Holy Heroes: Captain America
Scott Bayles, pastor
Blooming Grove Christian Church: 11/10/2013
Good morning and welcome to Blooming Grove. If you are visiting with us today, I hope you feel right at home—like a part of the family. These past several weeks I’ve been preaching about superheroes—using the stories of these fictional comic-book characters as modern-day parables that illustrate spiritual lessons.
Last Sunday we saw how Iron-Man’s hi-tech armor parallels and points toward the Full Armor of God. The belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the shoes of peace, the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit empower us to stand against the onslaught of Satan. There is one piece of armor issued to Christians, however, that Iron-Man doesn’t brandish—a shield.
The Bible says, “In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one” (Ephesians 6:16 NLT).
While Iron-Man may not wield a shield, there is another iconic superhero who does—Captain America! Created in 1940 by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, Captain America was Marvel Comics’ (the Timely Comics) first superhero. Stan Lee calls Captain America “the very definition of a superhero.” Chris Evans, the actor who plays Captain America in the movies has said, “He’s everything I wish I could be as a man… he’s just good for the sake of good.” It’s for that reason that I have grown to love Captain America.
Most recently I masked myself as Captain America for the Route 66 Mother Road Festival held in Springfield, Illinois where my wife, son, and I interacted with families at a booth for the Children’s Advocacy Centers of Illinois. Their mission is to protect children from abusive situations and showcasing some superheroes helped symbolize that. I’ll never forget my first time dressing as Captain America, though. We were, once again, in Metropolis on a sweltering and sunny afternoon in June of 2009, when a little boy—no more than four years old—appeared out of nowhere, wrapped his arms tightly around my legs and whispered, “I love you Captain America.” My heart melted and I knew instantly that I would be doing this costuming thing for years to come.
The story of Captain America is really the story of Steve Rogers, a skinny kid from Brooklyn. Despite his scrawny and sickly physic, Steve volunteered for a top-secret military experiment called Operation: Rebirth. Chosen because of his altruistic and patriotic heart, Steve was injected with a special serum and bombarded with “Vita-Rays” which transformed him from a frail young man to the peak of human perfection—the super-soldier, Captain America! Imbued with enhanced strength, speed, and agility, Captain America became the Sentinel of Liberty as he defended freedom against the Nazis. Then, after being lost in the Arctic and frozen in ice for decades, he was found and thawed out by the Avengers and continues to fight by their sides as a man out of time.
Captain America’s only weapon is a special shield made from an indestructible alloy capable of absorbing kinetic energy. There is a fun scene in Marvel’s Avengers that demonstrates just how impervious Captain America’s shield is, when Cap has to break up a misunderstanding between two much more powerful heroes, Thor and Iron-Man.
PLAY Avenger’s Movie Clip
Just as Captain America’s shield is impervious to even Thor’s hammer or Hulk’s fists for that matter, the shield of faith makes us impervious to Satan’s spiritual assaults. Not all shields are indestructible, though, and not everyone’s faith is either. So the question is how do we construct a shield of faith that can withstand any assault? There is a passage of Scripture in the book of Hebrews that touches on that question. The Bible says, “You can never please God without faith, without depending on him. Anyone who wants to come to God must believe that there is a God and that he rewards those who sincerely look for him” (Hebrews 11:6 TLB).
In the comics, Captain America’s shield is made of an alloy composed of three metals. The first is vibranuim, a rare vibration-absorbing metal found only in the jungles of Wakanda. Second is adamantium, the same indestructible metal that Wolverine’s claws and bones are coated in. Finally, in the story Fear Itself, Asgardian blacksmiths added some of the mystical metal Uru to the shield, the same stuff from which Thor’s magical hammer was forged. These three metals combine to make Captain America’s shield utterly unique and totally indestructible. Similarly, the above passage alludes to three elements of faith that, when combined, become an indestructible shield for believers. The first element of faith is simply believing that God is real!
• GOD IS REAL
Becoming absolutely convinced that God is real is the first element in our shield of faith. “Anyone who wants to come to him must believe that God exists” (Hebrews 11:6 NLT). There are several good reasons to believe that God is real—the fine-tuning of the universe, the applicability of mathematics, the reality of good and evil, the historicity of the life of Jesus, and your own personal experience to name a few. But the author of Hebrews touches one particularly good reason to believe in God when he writes, “By faith we understand that the entire universe was formed at God’s command, that what we now see did not come from anything that can be seen” (Hebrews 11:3 NLT).
For centuries the majority of atheists were convinced that the universe was eternal, but we now have strong scientific evidence that the universe had a beginning—that matter, energy, space and even time came into existence in what cosmologists commonly refer to as the Big Bang. Since the universe had a beginning, we’re forced to ask, “What created the universe?” Sadly, the universal answer from atheists has been, “Nothing!”
Richard Dawkins wrote in his book, The Ancestor’s Tale: “The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved literally out of nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.” The truth is—you’d have to be mad to believe a claim like that! But he’s not alone. Atheist Lawrence Krauss has written a book ambitiously titled A Universe from Nothing, in which he argues that nothing is actually something and that that something, which is nothing, created everything! If that sounds like nonsense to you, you’re not alone.
I think Maria said it well, in The Sound of Music, when she told Captain Von Trapp, “Nothing comes from nothing; nothing ever could.” Or, put another way, there simply are no free lunches! The conditions that hold true in our universe preclude the possibility of matter springing out of nothing. Anyone who tries to actually justify that nothing created everything has to be either insane or in denial.
