Abstract
Dallas Willard was professor of philosophy at USC and an influential Christian teacher. His ground-up reexamination of the teachings of Jesus led him to an understanding of living which has proven helpful to many people, including me. He identified practical means of becoming transformed into the kinds of persons who would naturally and easily co-operate with the Holy Spirit’s guidance in daily life. This article (Part 1) discusses the background concepts for such kingdom living. A future article (Part 2) describes the specific actions that Christians can take in order to live as apprentices to Jesus.
Introduction
Dallas Willard (1935 to 2013) was a remarkable man. Born in the dirt-poor Ozarks region of southern Missouri, he possessed a highly capable mind. As with C. S. Lewis, Willard was reputed to have read everything, and remembered everything he read.
As a very young man, Willard was a Baptist minister. He became dissatisfied, however, with what he was doing, in two ways. First, he felt a need for a deeper understanding of God and related metaphysical subjects, so he went off to the University of Wisconsin for a PhD in philosophy. He went on to become a pillar of the University of Southern California philosophy department for many decades. I will have more to say about his philosophical output, particularly in the area of epistemology, at some other time.
For now, I will focus on his other dissatisfaction as a young minister. He observed that his preaching, although based on well-established evangelical themes, was not actually having much of an effect on his hearers. He saw very little in the way of changed lives, even among those whose lives would clearly benefit from changing. The amount of anxiety and stress and self-centeredness and anger and sadness, and all the behaviors that go with those internal states, stayed about the same in his congregations.
This deeply troubled Willard, and it drove him to set aside everything he had been taught about Christianity and to pick up the New Testament and read it (especially the Gospels) with a fresh eye, to re-examine what Jesus taught about how to actually live life. He came to the devastating conclusion that the gospel he had been preaching was not the gospel that Jesus preached.
Willard grew up in a conservative evangelical milieu, and he observed that there was no clear understanding there of what a Christian was supposed to do after they got saved. In the extreme, you could just keep on being a rascal, since your “saved” status was a result of correct doctrinal beliefs, not a result of your personal good works. For the Christians who did earnestly want to live properly before God and man, there was not much comfort in this brand of fundamentalism. When conscious of your ongoing failings, about all you could do is come to the altar and rededicate yourself for the hundredth time.
From his ground-up reevaluation of the teachings of Jesus and his apostles, Willard developed an understanding of the Christian message that differs, if not in substance, certainly in emphasis from what is commonly taught in American evangelical churches today. His magnum opus was The Divine Conspiracy, first published in 1998. This tome presents an analysis of contemporary culture and philosophy and theology, as well as a comprehensive program for Christian living. A problem with that book is that it is so long and so dense and so diverse that most readers get bogged down and fade out somewhere in the middle. Willard referred to it as, “My most widely un-read book.”
There is a wide array of Christian leaders and laymen who have been deeply influenced by Willard’s teachings. They recognized that the impenetrability of The Divine Conspiracy book was a hindrance to communicating his message. Therefore, some years later the key content of the book was presented in a more digestible form, in a series of twelve Divine Conspiracy videos, with Willard doing the talking, accompanied by slides. On that web site there are also plain audio versions for easier listening on your phone as you are walking, and pdf documents displaying the slides. The videos are still information-intensive, so the slides give a useful outline and mnemonic for the material in the talks.
Willard has published other, shorter books [1], and many of his talks are available on-line, on YouTube and on the dwillard.org home site (go to “Resources”) and on the Conversatio app and website. That app is dedicated to his talks and articles, and also to ongoing talks and articles by other Christian thinkers who elaborate and reflect on Willard’s material. The tribute on the Conversatio site is typical of what so many others have said about this man: “Willard is renowned for his teachings on spiritual formation, and his presence has rippled through the lives of Christians worldwide. In seeking Christ through the spiritual disciplines, he has brought simplicity to a range of complex ideas, inspiring not only knowledge, but action.”
Dallas Willard’s Impact on Me
Like many other educated evangelicals, I bought a copy of Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy back around 1999 or so. I was mightily impressed, and I underlined potent sentence after potent sentence in the first few chapters. His analysis of cultural and intellectual trends was masterful and edifying. What Willard extracted out of Jesus’ teaching on the nature of reality was like a breath of fresh air. Here are some excerpts from the third chapter, “What Jesus Knew: Our God-Bathed World”:
We should, to begin with, think that God leads a very interesting life, and that he is full of joy…Jesus himself was and is a joyous, creative person…he was well known to those around him as a happy man.
