The Story of God Read online

  God and some of his favorite angels watched, eating grilled meat and drinking wine, as the temptation began.

  Almost instantly, God felt his stomach tighten. Satan wasn’t tempting Jesus, he was doubting him. Satan knew Jesus was God’s son, obviously, so why was he questioning that? “If you’re really the son of God,” Satan said (“IF HE IS?!” God literally shouted, spitting out a bit of grilled lamb as he did), “why don’t you turn those rocks into bread?” (Matt. 4:3) This was idiotic! Of course Jesus could turn the rocks into bread if he wanted to, but why should he? He had nothing to prove to Satan!!

  Jesus’ response was, honestly, weird. “Man does not live on bread alone. He lives on God’s words.” (Matt. 4:4) The second part was excellent, but the first part? God had no idea what it even meant. “He should have yelled ‘HOW DARE YOU, I WILL DESTROY YOU,’ that’s what I would have done,” God fumed. He felt unsure for a moment: Is Jesus up to saving the world? But then God saw something that warmed his mighty heart. Satan looked rattled. Jesus’ response to his question had obviously taken him by surprise. Satan obviously had no idea how to respond. He looked at Jesus like, “Wait, did that even make sense?” For the first time that God could remember, Satan looked unsure. Was he being tricked? Was he being made a fool of? And the more Jesus simply stared implacably back at him, the more unsure the devil looked. God started to smile, then laugh. “Good one, Jesus!” he called out and instantly all the angels started chattering excitedly in agreement, “Good one, Jesus, good one!!” It was quite an exciting moment.

  The temptation entered phase two. Satan took Jesus to Jerusalem and they stood on a high parapet, looking down. “Push him off, Jesus!” one angel cheered, but was quickly hushed as Satan spoke again. He seemed to have recovered his composure; he spoke calmly, quietly: “If you’re the son of God, why don’t you jump? Won’t angels hold you up?” (Matt. 4:6) God shook his head, extremely irritated by this. “You’re supposed to tempt him, dummy! Not continue to ask him ridiculous questions!” “Ridiculous ridiculous ridiculous” filled the air.

  God did not like the way Satan was doing his job. It was disobedient and disrespectful; he’d been given specific directions, which he was not following. Still, the first time Satan had challenged Jesus, God’s boy had clearly won the exchange. God waited for another odd, offbeat comeback. But this time all Jesus came up with was, “Don’t test me,” (Matt. 4:7) as if he was ready to jump off the ledge, fly around, then come back and punch Satan in the nose. The angels, waiting to cheer, made a few small “yays,” but not many. Had Satan won that little exchange? God wasn’t sure, but he thought it was possible.

  Satan now took Jesus to a high mountain (“How did they even get there?” God demanded. “Did they ride donkeys?”) and finally, finally, “tempted” him. But the temptation he offered made God’s back go up: “If you work for me,” he said, “you can rule the whole world.” (Matt. 4:9) Which was insane! Satan couldn’t offer Jesus that kind of power, it wasn’t his to offer! This was a terrible temptation. Satan was supposed to tempt Jesus with real things, tempting things: Grilled meats … incense … pomegranate-colored fabric … gold balls! Not with absurd oversized claims that he couldn’t possibly deliver on and which Jesus would have no interest in anyway!

  God hoped Jesus would deliver a devastating comeback to Satan and put him in his place—or at least say something cryptic and hard to understand, like he had the first time. But Jesus didn’t deliver a knockout punch. In fact, he just stood there for a moment, looking at Satan with those inscrutable eyes of his, saying nothing. “Why is he hesitating—why is he hesitating?” God demanded, his stomach tightening with every second that passed. Was Jesus tempted? Satan was good at temptation—that’s why God gave him this job—maybe he was too good—what if Jesus said yes?