Since the cosmos didn’t just appear from nothing, by nothing, there is only one other option—it’s the one articulated in the first chapter of the first book of the Bible: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). In an age of empirical science, nothing could be more certain, clear, or correct. God is real! Embracing and believing that fact is the first element in your indestructible shield of faith.
• GOD IS RELIABLE
Furthermore, the second element in your shield is believing that God is reliable. Again, the passage in Hebrews says, “The Bible says, “You can never please God without faith, without depending on him” (Hebrews 11:6 TLB).
While hiking on a mountaintop, a man slipped and fell off the edge of a cliff. Luckily he was able to grab a branch protruding from the side of the precipice on the way down. Holding on for dear life, he looked down only to see a rocky valley some fifteen hundred feet below. When he looked up, he realized he was only about twenty feet from the overhang he had fallen from. Hopefully, he thought, some other hikers would come his way and so he started yelling, “Help! Help! Is anybody up there? Help!”
A booming voice spoke up, shaking the entire mountain. It was God. “I am here, and I will save you if you believe in me.”
“I believe! I believe!” yelled the backpacker.
“If you believe me, let go of the branch and then I will save you.”
The young man, considering what God said, looked down again. Gazing at the valley below, there was a long pause, and then he looked back up and shouted, “Is there anybody else up there?”
This backpacker believed that God is real, but he didn’t believe that God is reliable. For many people—perhaps for you—the question isn’t whether or not God exists, but whether or not God can be trusted. Is God reliable? If I put my faith and hope in his promises, is he going to come through for me? If I trust him, will he catch me?
The answer, of course, is—yes!
When Lloyd Douglas, author of The Robe and other novels, attended college, he lived in a boardinghouse. A retired, wheelchair-bound music professor lived on the first floor. Occasionally, Douglas would pop his head in the door of the teacher’s apartment and ask the same question, “Well, what’s the good news?”
The old man would pick of his tuning fork, tap it on the side of his wheelchair, and say, “That’s middle C! It was middle C yesterday; it will be middle C tomorrow; it will be middle C a thousand years from now. The tenor upstairs sings flat. The piano across the hall is out of tune, but, my friend, that is middle C.”
God is our middle C. We have enough change and stress in life. Relationships fail. Health falters. Earthquakes erupt. But the God who ruled the earth last night is the same God who rules it today. Same convictions. Same plan. Same purpose. Same love. Same grace. Same mercy. He never changes.
That’s why David was able to pray: “I entrust my spirit into your hand. Rescue me, Lord, for you are a faithful God” (Psalm 31:5 NLT). God deserves our trust! He’s sovereign over every situation. His promises are faithful and true. In a changing, turbulent world, you have a Friend who is 100 percent reliable. But it is our responsibility to trust in him. Back in Hebrews, the Bible says, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1 ESV). When we learn to fully rely on God, trusting that he is in control and knows what is best even when we can’t see it, we’ll have added the second element in our indestructible shield.
• GOD IS REACHABLE
The final component, in addition to believing that God is real and reliable, in our shield of faith is believing that God is reachable. Take one last look at the Scripture we started with: “Anyone who wants to come to him must believe that God exists and that he rewards those who sincerely seek him” (Hebrews 11:6 NLT).
God wants you and me to sincerely seek and persistently pursue a relationship with him. In fact, the Bible says that God created us for just that purpose. It says, “God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us” (Acts 17:29 NIV).
If you believe that God is just some distant deity—an unknowable force or being—then your faith in him will be fragile and easily broken. But when you believe wholeheartedly that you can reach out for God and find, your faith will be impervious to any attack. The Bible assures us that God is reachable. He told the Israelites, “There you will look for the Lord your God, and if you search for him with all your heart, you will find him” (Deuteronomy 4:29 GNT). James urged the Christians of his day, “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you” (James 4:8 ESV).
To people like Abraham, Moses, the other heroes of the Bible, God wasn’t just an idea adopted by the mind, but an experiential reality that gave meaning to their lives. Through the experience of faith, we can draw near to God in the same way. If you reach out to him in faith, God will reveal himself to you personally.
There is absolutely nothing you could say to me that would convince me that my wife isn’t real—that she doesn’t exist. I have unshakable faith that my wife is real and that she loves me because I live with her. I talk to her. I know her intimately. I experience her presence every day. In the same way, knowing about God and actually knowing God are two different things. When you have a personal relationship with God—spending quiet moments in conversation with him, feeling his arms around you in times of need, and mingling your own spirit with his through worship—there will be nothing anyone could ever say to, no lie Satan could whisper, that could convince you that God is any less real, reliable, or reachable than your own spouse.
Conclusion:
Satan will do everything in his power to undermine and undo your faith. Those flaming arrows the Bible talks about often come disguised as disbelieving friends and family, internet infidels, skeptical scientists, or fervent followers of other faiths. Other times they come in the form of tragedies, trials, or troublesome times. If your faith is weak or naïve—if it isn’t composed of all three of these elements—it could crumble under the onslaught.
I have a replica of Captain America’s shield hanging on the wall in my bedroom. It looks cool. It’s the same size, shape, and patriotic colors as Cap’s shield. But it’s not the genuine article. It’s actually made out of tin and I could bend it my hands if I wanted to. Some professing Christians have faith like that. It seems strong on the surface. It looks genuine. Yet when it’s put to test, it bends and breaks.
If you want to have an unbreakable, unshakable faith—you have to know in your heart and head that God is real, that God is reliable, and that God is reachable!
Invitation:
If you’re ready to put your faith in God today or if maybe your faith has come under attack lately and you need some help reassembling the essential elements in your shield of faith, please come talk with me while we stand and sing.