…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 continually rejoices.
…Out of the eternal freshness of his perpetually self – renewed being, the heavenly Father cherishes the Earth and each human being upon it. The fondness, the endearment, the unstintingly affectionate regard of God toward all his creatures is the natural outflow of what he is to the core…
…With this magnificent God positioned among us, Jesus brings the assurance that our universe is a perfectly safe place for us to be.
That is a line that stuck with me: “Our universe is a perfectly safe place to be,” for those who are doing what Jesus taught. Put another way, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and everything else you need will be provided for you.” Obviously, this does not mean that we will never suffer hurt in this life, but it does mean that no lasting harm can come to us. God will bring some good out of evil even in this life, and in the end, we will revel with him for all eternity. I cannot say that I have always lived in the light of this insight since I read it so many years ago, but it has come back to me repeatedly, serving as a steadying thought in times of trouble.
I am embarrassed to admit that, like so many other readers of The Divine Conspiracy, I faded out somewhere in the middle of the 400-page book. Practicing spiritual “disciplines” did not sound like fun, and I was basically satisfied with the state of my inner life. The immediate gratification of the gifts of the Spirit seemed more engaging to me than the fruits of the Spirit that were Willard’s focus. This was largely a function of my stage of life, and of the specific year I read the book. At that point, I was a vigorous middle-aged man, with a busy, successful career in intellectually-stimulating research. On the spiritual front, the years 1995-2005 were a time of positive ferment in the mildly charismatic evangelical circles I moved in. Deep worship, often modelled after the Toronto Airport church outpouring of 1994-2000, was common in meetings. People reported feeling the presence of God, and there were frequent reports of gold dust and even gold tooth fillings appearing spontaneously in some of these worship services [2]. I witnessed a number of remarkable physical healings in this timeframe [3].
Fast forward some 25 years to the present: I am old, not middle-aged, and have suffered several serious though largely correctible medical conditions in the past 18 months. I believe I have maybe 10-15 “good” years left to me of relatively high function, to be followed in the normal course of affairs by increasing disability and discomfort, until then I die. I no longer work at a prestigious laboratory, and the national spiritual climate seems to be getting worse, not better. Evangelicalism seems to be splintering between a (mainly younger) left wing that cares about social justice, promotes unbiblical sexual lifestyles, and holds little value for the atoning work of Jesus (and even denounces the notion of substitutionary atonement as “divine child abuse”), and a more traditional wing that gets identified with conservative politics. The traditional wing still honors the inspiration of the Bible and historic doctrines, but struggles to make these relevant to the next generation.
Church attendance and belief in God are plummeting in the U.S. An attitude of practical atheism almost completely dominates the universities and movies and media. It is harder for me to point to recent, specific, remarkable answers to prayers in my personal experience. In sum, evangelical business as usual does not seem to be working well, and for me personally, I want to be sure I am spending my few remaining good years doing the right things.
Thus, I have both the leisure and the motivation to reexamine the spiritual foundations of my own life and of the churches in which I participate. In this context I have re-engaged with Dallas Willard’s material. I find it easier to digest it in smaller chunks, in his many articles and especially in his many talks, than in a large book. It has been encouraging to my faith to encounter a man who has thought so deeply about the foundations of reality and of morality, who has held his own in the increasingly hostile academy, and who can still affirm the validity of what Jesus taught. He presents Jesus as a great philosopher, “the smartest man who ever lived,” who gave the best-ever answers to the great questions of existence. Willard demonstrated in his own life the fruits of what he promoted. Nearly all those who met him in person remarked on his gentle graciousness. His personal benevolence probably comes through more clearly in his talks than in his writings.
Beyond this apologetics-type encouragement to my faith, I have been edified by Willard’s vision of what Christiantity is about, at its core. With the encouragement of his teachings, I do find myself communing with the Lord more in the activities of daily life, and valuing opportunities to grow in the love, joy, and peace of the Holy Spirit. Dallas Willard has made that more attractive and doable for me.
It has been satisfying to see Willard draw wholistic connections between the content in the Gospels and in the rest of the New Testament. Practically every New Testament scholar agrees that Jesus’ teaching revolves around the “kingdom of God,” but there seems to be widespread confusion about exactly what the kingdom of God is and how we relate to it today. Willard cuts through that confusion with clear, actionable answers.
