The Trouble with God Page 2

  CHAPTER THREE

  At first, God had strongly approved of what Solomon did with his great intelligence. God had frankly adored the Temple Solomon built for him. (OT, 1K 6:12–13) Solomon used a lot of gold and God dug that. (God had always loved gold and worn a lot of gold jewelry: He had several thick rings and a chunky bracelet, not to mention a heavy gold crown and, on occasion, some toe-rings.) Solomon had also included plenty of pomegranates in the design of the Temple, which had thrilled God, who’d always had a deep appreciation for pomegranates. (OT, Ex. 39:25) “I knew pomegranates would look marvelous and they do!” he had exulted.

  The first sign that Solomon was going off-track had come with the big speech he gave when the Temple opened. “Why is he putting pressure on me?” God had instantly wondered. “Why is he saying ‘Those promises you made, you better keep them, God?’ (OT, 1K 8:25–26) Because what if I don’t? (And guess what, I won’t.)” Then the speech had gotten worse. Solomon had started implying that nonbelievers, even believers in other gods, deserved God’s love and support; that God somehow “owed” it to people to forgive their sins because, you know, “everybody sins.” (OT, IK 8:46) “That is certainly true,” God had thought. “And that is why everybody gets punished!”

  “What is Solomon trying to do here?” God had fumed, listening to him speak. “Is he trying to imply that perhaps other people are partially correct in their beliefs? (OT, 1K 8:39) That perhaps no one possesses ‘absolute truth’? That maybe many humans get glimpses of the truth and that it’s only by putting all of these glimpses together that they might see the larger truth? Because if that’s what he’s trying to suggest, then all I can say is BULLSHIT! There is one truth and it’s mine and you are not going to ‘enlarge’ my story here, Solomon!”

  Solomon had made up for some of his presumptuous speechifying by barbecuing 142,000 cows and sheep immediately afterward. (OT, 1K 8:63) To say that it had smelled delicious would be a vast understatement. God had sat for hours up in the sky, inhaling deeply and murmuring “mmmm-mmmm” to himself. Solomon had also offered God a bunch of fat and God had definitely appreciated that. (OT, 1K 8:64) “Why do I love fat so much?” God had asked himself on more than one occasion. “Other than for the candle-making, I mean.”

  Solomon’s Temple speech had been so nettlesome to God that not long afterward he had appeared to Solomon in a dream. (OT, 1K 9:2) (It was a sex dream, needless to say. Solomon was, to be blunt, obsessed with bush. And not the burning kind either, no, the unclean, bleeding kind!) In the dream, God had leveled with Solomon. “If you don’t behave yourself, I will wipe you out,” God had announced. “All your wealth and power will evaporate and before long everyone will be asking ‘What did he do that was so bad?’ And do you know what the answer will be, Solomon? ‘He turned on God,’ that’s what.”

  “What was the first commandment I ever gave?” God remembered asking Gabriel at the time. “I mean, honestly, what were the first three? ‘Do not worship any gods other than me,’ right?” (OT, Gen. 20:2–5) So what did Solomon do? He started flirting with other gods, including my (imaginary, definitely imaginary) arch-nemesis, the sex-god, Baal!” Solomon had ended up marrying, among others, Pharaoh’s daughter. To repeat: Solomon married Pharaoh’s daughter. “You built a palace for her, Solomon? (OT, 1K 9:24) What the hell were you thinking?! I loathe Pharaoh! I spent a good chunk of time mind-effing Pharaoh back in the day, that’s how much I hated him! (OT, Ex. 7:1–14:30) Did you pay any attention to what I told you in that dream, or were you too caught up in your little ‘threesome’ to even remember it?”

