Which side are you on? Are you the hero or the villain? Or maybe both? I was looking around on Time Magazine’s website, and came across this post on the top 25 Villains of all time. After looking through it I realized that I didn’t agree with all of their choices (cause let’s face it… if Darth Vader doesn’t make the list, then it can’t be very creditable) but even from what I saw it got me thinking. Why do we love to have a bad guy? In everything we do we often put people into two sides… the good and the bad. We divide our political parties, social classes, and other groups into good and bad. There’s us and then there’s them. Even when I watch a sporting event I usually root for the “good” guys, and boo the “bad” guys. It seems that we like to have some evil person or force who gets vanquished by the hero. But what if there was no bad guy… what then? What if we were stuck in a room with a bunch of the good guys for a year with nothing to do? Would some people become bad guys? Or would we, due to our sinful nature, simply create bad guys out of others with our thoughts? A few weeks ago I watched the movie the Prestige again, and I was trying to figure out which of the two characters was the real hero and which was the villain. This made me think that perhaps everyone is someone’s hero and someone else’s villain… and perhaps through our sin tainted eyes we are all playing both parts in different people’s stories. Some look at us and see the heroic work we are doing for the kingdom, while others watch us pass by like the enemy. Now obviously we can’t be seen as the villain unless we have sinned. To take it one step further, if we sin we are an enemy (or villain) of God. Why do we sin? Because we think we can do something better than God or live in a plan better than God’s. Basically we sin when we try and be God. On the other side of things, when we aren’t sinning we are becoming more like God. So there are those who try to be like God (the heroes) and those who try to be God (the villains). We see this example with the devil himself. Here we had a worship leader in Heaven who thought he was better than God and wanted to be God. Sin is something that tries to take the place of God. When we sinned in the garden we tried to replace God’s plans with our own. A professor once tried to say that God was evil because he created evil, but a student (some believe Einstein) responded that evil is simply the absence of God. There’s a great story to go along with that here. The point is that evil exists in all of us when we don’t give ourselves completely to God. So we have a choice… Be God, or be like him. May you choose to be like God and live life in such a way that other people see the hero and not the villain.
