The Ultimate Superhero

Ever wish you could be the caped hero who swoops in and fixes all the ills of the world? Who magically zaps people and heals their diseases, repairs their hang-ups, makes them good? Who wipes out evil and famine and war? Or who, at the very least, helps one hurting person climb out of their self-imposed sinkhole and stand on their own feet?

If you have, you might make a great counselor.

If you have ever sought and received professional counsel for your life and relationships, you know the process can be both encouraging and difficult, but worth it. Taking time to root around beneath the surface exposes emotional rubble we don’t always want to look at. And we all have our rubble.

Whenever I look at mine, one of the most overwhelming and recurring impressions I’ve received has been the staggering size of God’s heart. My hurts and disappointments may be minuscule compared to what others have suffered, but when you multiply those hurts by the billions, for every person who ever breathed, all with our pain and scars, one question surfaces. If God truly sees it all, how can he bear it?

We hear on TV about abused or malnourished children and we want to change the channel because our hearts cannot handle it. The atrocities of war fill volumes. Hunger and disease run rampant. The age-old question about why God allows all the misery crops up easily. It leads many to conclude he may be loving, or he may be all-powerful, but he certainly cannot be both.

And then our protest is silenced by the shadow of a cross.

If the Bible is true, not only does God see it all, but he loves each hurting individual with a love we can only imagine. How can his heart stand it? His capacity for pain must be at least as great as his capacity for love. God’s heart breaks for the abuser as much as the abused, the perpetrator as well as the victim. And on some level, we are all both.

Jesus died on the cross not only for the sins you’ve committed but also for the sins done against you. Not just for forgiveness, but for healing. I don’t claim to understand this, but Isaiah foretold it: “He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.”

It’s been said that if you can comprehend God, your god is too small. As you celebrate Easter weekend, may God grant you a fresh picture of his heart. We simply cannot put him in a box, understand, or explain him with our little human hearts and brains. We cannot fully appreciate the battle at Calvary, when all the forces of darkness rallied everything and hurled it all at my hero as he hung there. Every vulgar thought, every loathsome deed, every emotional or physical wound ever inflicted. All of it, flung at him as though he committed it all himself.

The suffering will one day come to an end. We have the ultimate Hero. He took it all. He paid the price. It is finished. We win!

Happy Easter.