The Kingdom of God is Within Everyone

Christians and Jews hold deeply to the belief that we are created in the image of God. That God in his infinite mystery and love decided to put a piece of the divine in each of us. But what does that look like or even mean? 

The idea of mystery I think helps us here. God is bigger than our universe. The size and magnitude of God is a mystery. It is unknowable. Is that not true of the human psyche. We although made up flesh, bone and atoms have an inner mystery bigger than the universe. 

I don't see the belief that taking on the image is taking on the form.. The problem is that we have been told to look for the divine in everything else rather than saying look within. Maybe, this is what Jesus was alluding to when he said "The Kingdom of God is within you". 

This then takes mission, evangelism, pastoral care etc. to a whole new level. It is not about a foreign concept but rather it is about connecting people to the divine they already know within. People are not secular but rather they are just don't acknowledge it. For centuries God was speaking to people through the divine within. They didn't have the bible but they did have the divine image within them. The experience that they were loved and that inside them God was busy.  I am not saying we throw the bible away. What I am saying is that the bible is the tool that connects our experiential knowledge of our divine. A huge reason why people reject the bible is not because it is incorrect or irrelevant but, they ultimately don't see the poetry and beauty of it because it has been in shrined in literalism. It creates a dissonance between their experience and what they are hearing. 

Maybe we need to start listening to this image in others more closely.