At one church we attended, we were encouraged to compose a 30-second “elevator speech” version of what we would tell someone as our testimony of what Jesus and his teachings meant to us. I struggled with that: do I talk about the abstract notions of atonement or philosophical explanations for the universe, or about the grounding wisdom in biblical ethics, or about the personal comfort of a daily divine presence, or about the hope of life after death, or …? Is Jesus primarily my Savior or my Lord? I still do not have an elevator speech that satisfies me. But I feel I may be closing in on it, thanks to Willard’s comprehensive vision of the Christian life, as summarized in this article (Part 1) and in its follow-up (Part 2).
The Big Picture: The Nature of God and Spiritual Reality
The producers of The Divine Conspiracy video series frame its content:
“Dallas asserts in this in-depth study in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) that Jesus actually intended for us to do what he said, but it’s crucial for us to understand the way Jesus taught in order to be able to receive it, apply it, and teach others to do the same.”
Before diving into the how-to specifics of Willard’s recommendations for Christian living, it is worth establishing the worldview from which these recommendations flow. As a professor of philosophy, Willard thought deeply about issues such as what is “the good,” what is a human being, and what are the larger purposes for our lives. He has written and presented so much outstanding material in these ethical and metaphysical areas that it is painful to have to omit so much of it here. However, in order to keep the length of this article reasonable, I will confine my treatment to a subset of the text that is in the slides for the Divine Conspiracy video series.
The full texts of all twelve sets of slides are available on the Divine Conspiracy web page, and the reader is encouraged to consult these full originals. I will excerpt from them, with brief commentary. Direct quotations will be indented or in italics, or pasted in as images of formatted slides.
Divine Conspiracy Talk 1 of 12. Jesus and Culture
Willard starts with a discussion of truth and knowledge, which I omit for the sake of brevity. He notes that human desires are often at odds with reality (we crave what cannot be) and even at odds with what we know to be true. But God has a plan for taking rebellious, foolish, ungrateful human beings and helping them become the kinds of persons who can enjoy and manifest his nature. Willard calls this working of the kingdom of God in human affairs “The Divine Conspiracy”:
The Divine Conspiracy is God’s plan to overcome evil with good in the grinding processes of human history.
This divine working is subtle and largely hidden from normal observation, in this present age. This is why Willard characterizes it as a “conspiracy”. Outsiders are unaware of what is going on, and even insiders typically do not know the whole story. According to Willard, this hiddenness is an essential feature of the program, not a bug. God must allow us to hide from him so we really have a choice to move towards him or away. As Willard puts it, “God is so big that if he didn’t hide from us, we could not hide from him.” Awareness of this necessary hiddenness is helpful in fending off the jibes of skeptics, but it is also helpful in managing our own expectations, as we cry out with the prophet Isaiah, “Oh, that thou wouldst rend the heavens and come down!”
Willard elsewhere expounds on the necessity of a reliable cause-and-effect physical universe for us to make informed decisions, including the moral decisions which contribute to our all-important character development. In this sort of self-consistent universe, bad things can and do happen to people, so we should not be surprised by suffering and injustice and the seeming divine nonintervention. However, God is able to take events which in isolation are bad, and work them into an overall good pattern.
C. S. Lewis held a similar view of how the hiddenness of God is essential for allowing humans to genuinely choose to love God and his ways, or not: “Merely to override a human will (as his felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For his ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with him, but yet themselves….” (Screwtape Letters, Letter VIII)
Talk 2 of 12. WHAT IS A HUMAN BEING: The Current Battle Over Human Nature and The Biblical View
Human Desires Go Astray
Willard develops a nuanced view of the various components of human personality, and he refers to this numerous times. He notes that humans have natural, raw “desires,” including both bodily urges and emotional/intellectual cravings (acceptance, domination, stimulation, etc.). Young children and childish adults allow these desires to dominate their choices and behaviors, whereas mature adults (and especially mature Christians) filter these desires through layers of reflection and moral values. Willard locates these higher functions in the mind and the spirit; neuroscientists would likely locate them in the brain’s prefrontal cortex.
In Western societies a century or two ago, there was a consensus that it was good and praiseworthy to subordinate raw desires to longer-term considerations. In today’s popular culture, there seems to be endorsement of latching onto immediate bodily desires and claiming them as part of one’s identity, to the exclusion of God’s moral principles. This process is described vividly in the first chapter of the book of Romans. (I might add, as a small current example of living for desire, the messaging I see written inside the foil wrappers for Dove chocolates, which is: “Indulge yourself”).
Jesus provided a template for what is actually good for humans: to love God with all our hearts and minds, and to love others as ourselves. How to get to that happy state, starting from our current state of selfishness, pride, and fear, is what The Divine Conspiracy series is about.