  Jesus closed his eyes, took a deep breath. God held his own breath. The moment hung there for a moment. Finally, Jesus looked at Satan and said “out of my sight”—and God exhaled. (Matt. 4:10) The temptations were over. “That’s the last time I ever give Satan an important job,” God announced loudly. He then sent some angels down to tend to Jesus (Matt. 4:11), who was so hungry that he ate much too fast and puked violently—which, unfairly or not, irritated God.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  As God watched Jesus begin to play out his destiny, he was often baffled by the boy. “I don’t understand his stories,” he told several angels. It was obvious that neither Jesus’ followers, nor even his own family, really understood him either. “Even his own mother, whom I impregnated, doesn’t seem to believe in him!” God stammered. “How can that be?” (Mar. 3:31–33, 6:4; Lu. 14:26) For the most part, people looked befuddled by Jesus, and God thought he knew why. The boy was strange. There was something enigmatic about him—something vaguely unsettling. He was brilliant at times, poetic and insightful—then vague and obscure the next moment, then downright rude to his followers the next. (Matt. 15:16, 17:17) He sometimes didn’t even seem to know who he was! “Is he saying that he already is the Son of Man or that he’s going to return as the Son of Man?” God demanded, more than once. (Matt. 25:31 vs. 26:2)

  Some of what Jesus said, God found himself nodding along with vigorously. “Hate yourselves” (Jo. 12:25); “Hate your children” (Lu. 14:25); “You’re worthless and will burn.” (Matt. 13:48) Things like that were excellent. Other times, however, God felt that Jesus talked way too much about himself: Who he was, what he was doing, what was going to happen to him, etc. “He’s very self-involved, isn’t he?” God found himself asking an angel on more than one occasion.

  And Jesus’ magical powers? God was completely baffled by the way he used them. He’d given Jesus the ability to walk on water because, well—why not? He was asking a lot of the boy, why not let him have some fun? Also, just in case anyone doubted who Jesus was, walking on water seemed pretty convincing. But the way Jesus did it baffled God. “Why doesn’t he walk around the sea on a hot day?” God thought. “Why is he out there walking around a lake by himself at night ?! What a weird thing to do!” No wonder his followers thought he was a ghost! (Mar. 6:48) As for the story that Jesus supposedly kissed a man? (Mar. 17:35) Well, that better not be true!

  The way Jesus administered punishment was deeply puzzling to God too. “I believe in punishment, I think that goes without saying. But isn’t it important that it be, you know, justified?” God asked some angels. The killing of the fig tree just didn’t make any sense to God. “The tree was out of season. Of course it was bare of fruit. Why did Jesus kill it?” God wondered. (Mar. 11:14–22) And Jesus’ explanation, “If you have faith in God, you will do the same,” didn’t clarify things much. (Matt. 25:21) (As for the whole “eat this bread, it’s my body, drink this wine, it’s my blood” thing? In a word: Creepy.)

  God began to grow annoyed by the way people fell all over themselves about Jesus’ every word. He disliked intensely the way people seemed to see Jesus as his equal. They seemed amazed that Jesus brought one guy back from the dead. (Jo. 11:44) “I stopped the sun and no one even seemed to notice.” (God had begun to wonder if there was some sort of conspiracy that kept his sun-stopping out of the history books.) God couldn’t deny it anymore, and he didn’t feel the need to: Being in the background had gotten old. He was ready to reassert himself with mankind.

  “Jesus has had enough time,” he proclaimed one day. “It’s time for him to be tortured and killed.” As for the mistaken idea that Satan had somehow played a role in all this, that he had somehow “possessed” Judas and thus made him turn Jesus in (Lu. 22:3)—this was absurd! “I was solely responsible for Jesus’ being tortured and killed, me!” God fumed.

  But was there a misunderstanding between God and Jesus? At a rather inopportune moment—as Jesus was dying on the cross—God began to worry that maybe there had been. “Why have you forsaken me?” Jesus asked him (Matt. 27:46), and this bothered God a lot. “Forsaken him?” he said in an overly loud voice. “What is he talking about? We had this whole
thing planned from the start!”

  Since God and Jesus had never actually met and had communicated mainly through prayers, visions, and dreams—well, maybe dying painfully was a surprise to Jesus. God comforted himself with the thought that Jesus would only be “dead” for about five minutes anyway. After that, he would travel to hell and try to convert everyone there. (“Not gonna happen,” God grinned.) Then he would return to earth for a short time before he flew up to live in heaven.

