The Story of God Page 7

  Saul brought in a musician to help him drown out the evil spirit’s voice. That musician was named David and—well, what can you say about this remarkable young man? David was so very clever and quick—not to mention being a beautiful boy!

  Saul’s son, Jonathan (the one he should have killed), fell in love with David (1 Sam. 18:1), and God understood that in a way; David was gorgeous and charming, but he was furious about it too. Homosexuality was abhorrent. Jonathan would have to die. (As for David—well, everyone loved him and he loved everyone, and how could you hold that against him? Lovely boy.)

  Saul soon became jealous of David and, due to that evil spirit God had put in him, tried to kill the boy. (1 Sam. 18:11) God pretty much hated Saul now. He allowed the evil spirit to drive Saul crazy. Before long he was stripping naked (unacceptable!) and talking gibberish. (1 Sam. 19:24) Saul went back and forth, wanting to kill David, then begging his forgiveness. He was falling apart, clearly driven mad by the fact that God wouldn’t even talk to him anymore.

  God was infuriated when Saul talked to the ghost of the previous leader, Samuel. The idea of this conversation was maddening—but what Samuel’s ghost actually said was correct. “God hates you, Saul, and I’ll tell you why: Because you didn’t wipe out the Amalekites!” (This was true. God hadn’t forgotten those bastards. Bizarrely, the Amalekites were doing very well considering how much the creator of reality—him!—despised them and had vowed their annihilation.)

  Saul was killed soon after that and good riddance. (That awful homosexual son of his, Jonathan, died at the same time.) God couldn’t help but nod approvingly when he saw the Philistines cut Saul’s head off and impale his dead body. (1 Sam. 31:9–10) “Karma,” he muttered to himself, before remembering that karma didn’t exist and was a completely made-up idea.

  God didn’t much like David’s eulogy to Jonathan: “Your love was wonderful to me, more than the love of women?” he snorted. (2 Sam. 1:26) But he let it pass. He liked David that much and come on, you could hardly say the guy didn’t like women! (“I certainly am tolerant of those few people I like, though, aren’t I?” God mused to himself.) After David became king, he banned the lame and the blind from the temple because he hated them. (2 Sam. 5:8) God agreed wholeheartedly. The lame and the blind disgusted him.

  Like Samson, actually even more so, David was a terrific dancer. God loved men who could dance. “I like to watch them move,” he thought to himself. It was hard to overstate just how much God loved David. He frankly adored this beautiful, delightful, charming man, and he gave him everything he wanted, spoiling him like an indulgent parent would. At last, the son he had always wanted!

  David did do things that God knew were wrong. Sending your mistress’s husband into battle to be killed? (2 Sam. 11:15) God scolded David for this. But when David apologized, God quickly forgave him and gave him a son who would be, astoundingly, even more clever than he was!

  Solomon was a brilliant fellow. He had the most complex and interesting mind God had ever encountered in a person. God gave Solomon a kind of wisdom and discernment he had never handed out before and never would again. (1 K. 3:12) This was a very positive thing overall; the kingdom thrived. There was great wealth, the people were happy, there was a navy, for goodness’ sake! (1 K. 9:26) But (and wasn’t there always, always a “but” when it came to humans?) sometimes God wondered whether he had given Solomon a bit too much wisdom.

  Solomon wrote a lot, you see; he was quite prolific. There was a lot of what he wrote that God heartily approved of. “Trust in the Lord with all your heart,” for instance—or “Fear the Lord and shun evil.” “Honor the Lord with your wealth” was also good. (Prov. 3:5–9) But there were other things that Solomon wrote that God almost couldn’t believe he was seeing.

  Solomon wrote a poem to one of his girlfriends that literally made God blush when he read it. “What is THIS doing in my book?” God demanded. A few angels tried to tell God that Solomon’s love poem was written to him, not to the woman, but God shook his head dismissively. “I don’t think Solomon is telling me that my breasts are like fawns. (Song 7:4) He better not be!” One angel with a weird, slightly shifty look that bothered God suggested that perhaps Solomon was writing as God, complimenting mankind’s “rounded thighs.” (Song 7:2) God had this angel killed.

  But this love poem was nothing compared to another piece that Solomon wrote, a piece that more or less contradicted the rest of God’s entire book. (Solomon claimed his brother, “Koheleth,” wrote it, but come on, it was him.) It was called “Ecclesiastes” and it made God’s jaw drop. “‘The meaning of life is to eat, drink, and be merryl’? (Ecc. 2:24, 3:12, 11:9) NONSENSE!” God roared. “The meaning of life is to OBEY ME and Solomon knows that!” And saying that a human’s life was no more meaningful than a goat’s—or even a worm’s? (Ecc. 3:18–19) Ludicrous. Why not just say, “Everything you’ve read up to this point is worthless nonsense?” God could not fathom why Solomon was writing such craziness. One (supposedly) wise old man later suggested that “it was actually kind of profound, Lord.” God literally ripped that old man’s head off and kicked it down to hell.