Here are some slide contents which state these points in Willard’s words, with a little editing:
THE FALLEN HUMAN WILL REJECTS NATURE
• Turning to the body, men use it in every way possible to gratify desire. The nature of perversion. It is driven by unlimited desire for feeling.
• And they lose their mental capacity to discern good and evil. (Eph. 4:17-19)
• And form social institutions and arrangements accordingly. (Rom. 1:28-32)
HUMANS CANNOT FIGURE IT OUT BY THEMSELVES
• What is good for human beings, and what is right for them to do, does not change fundamentally.
• But the human capacity to know the good and the right is distorted by the human will to fulfill desire.
• That is why a divine source of knowledge is essential to human life, as we have been told over and over.
THE “WHOLE LAW”
• Jesus summed up the whole law as loving God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and your neighbor as yourself. (Luke 12:27)
• Paul said that to love one’s neighbor fulfills the law. (Rom. 13:8-10)
Humans Designed to Rule Responsibly and Creatively Over the Universe
Another part of the big picture is God’s intended relations between humans and the rest of creation. Our role is to “rule creation with God.” Like it or not, we are the de facto stewards of the earth. This is an important and engaging enterprise. We can of course complain about how well we have discharged this responsibility, but this is mainly because it has not been done “with God.” It can only be done properly by humans with developed characters who live steadily under the guidance and strength of the Holy Spirit.
Willard suggests that this role of responsible creative activity will extend into eternity. We will not be floating around on clouds, feeling bored. One of his trademark statements is, “You are a never ceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe.”
More slides:
THE HUMAN ROLE—TO RULE CREATION WITH GOD
• Gen. 1:26-28 • Psalm 8:4-9 • Isa. 63:12 • Luke 16:9-13 & 19:12-27 • Hebrews 2:5-9 • Rev. 22:5
Who You Are and Why You Are Here:
You are a never ceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe.
• SPIRITUAL – In substance
• NEVER CEASING – In duration
• RULING – Creative governance – In destiny
Who You Are and Why You Are Here:
• Your life as a spiritual being is completed only by living in and from the kingdom/government of the heavens. Matthew 4:17 – “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.”
• That is, by trusting Jesus Christ, Who brings us into the rule of God, and through our discipleship to Him enables us to fulfill the creation covenant of Genesis 1:26-31– FOR ETERNITY!
FULLY POSSESSED BY LOVE
• To love God, to love Jesus, with every dimension of our being puts us in position to be a fully functioning human being. If any part is still governed by self-will we will malfunction.
• Love of God is a personal reality that possesses our being and enables us to live a free and joyous life. Beyond legalism. We fulfill the law because we are that way.
The statement, “We fulfill the law because we are that way,” is a key plank of Willard’s platform. He contends that simply trying to do good things by our own efforts does not work; it leads to pride when we succeed and despair when we fail. Instead, we need our characters to be transformed though a process of discipleship (to be described later, in Part 2) to become the kind of persons who “naturally and easily” do the right thing.
Summing Up The Divine Conspiracy
Pulling it all together, Willard summarizes God’s program to remedy the human tendency to live from unhealthy motives:
God’s aim is to defeat this dreadful declension from God’s world and God’s kingdom by bringing out a world-wide and history-wide community of people who have the character and power of Jesus Christ himself.
This “aim” is what the Divine Conspiracy (“God’s plan to overcome evil with good in the processes of human history”) is gradually accomplishing, one life at a time. Although much of our discussion here deals with the choices and development of individual followers of Jesus, it is ultimately a larger community of like-minded people that will fulfill the purpose of God, which is to draw other beings into the mutually-honoring fellowship of the Trinity.
In Part 2 of our 2-part series on this blog, we will discuss the specifics of how we humans can participate in this grand purpose, finding personal peace and joy and healing along the way.
Talk 3 of 12. Understanding The Kingdom of God, And Its Presence on Earth
BEFORE THE FOUNDATION OF THE WORLD
• The sweet society of God in Himself. (John 17:5, 22-26)
• The Trinity extends its kind of love throughout a redeemed community of humans. (John 13:35 and 17:21-24)
• “The greatest of these is love.” (1 Cor. 13:13) God’s basic nature
GOD’S ULTIMATE INTENTION
• To bring out of human history a community of every “tongue, tribe and nation,” who will play a major role in the future of the universe.