  Watching the Queen of Sheba play on Solomon’s ego, God had shaken his head in mortified disbelief. “Oh, you’re so incredibly wise, Solomon,” the Queen had cooed. “I didn’t believe it was possible, but you’re even wiser than people said you were. And ooooohhh, you’re so rich.” (OT, 1K 10:6–7) And the Queen of Sheba had just been the start. After her had come a parade of nonbelieving women, basically one whore after another until Solomon eventually had a thousand women in his life. (OT, 1K 11:3)

  “I’m still not sure why I didn’t have Solomon killed,” God thinks to himself, now entering a forest of dead, grey trees. Solomon had whored around, flirted with God’s (imaginary—imaginary!) enemy, Baal; he had mocked God. If there was one person on Earth whom God would have been fully justified in killing, it was Solomon. But for some reason, he hadn’t been able to bring himself to do it. “He betrayed me in the worst possible ways and all I could do was say, ‘I’m going to give your kingdom to your servant after you’re dead, Solomon’? That was my big threat? Quickly followed by: ‘Oh, but don’t feel too bad about it, because, you know, not your whole kingdom, Solomon, no, some of it I will give to your son’”? (OT, 1K 11:11–13)

  Solomon’s son Rehoboam, by the way, had turned out to be an idiot, the kind of man who brags about the size of his own penis. (“I have never ever felt the need to do that,” God proudly murmurs to himself. “And that is because I am extremely confident in that department. There is no problem there, believe me, believe me.”) Rehoboam had also allowed for the presence of male whores near the Temple, which had infuriated God. (OT, 1K 14:24) “That … is … an … OUTRAGE,” God had sputtered in rage as he watched those pretty boys parading their firm buns outside his Temple.

  God remembered feeling extremely bitter during this stretch of time against Solomon—definitely, for his disloyalty—but even more so against women, because of the way they had seduced and therefore ruined his old friend and surrogate son. God had looked for a woman to take his rage out on—and Jezebel had fit the bill perfectly. God had watched Jezebel’s death again and again, sometimes slowing it way down, sometimes even studying it frame by frame. (God recorded everything, pretty much, on a kind of, well, proto … something. “I’m not a tech guy, never was.”) There Jezebel had stood, looking like the whore she was, all made-up, with her hair done, dressed in finery. God had had some eunuchs (“See how well your feminine charms work on them”) push Jezebel out a window. It was quite a drop and she had landed like a bag of ripe tomatoes, splat, her blood spraying everywhere. (OT, 2K 9:33) Wonderfully visual.

  Then—and this had been great, God had been quite proud of this—he’d had some horses (geldings obviously, for the exact same reason as the eunuchs) trample Jezebel’s body. “Step on her head, step on her HEAD!” God had yelled down at the horses, but they hadn’t done it because earth horses don’t like to step on things like human heads if they can possibly help it. (Heavenly horses, on the other hand, love to step on human heads; they laugh while they do it, “Hahaha.”) The sound of Jezebel’s bones snapping and cracking as the horses stomped on her had been classic. God had then had Jezebel chopped up into pieces: “Separate her head, feet, and hands!” he had cried down to his people. “As for the rest of her”—and oh my goodness, this had been outstanding—“Feed her to the dogs!” After all the frustrations surrounding Solomon’s betrayal of him and the subsequent super-messy breakup of Israel, God had needed a good laugh, and watching a bunch of dogs taking dumps the next day had definitely provided it. “How you feeling now, Jezzy?” God had jeered as he watched the dogs pooping her out. (OT, 2K 9:36–37)

  But the truth was that the end of the friendship with Solomon had been very hard on God. He had felt hurt, betrayed, and extremely angry. “I was so enraged that I wanted to see children not only eaten by bears (OT, 2K 2:23), but also smashed on rocks, slashed to pieces, and cut out of their mother’s bellies!” (OT, Isa. 13:16–18) God had felt a tiny bit uneasy about all this child-killing stuff. At the very least, it hadn’t sounded good and he knew that. But remember: All those murdered children had been innocents and therefore immediately after they were disemboweled or smashed to bits on rocks or yanked out of their mother’s bellies or gobbled up by she-bears or, you know, whatever, they had joined God in heaven. Now granted, that had turned out to be weird too, because the children had invariably arrived in heaven in an extremely traumatized state and
they had screamed endlessly and that’s why before long God had had to send most of them (okay, all of them) down to hell. “But the plan was for them to be in heaven with me, it just didn’t work out that way is all.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  But the worst thing Solomon had done to God, the betrayal that God had never been able to get out of his mind, the one that had really stuck, was the way he had made God look like a complete buffoon in his dreadful Book of Job. “People said they weren’t sure who wrote Job but look at the similarities to Ecclesiastes, both linguistically and thematically!” God had thought to himself. “‘Oh, life is so pointless, life is so ridiculous!’ They were both obviously written by Solomon!”