  Still, God felt he should do something to convey his unhappiness about his son being tortured and killed—even if it was his plan. He decided to send a massive earthquake, which he felt made his point extremely well. The earthquake was so powerful that graves opened up and some dead men climbed out and walked around town, which God wasn’t completely sure he had intended, but was basically comfortable with. (Matt. 27:52–53)

  Thinking back, God swore that he hadn’t meant to leave Jesus on earth for more than a day or two after his return from the dead. What would be the point? Did God feel bad that he’d gotten so caught up in putting the finishing touches on heaven that he had forgotten about Jesus for a while? Definitely! As soon as he remembered, he whisked Jesus up to heaven. When Jesus arrived it was … well, why deny it? It was an awkward first meeting. God wanted to hug his son, but they just sort of … missed. God opened his arms, but Jesus first hung back (was he mad?), then started to lean forward—before God pulled back. They never touched each other.

  Still, you know … it was fine. Jesus told God that he wasn’t mad or anything—that he’d filled the time by dressing up in costumes, then sneaking up on his followers and pretending to be someone else (Lu. 24:16, Jo. 21:9–13), which he found amusing. Also, he found that he liked to cook. (Jo. 21:12) The one person Jesus really did not like was a guy named Thomas, who’d demanded to be allowed to stick his fingers into Jesus’ wounds. (Jo. 20:25) God found this repulsive and agreed to send Thomas to hell.

  Jesus had told people fairly explicitly that Judgment Day was going to come very soon, within one hundred years at the most. He’d more or less guaranteed that, in fact. (Mark 9:1) Wouldn’t it make him look just slightly less believable if Judgment Day didn’t happen when he said? If it didn’t happen, in fact, for two thousand years? Yes, it sure would, and God felt bad about that too. But listen—if God needed that much time to perfect the ending of his story, well then, so be it. And if that made Jesus look like he was a little bit “out of the loop,” well, he had overstepped his place, that’s all. Regardless of what Jesus or his followers might have thought, there was one guy in charge here, God.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  A quick aside regarding God’s main messengers during this time: They were, he felt, a mixed bag. The first three, Matthew, Mark and Luke, were satisfactory, even if they didn’t always agree with each other, even about, shall we say, important details (“Like me being Jesus’ father, for instance!”) (Mar. Chap. 1) But the last gospel writer, John? God had a real problem with him. First off, he seemed to hate God’s own chosen people, the Jews! He even tried to make it sound like Jesus hated the Jews. (Jo. 18:36) “Jesus didn’t say ‘save me from the Jews,’ Jesus is a Jew!” God boomed, irritated by this. Second, John made the story of Jesus’ return from the dead sound completely ridiculous. He wrote it as if Jesus was stuck back on earth for—well, who knows how long, weeks! (Jo. 20:26, 21:1) Like he was so bored that he just wandered around “like a guy stuck at Spokane Airport!” God much later barked.

  What really bothered God about John, though, was his self-importance. “He acts like he’s the main character in the story!” God thundered. “He actually has the gall to call himself ‘the disciple that Jesus loved.’ He turns the climax of Jesus’ life into a love triangle that revolves around him! ‘Jesus loves me and wants me around and the other disciples are sooo jealous of me, but Jesus doesn’t even care because he loves me so much.’ It’s junior high—gay junior high!” God growled. (Jo. 21:20–24) And that ending of his! “Jesus did lots of other things too”? Lame!

  After John came Paul (actually, Paul came first, but never mind), and Paul was a whole different story. God liked Paul a lot. He liked how well Paul understood mankind. They were “wicked, futile, foolish, vile, degraded, shameful, indecent, depraved, greedy, villainous, malicious, treacherous, blasphemous, insolent, arrogant, boastful creatures,” and Paul told them so, before adding, “But we have no right to judge”—which was also true! (Rom. 1:29–2:3)

  God also liked Paul’s language. Living correctly (i.e., saying nothing negative, only good and helpful things; having no bad feelings, such as anger or resentment; being nice and good all the time—not even discussing sex), Paul described as “wearing the belt of truth, the breastplate of integrity, and the shoes of peace.” (Ephes. 6:14–15) “I could not have said it better myself!” God beamed.

  Lastly, God appreciated Paul’s feistiness. “He’s a fierce fellow!” God pronounced, admiring in particular how Paul handled the circumcision issue. Some Jews were mad at Paul for changing the rules about circumcision. It had been important, yes, very. (“I did nearly kill Moses about it,” God admitted to himself.) But it wasn’t important now. All that mattered now was believing in Jesus (Full disclosure: God didn’t like that too much; he was getting damned impatient to reenter his, yes, his story). When the Jews complained (“I chopped part of my penis off and now you say it doesn’t even matter?”), Paul was ready. His comeback was priceless: “Why don’t you go all the way and make eunuchs of yourselves?” (Gal. 5:12) God slapped his thigh with delight when he heard that. “Good one, Paul!” he cheered.