• The church a revelation to the universe (Eph. 3:10 and 2:7)
• TO “JUDGE ANGELS” (1 Cor. 6:3)
• To rule with Him for ever and ever. (Rev. 22:5)
• We don’t yet know. (Col. 3:3-4, 1 John 3:2)
THE MEANING OF LIFE FOR THE BELIEVER IN CHRIST
• The love and purpose of God for us. (Rom. 8:29-37) –embedded in His eternal life.
• All of the hard things turn to our good. (Rom. 8:28, 2 Cor. 4:16-18)
• Every thing done with him will be preserved and rewarded. (1 Cor. 3:11-14)
• We look forward and are carried forward. Drama. Meaning.
The slides above are packed with meaning and need to be perused slowly, but I think they are fairly self-explanatory. They present the larger purposes of God as the context of how we live our lives.
WHAT IS THE KINGDOM OF GOD?
From the first recorded preaching by Jesus and John the Baptist (“The time has come. The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!” Mark 1:16 and Matthew 3:2) to the last recorded teaching by Paul (“He proclaimed the kingdom of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ” Acts 28:31), the kingdom of God plays a key role in the New Testament worldview. This is particularly true for Jesus’ teachings. However, there is little agreement among theologians as to exactly what this kingdom is and how it operates.
One unfortunate tendency has been to view the kingdom of God as a geopolitical entity, with some ruling elite enforcing their will with the sword or with the barrel of the gun. A key reason that the people rejected Jesus was that they were looking for a political deliverer, a military king, and Jesus did not come through for that. In modern times, Marxists and other idealists sometimes justify their well-meaning imposition of utopian reigns of terror with references to Jesus’ teachings which championed the oppressed.
This political framing of the kingdom has led to notions that Jesus failed in his mission. On the theological left, one narrative is that Jesus hoped to ignite a social revolution that would empower the have-nots; he died on the cross with a cry of despair, with his message of justice having fallen on deaf ears. On the theological right, the dispensationalism popularized by the Schofield Bible taught that Jesus came to offer a political Davidic kingdom to the Jews in Judea and Galilee. When they rejected Jesus as their king, God dropped back to Plan B, a largely Gentile-dominated “Church Age,” to be followed at Christ’s Second Coming by his millennial reign centered at Jerusalem when he would finally run a political/economic kingdom. [4] Somewhere in the theological middle lie mushier definitions such as “The Kingdom of God is the realm where God reigns supreme, and Jesus Christ is King.” That is fine, but what do we do with that? How do we enter into such a kingdom?
Dallas Willard starts by considering a general definition of a “kingdom.” Everybody has a kingdom, which is where what you say goes, where things happen according to your will, where you control matters. In his lectures, he would sometimes point to a woman’s purse and note that that was part of her “kingdom”; it would be a violation for him to go over and open it up and start rifling through its contents. To various degrees, your home or (if you are a manager) your business department are part of your kingdom, where what you say goes. Your body is generally part of your kingdom, as it expresses your will and should not be violated by other people.
This concept can then be extended to the kingdom of God. Willard defines that as: “The kingdom of God is the range of God’s effective will—where what God wants done is done.” We might think that (since God is omnipotent) that everything is in fact done according to his will, making this a comprehensive but somewhat uninformative concept. However, in this age God has sovereignly given certain sentient beings the ability to choose to cooperate with God’s will or not. In the spiritual realm, there are angels who delight to do his will, and devils who resist it. Humans, too, have been granted the dignity of saying Yes or No to God. [5]
As parents of young children, for example, we could perhaps institute a system of very rigorous rewards and punishments to ensure that our kids do exactly what we want when we want, but most parents opt not to do that. Rather, they give their children the freedom to learn to genuinely appreciate and choose to model their parents’ attitudes and habits. In a healthy home, the children emotionally attach to their parents, and then they can internalize their parents’ personalities and values if they choose. This appears to be how God is treating humans in this age, raising up followers who act as Jesus would act in the same situation and who enjoy the same satisfying fellowship with the Father that Jesus does.
The final two slides here serve as an introduction to Willard’s teachings on the kingdom of God:
In Part 2, we will survey Willard’s teachings on how we can effectively enter into living in this kingdom of God.
ENDNOTES
[1] “Dallas Willard Resources” will be an appendix to the future Part 2 of this 2-part series and will list his books.
