Jesus Is Not a Physical Image: Neville Goddard and the Inner Revelation

“Seeming to be wise, they were in fact foolish,
And by them the glory of the eternal God was changed into that of the image of man who is not eternal, and of birds and beasts and things which go on the earth.”
— Romans 1:22–23, NKJV

The error isn’t in believing in Jesus. It’s in mistaking the symbol for the substance, the shadow for the source. According to Neville Goddard, the tragedy of modern religion is that it has turned a living spiritual pattern into a historical photograph, worshipping an image instead of experiencing the truth.

Not a Man of Flesh, But a Pattern of Awakening

To believe that Jesus Christ is solely a man of two thousand years ago is to do exactly what Paul warned against in Romans: to change the eternal glory of God into the form of a mortal man.

Neville makes it startlingly clear:

“Jesus Christ is your own wonderful human imagination.”

This is not poetic flourish. It’s a key. The “I AM” that declares your being, the awareness that assumes and feels and believes—that is Christ in you. The moment you assume that Christ is only external, you have traded the uncorruptible for the corruptible.

You may appear wise in theological terms, but spiritually, you've become a fool. Why? Because you now place salvation outside yourself, and in doing so, you’ve denied your own power to transform.

The Glory Traded for an Image

Paul’s words in Romans strike at the very heart of this issue:

“And by them the glory of the eternal God was changed into that of the image of man who is not eternal...”

This isn’t simply about statues or pagan rituals. It is about the unseen transaction of consciousness—where we trade inward revelation for outward form. Where we imagine the Divine to be something that happened, rather than something happening.

By turning Jesus into an idol of history, a relic of space and time, we worship the memory of God, not the living presence of God. We begin to bow to the image of a man, rather than awaken to the truth of our being.

Worshipping the Effect Instead of the Cause

Just as others worshipped birds, beasts, and creeping things—natural forces and instincts—we may now be worshipping belief systems and historicity with the same blindness. The problem is not reverence, but misplacement.

Neville taught that every man is both the image and the maker of the image—and when we believe our salvation lies in something we are not, or something we can only remember, we become trapped in a state of powerlessness. We begin to treat our own creative centre as subordinate to a distant miracle.

But Jesus, as revealed in Scripture, never spoke of himself as apart from you.  In John 8:58 (KJV) He said:

“Before Abraham was, I am.”
— not “he was,” but “I AM.” 

That statement alone is the purest declaration of your own being, stripped of any timeline, culture, or story. The same “I AM” (Exodus 3:14) that said, Let there be light, is the “I AM” that now lives in you—awaiting your assumption of its power.

Paul: The Pattern of Revelation Within

Neville frequently reminded us that Paul’s real conversion was not doctrinal—it was experiential. In Galatians 1:15–16 (KJV) Paul declared:

“When it pleased God to reveal His Son in me, I conferred not with flesh and blood…”

This moment wasn’t about seeing Jesus in the sky or meeting him on a dusty road. According to Neville, Paul was awakened to the realisation that the Son of God—the creative pattern called Christ—was within himself.

In his lecture Paul’s Autobiography, Neville says:

“Paul is not speaking of a man external to himself. He tells you that the Son of God was revealed in him—not to him. And from that moment on, he conferred not with flesh and blood. He looked not outside for confirmation. He knew it was within.”

Paul’s story, then, is our story. His encounter with Christ is a symbolic telling of the awakening of the imagination, the divine pattern finally recognised within consciousness. This is the real meaning behind “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

Christ In You, Not Outside You

“To whom God was pleased to make clear what is the wealth of the glory of this secret among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”
— Colossians 1:27, BBE

This one verse alone undoes the entire concept of a distant historical Christ. If Christ is in you, then He is not confined to the past. He is not a photograph, a statue, or even a man of Galilee. He is a state of consciousness that awakens as you.

When you accept this, the Bible comes alive—not as a record of external facts, but as a manual of inner transformation. You stop reading about Jesus and start becoming Him.

You rise in imagination. You resurrect new states of being. You assume the identity of the one you want to be—and walk as though it were already true.

This is the Law of Assumption, and it is the very life of Christ in practice.

Final Thought: The Image We Must Shatter

We do not dishonour Jesus by removing his flesh—we honour him by embodying his mind. We do not reject the story, but we refuse to freeze it into history and lose its power. Every image, even of Jesus, must be shattered if it stands between you and your own divine origin.

Romans 1:22–23 is not only about ancient idolaters. It’s about us, whenever we trade imagination for intellect, assumption for evidence, spirit for symbol. Jesus is not a distant saviour, but the nearness of God as your own creative awareness.

To know Him is to move from image to essence—from the dead form to the living power.

And in that return, you no longer need an image.

You have the glory itself.