Pastor’s Corner July 2012

The following was published in our monthly newsletter, the Redeemer Report.

Jesus, our Hero

I hope you are enjoying your summer! Summer is the season for action movies. The blockbuster of this summer (with all due respect to the soon to be released final installment of Batman) is “The Avengers”. This superhero film has several popular heroes teamed up to fight Loki, who seeks to subjugate all earthlings.

We love heroes. The love people have for super-hero stories is not just about entertainment and fantasy. I believe it resonates with a deep sense of our need of rescue and our inability to save ourselves. People want a savior. People clamor for a rescuer. People innately recognize their weakness and fantasize about a hero rescuing them and all of us. The comic book concept of superheroes developed in a very precarious time in our country’s history, when the fate of the world truly felt like it lay in the balance during the 1940’s an WWII. Batman, Captain America, and Superman became popular comic book characters during that time. It’s a sense of human desperation that cries out for a hero, a deliverer.

The super-heroes of fantasy have a common characteristic- they have weaknesses. Even the Incredible Hulk can be stopped with a tranquilizer-tipped arrow from Hawk.

n reality, there is an ultimate hero. The Biblical term for hero is messiah. The term literally means “anointed one,” (“Christ” in greek) and refers to the ancient practice of anointing kings with oil when they took the throne. The messiah concept was attached to the Redeemer early in Scripture (Genesis 3:15) and undergirds the whole of the Old Testament’s message of coming divine deliverance. Isaiah gives prophesy about the Messiah of God calling Him “Mighty God” (Isaiah 9). The God-Man, Jesus Christ, is the ultimate hero. The crisis of man however, is not made up or part of a comic book fantasy. The crisis of man could not be more real or desperate. We are all dead and doomed in our sins and must have a hero save us.

In Jesus Christ, we have our hero. In Jesus we have the one who bore all of our sins upon Himself, took them to the Cross, underwent the punishment we deserved, satisfied the just wrath of God, and was accepted by God on our behalf as our substitute. Unlike the made up super-heroes of the comic books and silver screen, our hero Jesus is without fault or weakness. Despite being in all ways perfect, our Hero was humble to the uttermost, so that we might be liberated from our sin and freed to serve our Father.

“…who, though he (Jesus) was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” – Philippians 2:6-11

In the Lamb,
Tony Felich