  One event that really incensed God was when Paul went to Athens and talked to some so-called philosophers, who then laughed at him and told him to go away. (Ac. 17:32) “Time will show that Greek philosophers know nothing!” God muttered darkly to the angel who was massaging his shoulders.

  A few hundred years before, there was another man who God really didn’t like. His name was Ezra, and although not everyone accepted his words, some people did. Ezra asked extremely impertinent questions. When God sent an angel down to talk to him, Ezra grilled the angel. “Your story doesn’t make sense,” he said. “All those other people who are supposed to be doing so badly because God hates them? Well, they’re doing better than us and have been for quite a while, so how do you explain that?” (Esd. 3:30)

  The angel correctly instructed Ezra that he could not possibly understand God’s ways with his limited intelligence (Esd. 4:1), but Ezra persisted. “I’m not asking about the heavens,” he said. “I’m asking about the world we live in every day.” (Esd. 4:22) The angel sort of panicked and blurted out that in times to come, 3–4-month-old fetuses would pop out of their mother’s stomachs and dance around. (Esd. 6:21) Ezra still didn’t back off. “Why didn’t God just make Adam good?” he demanded. (Esd. 7:46) “Why is he so mad at us if we are made in his image?” (Esd. 8:35, 8:44) “No more questions!” barked the angel (Esd. 8:55), who got out of there pretty quickly, and got quite an earful from God when he got back to heaven. “Why did you ruin the surprise about the fetuses dancing around?” God scolded.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Two thousand years passed. For some reason that God did not understand, Jesus aged. He now had white hair, wore a girdle, and had darkly tanned feet. (Rev. 1:15) “Why did he only tan his feet and not the rest of his body?” God asked some angels. “And why does he brag about them?” (Rev. 2:18) “Also: why does he have such a high-pitched, trumpety voice?” (Rev. 1:10) Things had not gotten better between God and Jesus. It was still tense—if anything, more so. God still didn’t fully understand Jesus; he felt that Jesus was judging him at times, not fully supportive of his great plan for ending the story, “Operation Punish Mankind.” “Not ‘kind and compassionate” enough, I guess!” God would mutter to himself.

  Heaven was complete now and it was magnificent. The huge throne, the rainbow, the torches, the ice rink (Rev. 4:3–6), the singing eyeball-monsters … it was
all … perfection. When God had first described his eyeball-monsters to Jesus, his son had looked at him funny. “We’ll have four of them,” God had pronounced. “One that looks like a cow, one like a lion, one like an eagle, and one like a man! Also! They will have wings! Six wings!” (Rev. 4:6–7)

  “The eagle will have wings too, Father?”

  “Yes, yes, absolutely!”

  “Six more wings on the eagle, Father, or six total?”

  “Six more! Eight total! Also—I will cover them all with eyeballs!”

  “Eye … ?”

  “Eyeballs, Jesus, eyeballs! All over them, head to toe. I will even put eyeballs inside them!”

  “In their stomachs, Father?”

  “In their stomachs, their hearts, their kidneys, their bones, everywhere! These things will be overflowing with eyeballs!”

  “What will these creatures do, Father?”

  “They will sing in praise of me, Jesus! I have already composed a song for them to sing; it goes like this …” And with that, God began to sing. He had a good strong tenor voice. “Holy holy holy is God, Lord of what is, was, and will be.” (Rev. 6:8)

  “It’s beautiful, Lord,” piped up several nearby elders who God had brought to heaven for their so-called wisdom, before he had realized that he didn’t need their wisdom, he was God—at which time he put them to work groveling before him. “You are great, Lord. You made everything, everything,” he had them say to him over and over again. (Rev. 4:10–11) It was not as good as the song, obviously, but it was still nice.

  God could tell that “Tanfoot Jesus” had found his eyeball-monsters idea bizarre. But he had not wavered and now the eyeball monsters existed and did have wings and eyeballs inside them and it was brilliant. “They see my greatness even in their bowels,” God cried to himself, thrilled. God loved his eyeball-monsters’ fluttering wings. “They could fly if they weren’t chained up near my throne,” he chuckled. But they were chained up, and forever too, because their job was to sing to him eternally.