Superheroes

What do you think of when you think of Superheroes?Superpowers? Capes? Underwear on the outside? Courage?How much of this is important in order to make a superhero? What do they need to be a superhero and what can they do without? Batman has no superpowers, but he does have lots of gadgets and a cool belt. Do you need them?

To me, you don’t need a cape to be a superhero, you don’t need to wear your underwear on the outside, and you don’t need superpowers or a gadget belt. All you need is the courage to try your best, even when it seems hopeless.

The Bible is filled with lots of Superheroes: people who heard God’s voice, and obeyed it against all odds. Now that is one thing that is quite interesting. How do you hear God’s voice? What if you don’t hear God’s voice, how do you know what he wants you to do?

In Numbers 13, we meet a normal man, with no superpowers, without a cape, without a utility belt, and who hadn’t heard the voice of God. But he managed to obey God’s voice anyway. Listen to this.

Numbers 13:1-4 The LORD said to Moses, “Send some men to explore the land of Canaan which I am giving to the Israelites. From each ancestral tribe send one of its leaders.” So at the LORD’s command Moses sent them out from the Desert of Paran. All of them were leaders of the Israelites. These are their names: (yada yada etc.)

So these twelve men go into the land of Caanan, and spend 40 days looking around at it. They find out it is a land filled with giants, but it also is a land of plenty. Two of them manage to get this cluster of grapes which is so big they have to carry it between them on a pole. Then they come back to Moses and the others.

25-29 They came back to Moses and Aaron and the whole Israelite community at Kadesh in the Desert of Paran. There they reported to them and to the whole assembly and showed them the fruit of the land. They gave Moses this account: “We went into the land to which you sent us, and it does flow with milk and honey! Here is its fruit. But the people who live there are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large. We even saw descendants of Anak [a giant] there. The Amalekites live in the Negev; the Hittites, Jebusites and Amorites live in the hill country; and the Caananites live near the sea and along the Jordan.”

Now the hero of the story enters the scene. Caleb is one of the spies. He had seen the same giants in the land, and the same war-tribes of people, and the same fortified cities. But instead of being scared…

30-33 Then Caleb silenced the people before Moses and said, “We should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it.” But the men who had gone up with him said, “We can’t attack those people, they are stronger than we are.” And they spread among the Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored. They said, “The land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size. We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.”

So, we have this group of people facing off against unsurmountable odds, not chance of victory according to what the other spies have said, but Caleb is yelling “Give me a sword, let me at them.” Why would he do this? What made him so confident that he knew he could win the battle against the tribes and the giants and the cities?

The answer is right at the start of the story.

1-2 The LORD said to Moses, “Send some men to explore the land of Caanan which I am giving to the Israelites.”

God had promised victory, but the other spies were too afraid to understand it. Only Caleb, and later Joshua, were brave enough to say “We can do it, let us at them!” Eventually what happened here is that the 10 other spies convinced the people not to enter Caanan, and so they all wandered around in the desert for another 40 years, until everyone who was afraid of entering the land had died. And get this. After 40 years, when Caleb and Joshua were the oldest two men in the whole of Israel still alive, they led the next generation of Israelites into Caanan and won, against the giants, the tribes, and the cities. No one could stop them, because God had promised them the land. The way Caleb knew what God had said was by listening to Moses, by finding out what God had already promised. We can do the same today. Even if God isn’t speaking to us directly, we can read the bible, and see what he has already asked us to do, and what he has already promised.

In 2001, in Pakistan (which is a mostly Muslim country) a young man was riding his motorbike down the road, when a car swerved out and hit him, breaking his leg. As he lay in the street, a woman he had never met came out of the crowd, put her hand on his leg, and prayed to Jesus to heal it. This was a hugely risky thing to do. Muslim people don’t pray to Jesus, they pray to Allah, and often if you pray to Jesus you can get in a lot of trouble. But just as the man was thinking this, and getting really angry, God healed his leg, and the woman left. The only other time he saw her was when she came up to him again and handed him a bible.

That woman risked her life to pray for the man, and God might not have done anything. Obviously, she heard God’s voice calling her to pray for him, and she obeyed. She was definitely a superhero then.

And the man, who is known as ‘Asif’ became a hero for God too. You can read the rest of his story in the book 'Jesus Freaks II' starting on page 29.People keep trying to kill him, and he has been kicked out of his home for his faith, but Asif knows that God has called him, and keeps preaching God's Word.

A superhero is willing to face any obstacle for the cause. They know that evil needs defeating and that they are called to defeat it. So, if you want to be a superhero, listen to God, find out what he wants you to do, and get to it.

Up, up and away!