"Who Will Save Us?" part 3, by Mike Crowe

So, where is humanity’s hero?  Who’s going to fix this mess?  That’s where the Old Testament leaves us.  It’s not until we reach the New Testament that we find the question answered and our longing for rescue satisfied.  Jesus Christ is the seed of the woman who, by his sacrificial death and victorious resurrection, crushes the head of the serpent, defeats death, and rescues rebellious men and women from slavery to sin.

At last, humanity’s hero, savior and rescuer has come to reverse the curse!  Jesus, the offspring and descendent of Adam and Eve, has triumphed over Satan, just as God had so long ago promised He would, and the kingdom He ushered in during His first coming, through His death and resurrection, will come into full view and encompass the entire cosmos when He returns to set his people free from the curse of death and deliver the creation from bondage to decay.

So, the question remains:  what does the longing, the hope, and the anticipation of the Old Testament, the true story of the Bible, the story of God’s triumph over Satan and his restoration of His good creation through Jesus Christ have to do with our cultural adoration for superheroes?

All people know instinctively that all in this world is not as it should be.  We know firsthand the devastating effects of Adam and Eve’s rebellion (and our own).  Marriages dissolve.  Women struggle with issues related to giving birth, everything from infertility to birthing complications.  Men, whose identities tend to be wrapped up in their work often find their work working against them.  Some can never accomplish enough, while some can never seem to keep a job. Still others find themselves anxious, depressed, angry or frustrated because of their work.

Top these personal issues off with war, famine, natural disasters, crime and an international financial crisis, and it’s easy to see why our hearts long for a superhuman hero to come along — to fix us and all that’s going awry around us.

The human heart is longing for relief, rescue, and rest from personal and societal ills, and more often than not we’re looking in all the wrong places still asking the questions that dominate the first few chapters of Genesis and the entire Old Testament:  Could he be the one to bring an end to all my troubles?  Could he really be the promised one sent to rescue us from this wretched curse?

And though most of us know that the characters of comic book lore are fictional, we still tend to gravitate toward them, as we do to politicians, movie stars, musicians and others, with messianic fervor hoping against hope that the next one will be different than the ones before, that he will be impervious to the curse.  But he fails to deliver.  He fades from the scene.  He dies.  And so will we, sooner or later.

All the while, the Scriptures, both Old and New Testaments, hold out before us the one Man, Jesus Christ, offspring of the woman and promised seed of Abraham, who has conquered sin, death, and hell through His blood-stained cross and His triumphant resurrection.  And the Holy Spirit calls us to rest in His finished work and wait in faith for His return to this earth, when He will rescue us from the curse of death and set all things right — a feat that no Superman, despite his great strength, has ever been able to accomplish.