Marveling at God’s Character

Marvel's latest film, Thor: Love and Thunder, made 747 million dollars! Say what you want about superhero films, but that’s a lot of money. They could buy a medium-sized unit in Sydney for that kind of cash. While the film is often light-hearted and sometimes funny, it makes many profound comments about God or, at the very least, gods. Warning: upcoming are spoilers for the first 5 minutes of the film.

The movie opens with a weak and frail man getting battered about by sand, trying desperately to carry his daughter. Eventually, he can go no further. With cracked lips, he calls out to the gods for help – only to hear silence. The only water that falls is the father’s tears as his daughter dies in his arms.

He then wakes in the sandstorm to see a garden in the distance. A garden in which he finds his gods feasting, indulging, pampering and being pampered. The father, Gorr, asks why they didn’t respond to his call for help. He soon realises that the gods to whom he has expressed his subservient devotion and sacrifice for his whole life care nothing for him, his daughter or their followers. They are, in short, very human. They are arrogant and self-centred, insecure, proud, bigoted, and uncaring of those they deem below them, seeking only greater pleasure and richer comforts.

It is a picture that contrasts God in the Bible. In this remarkable book, we do not meet a God who is apathetic or uncaring about the suffering of His servants. We do not find a God who remains’ in a paradise, feasting and indulging in comfort, while we wander and stumble through the desert with cracked lips. We are not found by one who laughs at our grief. Rather, we see a God who gives up His own privilege, who willingly enters into suffering and hardship, who leaves the garden to be hung on a cross.

See the film if you wish. Let your teenagers or children watch it if you choose. But do not miss the opportunity to reflect with them or with your own heart. How is our God different? How is our Jesus different from these petty, finite, self-centred, insecure gods? Why is it that we worship no other gods…?

By Jamie Mackenzie