Let’s be honest: Life gets old sometimes.
Even when something’s new, it gets old. Ever gotten a present for Christmas or your birthday that you desperately wanted, only to grow tired of it in just a few hours, days or weeks? No matter how new that something is, the shininess always dulls, the newness wears off, and it just becomes another thing taking up space in your closet, destined to become a garage sale item someday.
We all encounter times in our lives when we feel like that used-up Christmas gift, when we feel like we’re destined for the world’s biggest garage sale. When we feel like we just don’t belong or we’re on the outside looking in.
Peter Parker is just such a kid.
But with a single spider bite, Peter Parker was no longer the nerd, the downtrodden, the beat-up. Ten minutes into the first Spider-Man movie, he becomes different; a change happens within him at a fundamental level.
Before this pivotal occurrence in his life, Peter Parker was fast on the road to geekdom. The glasses-wearing brainiac, the typical “science whiz,” as Norman Osborn, his best friend’s father, calls him, Peter was a regular ol’ high school senior with a gigantic brain and dreams of becoming a professional photographer. What he was going to do with his smarts, we’ll never know.
As the movie opens, we already know Peter’s like us, on the outside looking in—a perspective demonstrated by Peter literally running alongside a school bus as everyone else laughs at him from inside.
Everyone but Mary Jane Watson, of course, who implores the driver to stop and pick him up. We can see at this point that Peter, if left on his own, would drown in the ocean of society. He is helpless and hopeless. He would still be able to carve out a life for himself, perhaps, but it would be a life lived under the thumb of bully Flash Thompson and other jerks like him, who rule the world with charisma, charm and muscles.
We all feel a little like Peter sometimes. This is why the Spider-Man story has caught on so well—we can all empathize with the guy. How he just wants to live his life and do his thing, but some outside influence (in Peter’s case, torment from Flash & Co.) prevents us.
Sounds like David. Not King David, the powerful ruler, but the young shepherd boy David, whose story we start reading about in 1 Samuel 16. This is a guy God had big plans for, but that no one paid attention to.
Samuel, the big-time prophet of Israel, went to David’s house on God’s orders to anoint a king. Now, David had a ton of brothers, and they were all studlier than he was. He looked like a little kid, a nerdy little shepherd boy pounding on the side of his brothers’ school bus, hoping they’d slow down to let him on. Samuel took one look at David’s oldest brother Eliab and said to himself, “Here’s the guy. Here’s the king, the big superhero that’s going to guard and protect and lead Israel.”
“Nope,” God said. “You’re looking at the outside, but I’m looking at his heart. He’s not our man.”
Samuel moved on to the next brother, Abinadab. He was a stout fellow, we presume. Probably not as imposing as Eliab, but still a good candidate for king. “Ah,” said Samuel to himself, “God’s faking the people out by not taking that first one, but this is going to be the one.”
“Nope,” God said.
Next was David’s brother Shammah.
“Nope.”
“Come on, God,” Samuel must’ve been thinking. “This is getting ridiculous.”
In all, seven of David’s brothers went before Samuel, and God rejected all of them. David’s dad, Jesse, didn’t even bring David up—took him out of the running before he was ever in it. Wrote him off.
God—and Samuel—wrote David back in. “Do you have any more sons?” Samuel asked Jesse. “God has rejected all these guys.”
“Well,” Jesse said, “there’s the youngest, but, come on—he’s tending the sheep.”
Samuel sent for him, and the second David appeared, God said, “Yep. There’s My guy.”
So Samuel anointed him to be king over Israel, and that simple act, that anointing, changed David’s life forever—and the change was put into action in the very next chapter in the Bible, when David went up against Israel’s own supervillain, the Philistine Goliath.
But back to Peter Parker. When he’s bitten by that genetically modified spider and that monitor flashes behind him, we’re given an indication that Peter is changed into a new species. It isn’t an outward change—he doesn’t just put on muscles or get better vision without laser eye surgery—his DNA is changed. He is changed at the molecular level.
He becomes something completely new.
A new creation, if you will.
In 2 Corinthians 5:17, the Bible says, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” Boy, that sounds really familiar.
No, Peter Parker doesn’t become a Christian, but his transformation into Spider-Man is a wonderful parallel parable about the Christian life. When we accept Jesus’ sacrifice, when we welcome Him into our hearts, He really does change us from the inside out.
We are no longer garage-sale material. We are no longer used-up versions of ourselves. We are changed from within to become something valuable, something new again—something that will never dull or lose value.
We all have that feeling at times in our lives: that innate sense that something in ourselves needs to change if we are going to move forward. We all feel like Peter, running alongside the bus of life, pounding on the side and hoping it’ll stop long enough for us to jump on board.
Philosophers talk about the “God-shaped hole” that we each have inside of us. Remember that double helix in the television monitor, how it had gaps in it that were replaced to create a new species? It’s like that. We have gaps within ourselves, holes in our souls that can only be filled by Jesus. By His love. By His sacrifice.
And when we accept that love, that sacrifice? We become a new creation. We kiss that old way of living goodbye. We stop running alongside the bus, pounding to get on, and we start swinging from skyscrapers, free to pursue life on God’s terms, not man’s.
We become super, because He has made us that way.