Knights in Shining Spandex

Woven throughout the immeasurabley vast and beautifully vibrant canvas of humanity's fiction, myths and legends is an undeniable obsession with heroes. Achilles to Atticus Finch, Hercules to Harry Potter, we love heroes. And within our obsession with heroes is our DESIRE for heroes.

I notice this obsession with heroes primarily because of the amount of comics I read. "Heroes" often, for many, at least for the younger generation, leads to ideas of "superheroes" or similar figures. Superheroes- people with powers or abilities or qualities beyond our own, which allow them to conquer foes and acheive feats (physical and moral) which we ourselves could not. Superman has his unmatched strength, power of flight and seemingly immovable moral stance. Batman has harnessed his personal tragedy and allowed it to drive him into one of a handful of men taking an active, physical stand against the tide of evil in Gotham City. Iron Man who has utilised his incredible wealth and intelligence into technology he uses almost relentlessly for the good of man kind. The X-Men who, despite the abuse and racism hruled at them by their society, scarcely waver in defending the very people who despise and reject them.
Right there, really, is what we want in heroes. Figures who do what we can't. Figures who embody the heights of action and morality we so often wish we could reach ourselves. Those who can defeat super villains, villains who are inconceivably stronger and eviler than any other foe we could come across. Figures who deal out blind justice.

Now, morality in the realm of comic books has become increasingly complex throughout the years, and that's a whole different blog/book altogether, but those premises I began with remain there.
Humans want heroes. People who can overcome the villains, evils and threats facing the world that we cannot. Even people who are endlessly skeptical can only say that they don't think such heroes exist on earth, they cannot say that they do not want one.
And this desire for heroes shows, indisputably, the desire inherent in every human heart in history: the desire for God.

Whether you believe it or not, you want God. You are seeking the things which you can only get in an eternally satisfying way from God- love, acceptance, relationship, justice, worth, purpose, direction, creativity, moral standards and, in this specific instance, a hero.
Someone to overcome that which you cannot.
And that thing is the evil in the world.
The human race can swipe at what we perceive to be evil for millenia. We can defeat Hitler, Saddam, the next evil dictator. We can attempt to reduce knife crime. But those are only symptoms of the sin and darkness that lives in the heart of every human. They are not the thing itself. Thining you can iron the evil out of the world by targetting things such as those is like trying to blow out a gas fire. Even attempting to target their causes will never stop the selfish desires that we are all subject to, no matter what.
Through Jesus Christ, the enemies we cannot possibly hope to defeat on our own are flattened and decimated once and for all, for eternity. Sin and death. He can do what we can't. He can once and for all deliver justice to evil. He can once and for all dish out the punishment evil deserves. And He can once and for all free us from the oppression of that enemy.