  Had Job generally been a true story? Yes, obviously. There certainly had been a man named Job whom God had allowed Satan to torture in order to prove a point and win a bet. In the end, yes, God had yelled down at Job from heaven and berated him, that part was true too. But beyond those rudimentary facts, well, the picture that Solomon drew of God in Job was all wrong. “I can easily refute so many things that Solomon wrote!” God thinks to himself. And as he pushes deeper into the dead, dark forest, he proceeds to do exactly that.

  Question One: “When I asked Satan where he’d been near the beginning of the story, did I not already know the answer?” (OT, Job 1:6)

  Refutation: “Of course I knew! I’m God; I know everything! Satan had been on Earth plotting against me, exactly as I wished him to! I was simply being polite. ‘Where have you been?’ was my standard question at the time, sort of, you know, a variation on ‘How have you been?’”

  Question Two: “Was it ‘senile’ of me to repeat the exact same question to Satan the second time I saw him?” (OT, Job 2:2)

  Refutation: “Not in the least! Look, just because I sometimes repeated myself, that in no way implies that I was ‘senile.’ There’s a lot to remember when you’re the creator of the entire universe, so fine, sometimes I did repeat myself a little. (OT, Deut. 14:21, Ex. 23:18–19, Ex. 34:24–26) Or sometimes maybe even kind of a lot. (OT, Ex. 20:1–4, Deut. 5:6–18) So what? Next question!”

  Question Three: “Was I a ‘bad loser’?”

  Refutation: “Absolutely not and here’s why: Because I didn’t lose! The bet with Satan was whether Job would ‘blaspheme’ me to my face (OT, Job 1:11), and guess what, Job never spoke to me face-to-face, so he never had the chance to blaspheme me to my face and that, I think, is THAT.”

  Question Four: “Was it really necessary for all of Job’s children to be killed for the bet? Wasn’t that, you know, a bit much?”

  Refutation: “This is absurd. For one thing, I replaced all of Job’s children in the end. (For what it’s worth, I made his new daughters much hotter than his old ones had been.) (OT, Job 42:15) Also—come on—those children died quickly, okay? Have you ever stepped on a locust? It’s fast, right? It’s like crunch, and it’s over for them. Well, a whole house fell on Job’s children. Meaning, crunch, they were like locusts. The truth is, if it had been me doing the punishing rather than Satan, I’d have probably made Job eat his children. (OT, Lev. 26:22–29) (I’d also probably have given him severe hemorrhoids, which is something I am an expert at.”) (OT, 1S 5:6–12)

  Question Five: “Given that Job’s camels were merely stolen, couldn’t I have gotten them back for the poor man in the end?” (OT, Job 1:17)

  Refutation: (And God hated this question for its nasty, unspoken implication, i.e., that he was some kind of “poser,” or “empty suit.”) “I obviously could have gotten those stolen camels back. I can stop the sun—I made the sun! The idea that I’m so feckless that I couldn’t even track down a few stolen camels is insulting and laughable! I simply didn’t feel like doing it, that’s all.”

  Question Six: (And this is where God generally started to tense up a little bit) “Have I actually walked along the bottom of the ocean?” (OT, Job 38:16)

  Refutation: “Technically, no, but I obviously know what’s down there, alright?!”

  Question Seven: “When I said that lightning talks to me, did I mean that literally?” (OT, Job 38:35)

  Refutation: “Damn right I meant it literally! Lightning literally tells me ‘I am ready.’ What is so hard to understand about that?”

  Question Eight: “When I asked Job if he knew when mountain goats gave birth, did I not realize that Job probably did know the answer to that question?” (OT, Job 39:1–3)

  Refutation: “Well, I hoped he did! We’d been talking about animals a lot and I suddenly wondered, ‘When do mountain goats give birth?’ and so I asked him. Next!”