  (And let’s not even get started on that other thing that Solomon wrote—pertaining to the very events that God didn’t want to think about and had vowed not to and—no—no—no more about that.)

  But in the end, it wasn’t Solomon’s writings that were the real problem. The real problem was that the man was, to put it very crudely, an insatiable pussy hound. And honestly, even that wasn’t the real problem. No, the real problem was this: Solomon loved all women—including non-Hebrew women. In fact, he loved some of these non-Hebrew women enough that he allowed them to talk to him about their own nonexistent gods! Solomon would listen to them—he would even flirt with those fake gods! Solomon, God’s greatest man, the one who had finally realized his plans, and even he couldn’t be counted on! (1 K. 11:1–8) “I have led them to the pinnacle of success and this is how they reward me? What is wrong with these people??”

  (“And what is wrong with me that I picked them?” came the dark response. “They were the only ones who believed in me, I had no choice!” he found himself responding—but that didn’t make him feel better.)

  Once Solomon flamed out, it was a sudden and steep fall for God’s people. Things went from bad to worse for them—“exactly as they deserved,” God said indignantly. There were struggles for power, civil wars, military defeats, and lots of poor leaders. God was in a bad mood now and at times he lashed out in ways that he would wonder about for a moment, before he reassured himself of his own perfect judgment. The incident with Elisha and the bears, for example, was, well—slightly embarrassing. At the time, God was feeling irritable and it felt like the right thing to do—but was it?

  Elisha was a prophet, as his father Elijah had been before him. Elijah had killed a lot of Baal’s followers, and God appreciated that. (1 K. 18:40) So much so that he sent a fire-chariot drawn by fire-horses down from heaven to pick Elijah up when he died. (2 K. 2:11) The only problem with Elijah was that he was extremely hairy. God didn’t like hairy men. Elisha was less hairy; he was bald, in fact, with a gleaming, hairless head. One day, as Elisha was going from town to town, prophesying, some boys saw him coming and shouted, “Go away, baldhead!” at him. God, looking down at this, was instantly enraged. How dare those children yell at his shiny-headed prophet? He thought about fire-blasting them from heaven or turning them all to salt, but he had a better idea: God quickly sent two she-bears to maul the children. The bears killed forty-two children. (2 K. 2:23–24)

  “The children were teasing Elisha for being bald?” Satan asked, the next time they met.

  “That’s right.”

  “And you had them all mauled by bears for that?”

  God’s jaw was tight, he hated this kind of questioning. “Correct.”

  “How many children were actually yelling, God? Two? Three?”

  “At least five.”

  “Why did the oth
er thirty-seven children get mauled?”

  “They were present, Satan, that was enough.”

  Satan smiled, his small, dark eyes glittering. “Your justice, as always, is perfect, God.”

  He was being sarcastic, but God didn’t take the bait. “Thank you, Satan. Coming from you, that means a lot.”

  “I think it probably does mean a lot, yes.”

  And it did mean a lot. Damn it, it did.

  Fine, maybe he could have killed fewer children, like fifteen or twenty. Maybe killing forty-two children was a bit excessive. On the other hand, God told himself, it was quite likely that many of the children had been disobedient at some point and therefore deserved to be killed. Also, some of them were undoubtedly homosexual, so they deserved death. At least one or two had probably had sex with a goat or a sheep, so they had it coming too. Overall, when he thought about it, probably most of the children deserved to die. Also, God couldn’t help but feel somewhat proud of how he had so quickly “possessed” the two she-bears and used them to mangle the children. “I can puppet bears!” he’d noted to himself. “That is fantastic.”

  God also briefly cheered himself up with the way he killed that Baal-loving harlot, Jezebel. He had her thrown off a building, then trampled by horses, then eaten by dogs! (2 K. 9:33–37) (“I hate women so much,” God found himself murmuring under his breath, as he watched the dogs tear Jezebel’s bloody carcass apart.)

  Not long after that, God killed 185,000 Assyrians in one day. (2 Kings 19:35) He hadn’t killed that many people in a long time, and it felt great. Still, it puzzled him. “I can stop the sun, I can kill 185,000 people, I can control people’s—and bear’s— minds … but my people are circling the drain! Why is that? Also—why don’t the Assyrians even seem to acknowledge that I just killed 185,000 of them, what is that about?!”

  Chapter Sixteen

  That was the beginning of the dark times.

