I concluded my reading of the second book by Earl Jabay, The God Players: How Not to Run Your Life, and am posting a couple of exerpts that consider specifically the human spirit and the Kingdom of God.
“One of the first things the Scriptures tell us about man is that he bears a likeness to God. . . . we are created in the image of God. . . . That is, as God is Spirit, so man is spirit. Man is essentially a spiritual being, related to and of the type similar to God the Eternal Spirit. Human spirit and Divine Spirit are not the same but they are in the same spiritual order. Man, being created, is lower in the spiritual order than God, for ‘thou hast made him little less than God,’ but man is highly honored in that ‘Thou hast given him dominion over the works of thy hands’ (Psalm 8:5,6).
“That man is human spirit is a profound and difficult thought. It means that an unimaginable gift has come to us, in that we are in the same spiritual order as God. It means that we are not what we externally appear to be. It also means that man is quite as indefinable and as descriptively elusive as God Himself. The most the word spirit can do is tell us that what we really are cannot be seen.”
This “unimaginable gift” given to man by God enables the personal, intimate communion intended by God between Him and the immaterial spirit and soul of man. It is a bidirectional, dualist interaction that has been restored to repentant people through the sin sacrifice of Jesus Christ who now indwells His people as the Counselor, the Helper, the Holy Spirit.