 13:4–7).--The kingdom of the heavens has a chemistry that can transform even the past and make the terrible, irretrievable losses that human beings experience seem insignificant in the greatness of God. He restores our soul and fills us with the goodness of rightness.--Jesus then proceeds, in the immediately following verses, to give his overall picture of moral fulfillment and beauty in the kingdom of the heavens. It is one of heartfelt love toward all, including those who would be happy if we dropped dead. This love does not consist of acts and projects but is a pervasive condition of vision, joy, and love in which we habitually reside. It is a love of the same quality as God’s love (Matt. 5:45–48). We are to be “perfect” or whole as our Father, the one in the heavens, is perfect and whole.--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 Jesus and other biblical writers say about anger.To cut the root of anger is to wither the tree of human evil.That is why Paul says simply, “Lay aside anger” (Col. 3:8).--A leading social commentator now teaches that despair and rage are an essential element in the struggle for justice.He and others who teach this are sowing the wind, and they will reap the whirlwind, the tornado.Indeed, we are reaping it now in a nation increasingly sick with rage and resentment of citizen toward citizen.And often the rage and resentment is upheld as justified in the name of God. But there is nothing that can be done with anger that cannot be done better without it. --When I go to New York City, I do not have to think about not going to London or Atlanta. People do not meet me at the airport or station and exclaim over what a great thing I did in not going somewhere else. I took the steps to go to New York City, and that took care of everything.Likewise, when I treasure those around me and see them as God’s creatures designed for his eternal purposes, I do not make an additional point of not hating them or calling them twerps or fools. Not doing those things is simply a part of the package.“He that loves has fulfilled the law,” Paul said (Rom. 13:8). Really.On the other hand, not going to London or Atlanta is a poor plan for going to New York. And not being wrongly angry and so on is a poor plan for treating people with love.--...not 'are we seen doing a good deed,' but 'are we doing a good deed in order to be seen.'--A few years ago Clyde Reid wrote a painfully incisive discussion of how our church activities seem to be structured around evading God. His “law of religious evasion” states, “We structure our churches and maintain them so as to shield us from God and to protect us from genuine religious experience.”--Along with many other telling observations of church life, he notes,

The adult members of churches today rarely raise serious religious questions for fear of revealing their doubts or being thought of as strange. There is an implicit conspiracy of silence on religious matters in the churches. This conspiracy covers up the fact that the churches do not change lives or influence conduct to any appreciable degree.

--If we honestly compared the amount of time in church spent thinking about what others think or might think with the amount of time spent thinking about what God is thinking, we would probably be shocked.--Everyone has treasures.This is an essential part of what it is to be human.To have nothing that one treasures is to be in a nonhuman condition, and nothing degrades people more than to scorn or destroy or deprive them of their treasures. Indeed, merely to pry into what one’s treasures are is a severe intrusion. Apart from very special considerations, no one has a right even to know what our treasures are.A main part of intimacy between two persons is precisely mutual knowledge of their treasures. Treasures are directly connected to our spirit, or will, and thus to our dignity as persons. It is, for example, very important for parents to respect the “treasure space” of children. It lies right at the center of the child’s soul, and great harm can be done if it is not respected and even fostered.--Eternity is now ongoing. I am now leading a life that will last forever.--What I “treasure” in heaven is not just the little that I have caused to be there. It is what I love there and what I place my security and happiness in there.--“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever” (Ps 23).--“You can do your worrying about tomorrow tomorrow. Each day contains just enough problems to last to the end of that day” (6:34).--“Rebuke a wise man,” the proverb says, “and he will love you for it” (Prov. 9:8). Yes, but in most cases where we condemn we are not dealing with wise people. We are dealing with people, even very young people, who will simply be deeply injured, become angry, and repay us in kind.--Condemnation is the board in our eye. He knows that the mere fact that we are condemning someone shows our heart does not have the kingdom rightness he has been talking about. Condemnation, especially with its usual accompaniments of anger and contempt and self-righteousness, blinds us to the reality of the other person. We cannot “see clearly” how to assist our brother, because we cannot see our brother.--Forcing religion upon the young even though it makes no sense to them is a major reason why they “graduate” from church about the same time they graduate from high school and do not return for twenty years, if ever.--We do not know enough, and our desires are not perfect enough for us safely to be given everything we want and ask for.--It is deeply instructive of the nature of human life and its redemption that, when Jesus knew Peter would deny him, he did not just “fix him” so that he wouldn’t do the terrible thing.Surely he could have done that. But it would not have advanced Peter toward being the person he needed to become.So Jesus said to Peter, with sadness perhaps, but with great confidence in the Father, “I have requested, concerning you, that your faith might not die. And when you have straightened up, uphold your brothers” (Luke 22:32).I think there is perhaps no other scene in all scripture that so forcefully illustrates the community of prayerful love as this response to Peter. How earnestly Jesus longed for Peter to come out right in his time of testing! But he left him free to succeed or fail before God and man—and, as it turned out, before all of subsequent human history. He used no condemnation, no shame, no “pearls of wisdom” on him. And he didn’t use supernatural power to rewire his soul or his brain.It was just this: “I have requested, concerning you, that your faith might not die.”--Heroism, generally, is totally out of place in the spiritual life, until we grow to the point at which it would never be thought of as heroism anyway.--Prayer simply dies from efforts to pray about “good things” that honestly do not matter to us. The way to get to meaningful prayer for those good things is to start by praying for what we are truly interested in. The circle of our interests will inevitably grow in the largeness of God’s love.--I believe the most adequate description of prayer is simply, “Talking to God about what we are doing together.”--Prayer is a matter of explicitly sharing with God my concerns about what he too is concerned about in my life.--There is nothing automatic about requests. There is no “silver bullet” in prayer. Requests may be granted. Or they may not. Either way, it will be for a good reason. That is how relationships between persons are, or should be.--When trials are permitted, it only means that he has something better in mind for us than freedom from trials.--It is one of the major transitions of life to recognize who has taught us, mastered us, and then to evaluate the results in us of their teaching. This is a harrowing task, and sometimes we just can’t face it. But it can also open the door to choose other masters, possibly better masters, and one Master above all.--The preferred way is to speak, to communicate: thus the absolute centrality of scripture to our discipleship. And this, among other things, is the reason why an extensive use of solitude and silence is so basic for growth of the human spirit, for they form an appropriate context for listening and speaking to God.--To be a disciple in any area or relationship is not to be perfect.--He is, in any case, interested in my life, that very existence that is me. There lies my need. I need to be able to lead my life as he would lead it if he were I.--My discipleship to Jesus is, within clearly definable limits, not a matter of what I do, but of how I do it. And it covers everything, “religious” or not.--It is crucial for our walk in the kingdom to understand that the teachings of Jesus, which we have been examining at such length in this book, do not by themselves make a life. They were never intended to. Rather, they presuppose a life.But that causes no problem, for of course each one of us is provided a life automatically. And we know exactly what it is. It is who we are and what we do.It is precisely this life that God wants us to give to him. We must only be careful to understand its true dignity. To every person we can say with confidence, “You, in the midst of your actual life there, are exactly the person God wanted.”--Nondiscipleship is the elephant in the church.It is not the much discussed moral failures, financial abuses, or the amazing general similarity between Christians and non-Christians. These are only effects of the underlying problem.The fundamental negative reality among Christian believers now is their failure to be constantly learning how to live their lives in The Kingdom Among Us.And it is an accepted reality. The division of professing Christians into those for whom it is a matter of whole-life devotion to God and those who maintain a consumer, or client, relationship to the church has now been an accepted reality for over fifteen hundred years.--I am thoroughly convinced that God will let everyone into heaven who, in his considered opinion, can stand it. But “standing it” may prove to be a more difficult matter than those who take their view of heaven from popular movies or popular preaching may think. The fires in heaven may be hotter than those in the other place.--Love perfected eliminates all fear.--Love is an emotional response aroused in the will by visions of the good. Contrary to what is often said, love is never blind, though it may not see rightly. It cannot exist without some vision of the beloved.--