[2] Skeptics will of course scoff at anything supernatural and try to wave it away, since it does not fit their prejudices, including the spontaneous appearance of gold. As with any purported miracle, there is a chance of intentional deceit and of honest mistakes. In some cases, it turns out that folks who thought their gold tooth suddenly appeared actually had the gold filling put in by a dentist some years previous. In other cases, though, it does seem that a gold filling did appear spontaneously. I have met a man, Sam Stalcup, who had a gold tooth filling appear in a meeting back then. His wife Elizabeth had a geology background and had a tiny sample of the filling analyzed, and it was indeed gold. This is documented in her book Miracles: Remembering God’s Interventions in my Family. See Darren Wilson’s video Finger of God for more documentation of gold fillings.
[3] See my Prayer for Healing at Bethel Church for more on physical healing.
[4] A great irony here is that dispensationalism has it exactly backwards: a key reason the people turned against Jesus was because he did NOT offer deliver a political regime which would expel the hated Romans and restore the nation of Israel to military might (cf. John 6:15 “Jesus, knowing that they intended to come and make him king by force, withdrew again to a mountain by himself”, and John 6:36, “Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders”). Dispensationalism has insisted that Jesus’ real kingdom is a (future) physical theocratic regime; at present, Jesus is hanging out in heaven still awaiting his chance to actually reign. A disastrous consequence of historic dispensationalism has been a marginalization of the actual teachings of Jesus – – according to the Schofield Bible, the Sermon on the Mount does not apply normatively to current Christians, but only to a future millennial kingdom. Some more recent versions of dispensationalism are more moderate in this regard.
Eschatology can be a very polarizing topic, so I do not want to get distracted with it. I only mention it here to correct some harmful corollary teachings touching on the kingdom of God. The notion that Christ’s kingdom is a future geopolitical realm centered on the land of Israel is refuted by those in the Reformed Protestant tradition who use the later, more fully developed revelation in the New Testament to normatively interpret the earlier physical kingdom prophecies in the Old Testament. See, for instance, the on-line book High King of Heaven by Dean Davis (also available on Amazon), and also YouTube interview with Davis. He demonstrates that the New Testament consistently sees Old Testament kingdom prophesies as being fulfilled in Jesus’ first coming, rather than in some future millennial reversion to the earlier types and shadows of physical temple and animal sacrifices. Christ is successfully reigning as Lord right now, although there will be a second, more visible stage at his Second Coming. Another similar book on line is Jonathan Menn’s Biblical Eschatology. Kim Riddlebarger provides a briefer treatment on-line, and in his book A Case for Amillennialism. The book Win the World or Escape the Earth? covers similar ground, offering a positive and energizing perspective on the current reign of King Jesus.
[5] Christian theology typically distinguishes different senses of God’s will. His revealed will, with its good commandments such as love God and love your neighbor, tells us what he wants us to be doing. There seems also to be a secret or decreed will of God which comprehends and even directs the outworking of all the good and evil choices made by men and angels, but we generally do not have access to that. We do know the revealed will of God, and we can and do operate at the level of responding to that, rather than speculating on his unknown decreed will.
Similarly, one can distinguish multiple senses of the kingdom of God. On the one hand, God is sovereign over all events, while in another sense, in this age his will is contested and even temporarily thwarted by rebellious humans and by Satan. His kingdom has not fully come, since his will is not yet fully done on earth as it is in heaven. Willard seems to be using “kingdom” in this second sense, since in his presentations the kingdom operates largely hidden, like yeast growing in dough, and we can choose to cooperate with it or not.
Willard discusses these two senses of the will of God and the kingdom of God here:
“We have to recognize that we are already under the rule of God. No one, no thing is outside of the rule of God, okay? …Everything is in God’s hand. Right? …When we speak of entering the Kingdom of Heaven, we are talking about meshing our lives willingly and with understanding, meshing our lives with God’s Kingdom. That’s what we are talking about.
…There are two senses of entering the Kingdom of God—entering the Kingdom of Heaven. There is one sense in which you don’t have any choice about it. God is in control. His Kingdom is from everlasting to everlasting, period.
But there is another sense in which we have to choose to enter the Kingdom of Heaven and that is, the sense in which God offers to us, as He offered to Abraham, and to Moses, and to David, and to the prophets; He has offered to us the opportunity to live by His power through faith according to His will—to live by His power through faith according to His will. All of those things now have to be kept there—by His power, through faith, according to His will.
There is a life which we can live with a power that is not our own. We live by His power. There is a life which we can live with a power that is not our own. It is a supernatural power; that is, it is a power that is beyond nature. We come to know that power when we are informed about it by acting in faith and reliance upon it.
Letters to Creationists 