The Invisible Kingdom and the Power of Psyche

When Jesus invites us into a relationship with him, it's a strange invitation.

Think about what it asks. To be in relationship with God is to stay in conversation with someone who doesn't answer out loud. You speak; he doesn't speak back, at least not in words. Instead, you learn to read your life as a series of signs from God such as this door opening, that one closing, timing too precise to be coincidence, or the plan that came together when it shouldn't have. You come to see certain moments as his will at work in your life, and other believers often confirm what you've seen.

Jesus said the kingdom of God is at hand, among us, all around us. Yet no one can point to it. It has no borders, no capital, no census. As far as anyone can observe, it exists only in the minds of those who believe, beyond the reach of any real standard of inquiry.

As a result the relationship with Christ becomes a mental lens that shapes how we see the reality and how we act in the world. Everything passes through it like suffering, blessing, coincidence, loss, etc. Nothing reaches the believer unfiltered anymore as they take on the identity of Christ through his mission and renew their minds until their very perception changes. Or at least that's how it's supposed to work.

No one has ever done what Jesus did in distilling the human condition into a handful of parables. He created a longing for things unseen, and it took hold across the world. Billions of people now live in relationship with a God who is silent, invisible, and set apart from us, but who still cares deeply about our moral choices.

If you consider what Jesus died for it gets even stranger. He wasn't fighting for territory, a throne, or power. Yet his mission undeniably won him all three. He now occupies the seat of the self in billions of people who believe he is God and submit to his will and reign. His real revelation was convincing us that something invisible is more precious than life itself. He died to give us a new way of seeing reality, one that rejects most of our human instincts.

The kingdom of God has never been seen or measured, and by the world's standards it looks like a shared delusion. Practically speaking, millions of people are bound together by a reality no instrument can detect. And yet it has proven more powerful than any weapon we've built, has changed more lives than any book ever written, and has withstood two thousand years of time and critique.

The relationship with Jesus moves through the world and it's only evidence is how the faithful forgive, make peace, endure hardships, and hope. They believe it reaches them through what theologians call general revelation, God made known through creation and conscience, and at times through special revelation, when God himself breaks through into our plane of reality.

The psychological power of a relationship with God is the source of both mass delusion and divine revelation. It has built the greatest pillars of justice, and it has been used to justify the most savage and chaotic brutality humanity has ever known.

In the presence of the Gospel, the self, the shadow, and the ego are all forced to change. They have to wrestle with the claims Jesus made, claims he left us to interpret in the spiritual language of transcendence.

So what power does an invisible kingdom hold over the mind? How does belief in something we can only perceive spiritually change us as individuals, as societies, as nations?

How does the invisible kingdom change you?