  Question Nine: “Do I genuinely believe that horses can’t be frightened?” (OT, Job 39:22–25)

  Refutation: (God was getting tired of these inane questions by now.) “Look, I made horses, okay? I am well aware that they are prey animals and therefore easily frightened. When I said that horses could not be frightened, I was talking about heavenly horses, who love battles and charge right into them, laughing ‘hahahahaha’ as they do; that’s who I was talking about! (I have no idea why I should have to defend any of this anymore!”)

  Question Ten: “What exactly is my deal with Leviathan?”

  Refutation: (This was the question that God was most sensitive about. He loved his pet sea monster, Leviathan, and felt extremely protective of him. [OT, Job 40:32] That’s why God had by this time printed up a sheet of paper, meant to set things straight, from which he now stopped and read:)

  “FOUR FACTS ABOUT LEVIATHAN, BY GOD.”

  1) “I absolutely could put a ring through his nose if I wanted to. (OT, Job 41:2) I haven’t done it, but I definitely could!”

  2) “Leviathan certainly does speak to me in a soft and pleading little voice. (OT, Job 41:3) ‘Please make me your slave, Lord,’ he occasionally whimpers.”

  3) “I unquestionably could tie Leviathan up so that my little girls could play with him. (OT, Job 41:5) Again, I’m not saying I have (the truth is I don’t have any little girls and why would I?), I’m simply saying I could. And do you know why? Because sea monster or not, I am way tougher than Leviathan, that’s why!”

  4) “Of course Leviathan wears clothes (OT, Job 41:13) and has doors in his face!” (OT, Job 41:14)

  Finishing, God stuffs the paper back into his robe pocket and relaxes for a moment, feeling satisfied that he has set the record straight regarding Job. Then, horribly, out of the blue, an inner voice whispers to him:

  “Solomon mocked you,” the voice says.

  “Stop.” God speaks aloud, forcefully. He hates this voice, always insinuating things that are not true, that God knows are not true. (Sometimes it feels as if Satan has snuck into God’s brain and corrupted some small part of it. Which is absurd, obviously, because Satan does not have anything like that kind of power.)

  “You made Solomon smart enough to see things and he laughed at you,” the inner voice continues.

  “STOP IT, DEVIL.”

  “His high intelligence only led him to doubt.”

  “ENOUGH!”

  “Only stupid people believe in you.”

  “SILENCE, ABOMINATION!!”

  There is silence for a moment. Then the voice whispers, “She didn’t even believe in you.”

  “NO!”

  “She knew the truth.”

  God sees a crack of light, the exit from this spectral forest, and as he starts for it, “Mary” crosses his mind.

  “No,” God says aloud. “I don’t want to think of her—no, no!”

  “Mary.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  When God had first seen her, she was alone, walking down a street, dressed plainly and simply, her eyes lowered. She was sweet and lovely and God quickly fell for her. “Like Michael Corleone with that pretty little Italian girl in The Godfather who later got blown up in the car, sad,” as God much later described it to Gabriel. (God was one of the very few people who understood that Godfather III was the true classic in the series.)

  God had soon found
that he couldn’t stop thinking about Mary. He had found himself gazing down at her hour after hour, beginning to experience feelings he had never known before. “She is exquisite,” God had thought to himself, watching while she slept, studying her lovely mouth, her soft skin, and when she stirred, her beautiful, soulful brown eyes.

  One day God had finally realized something important: “I want her,” he had thought. “I desire her.”

  Exhausted from his long, vaguely scary walk through the forest of skeletal trees, God now sits on the ground and absently strokes his beard. “I wanted a real son,” he thinks to himself. “Not an adoptive one like Solomon had been, but an actual, biological one.” Before seeing Mary, God had been unsure how he wanted to create this son, however. Should he make him out of mud, or perhaps out of one of his ribs, he had wondered? After seeing Mary, though, God understood precisely how he wanted to create Jesus. “I have walked the earth,” he thought. (OT, Gen. 3:8) “I have eaten food.” (OT, Gen. 18:7) “I have even beaten a man up.” (OT, Ex. 4:24) “What I have never experienced is that which would seem to be the most sublime physical pleasure of all, lovemaking.” Also, to be completely honest, God had felt for quite a long time slightly jealous of that (imaginary—imaginary) prick, Baal, who had clearly had a ton of sex. “While here I am, the eternal virgin. Well, guess what, that’s about to end!”