The soul selects her own society, then shuts the door.

Emily Dickinson--The deepest revelation of our character is what we choose to dwell on in thought, what constantly occupies our mind—as well as what we can or cannot even think of.--The acid test for any theology is this: Is the God presented one that can be loved, heart, soul, mind, and strength?If the thoughtful, honest answer is; “Not really,” then we need to look elsewhere or deeper.It does not really matter how sophisticated intellectually or doctrinally our approach is. If it fails to set a lovable God—a radiant, happy, friendly, accessible, and totally competent being—before ordinary people, we have gone wrong. We should not keep going in the same direction, but turn around and take another road.--Saint Clare, before her last words, was heard to murmur to her soul,

Depart in peace, for thou wilt have a good escort on the journey.

--The most spiritually dangerous things in me are the little habits of thought, feeling, and action that I regard as “normal” because “everyone is like that” and it is “only human.”--In particular, I had learned that intensity is crucial for any progress in spiritual perception and understanding.--The Christian philosopher Pascal insightfully remarks,

I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they are unable to stay quietly in their own room.

--The idea of doing nothing...Every person should have regular periods in life when he or she has nothing to do.--Don’t go into solitude and silence with a list. Can we enjoy things in solitude and silence? Yes, but don’t try to. Just be there.--

“Then the prophecies of the old songs have turned out to be true, after a fashion!” said Bilbo.“Of course!” said Gandalf. “And why should not they prove true? Surely you don’t disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand in bringing them about yourself?“You don’t really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit? You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!”

J.R.R. Tolkein, The Hobbit--And they shall live with His face in view, and that they belong to Him will show on their faces. Darkness will no longer be. They will have no need of lamps or sunlight because God the Lord will be radiant in their midst. And they will reign through the ages of ages.(Revelation 22:4–5)--The intention of God is that we should each become the kind of person whom he can set free in his universe, empowered to do what we want to do. Just as we desire and intend this, so far as possible, for our children and others we love, so God desires and intends it for his children.--Jesus used symbols pointing to eternal life as limitlessly enhanced life, as a state of being more intensely alive in an existence which is both perfect fulfillment and yet also endless activity and newness.If death leads eventually to that, then although we shall still think of it with trembling awe and apprehension, yet it will not evoke terror or despair; for beyond death we will not be less alive but more alive than we are now.--In words so beautiful that everyone should know them by heart, Augustine of Hippo says,“There we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise. This is what shall be in the end without end. For what other end do we propose to ourselves than to attain to the kingdom of which there is no end?”--You can buy the book here. :)