  Things went horribly for God’s people for a very long time and, frankly, God didn’t much care. He was feeling more and more finished with his people. He didn’t want to help them anymore; what he wanted to do was berate them and tell them how wicked they were for several hundred years. He used his prophets to do this.

  Isaiah came first. There were things God liked about him. The part about God’s enemies’ babies being dashed to pieces on rocks was excellent. (Isa. 12:16) Also good was when Isaiah talked about how God had killed all of the other gods. (Isa. 26:13–14) (“Fine, they did exist the whole time, whatever. I had my reasons,” God thought curtly to himself, then smiled, remembering the other gods screaming as they were mauled by she-bears.) God also liked the way Isaiah capitalized every version of his name. “There is no anger in Me,” Isaiah had God saying, for example. “Isaiah’s right! I am so great that all descriptions of Me should be capitalized!” God exclaimed. He also appreciated that Isaiah correctly perceived that there was no anger in Him. Anyone opposed to Him would be set on fire, that was true. (Isa. 27:4) But not out of anger. No. Out of righteousness. Ultimately, however, God thought Isaiah was a bore. He talked way too much for way too long, and God was glad when he died.

  Jeremiah, who came next, was even worse. He was duplicitous—pretty obviously using God to curry favor with the King of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar. Even his own people saw through Jeremiah, locking him up for telling them to surrender to Nebuchadnezzar again and again. (Jere. 38:6) What Jeremiah did, however, make clear was how very much God hated his people by this time. They were stupid and unintelligent. (Jere. 4:22) They were, let’s be blunt, firewood. (Jere. 5:14) Yes, it was sad but true; God had decided to burn his own people like firewood, that’s how much they mattered to him. They had hurt his feelings too many times. He loathed them by this point and he told them so: “I come to loathe you,” he said. “You are dung and I will make an end of you.” (Jere. 8:2) It had gotten that bad; God’s people were shit to him and he would wipe them out. He didn’t care what people would say about him anymore—didn’t care about his fame or reputation or anything. It was time to end this thing and start over—right now.

  And then—and God couldn’t really understand this—for some reason, he didn’t end it. When God looked back on this period of time much later, it seemed a blur to him. Things were going badly, his people were losing, he was furious with them, even more furious at their enemies—but strangely ineffective at changing anything.

  “I am all powerful, yet nothing ever seems to go the way I want it to. That’s bizarre,” God thought to himself.

  He kept complaining about his people. “I am shattered, dejected, seized with desolation,” he told Jeremiah (Jere. 8:21)—which afterward, he felt a little bit weird about. “I made up this game, how can I be losing it?” Why didn’t he just end this whole thing and start over? He honestly wasn’t sure anymore.

  “It’s all a conspiracy,” God found himself saying to Jeremiah at one point, and instantly wished he hadn’t. (Jere. 11:9) “Only weak, paranoid people think there are conspiracies against them, right?” God asked the nearest angel. The angel shook his head and said no no, of course not, it sounded commanding and strong, just like everything you say, blah blah blah.

  But God didn’t trust his angels anymore. They were a bunch of sycophants. The only one who ever told him the truth, as much as he hated to admit it, was Satan. But he knew what he would say: “Maybe you’re not wiping them all out because you can’t, God.” Which was absurd—obviously. So God didn’t ask Satan for his opinion, because he knew beforehand how wrong and misguided it would be.

  Enough. No more talk.

  God was going to act, he was done, and this time he meant it. “I am abandoning you, deserting you,” he told Jeremiah. (Jere. 12:7) It was over. He was leaving, not even bothering to kill everyone, not even caring enough to do it anymore—he was going and he was not coming back. God started to leave, feeling determined and clear-headed. “This is good,” he thought to himself, happy to be done with his people, happy to be on the way out.

  It was strange though … no matter how many times he said he was done, God found himself continuing to talk to Jeremiah, venting about how much he hated his people. “I will exterminate them, I will destroy them, etc.” (Jere. 14:12, 15:7) He didn’t do it though. He didn’t leave, he didn’t destroy his people, he didn’t do much of anything except keep yelling about how mad he was. God had long ago accepted that his plan was mysterious, but this was baffling. “What am I doing?” he thought to himself. “I’m making a fool of myself here! I have to leave now. I have to stop talking and go right now!!”

  “Dogs will drag your carcasses through the streets and buzzards will eat your guts,” God screamed at Jeremiah (Jere. 15:3), thinking, as he did: Stop talking, God. STOP.

  Not long after that, Nebuchadnezzar attacked Jerusalem. God was stunned and furious about this. (Jere. 51:34) Nebuchadnezzar and his whore of a city (for Babylon was the most whorish city God had ever seen!) would be annihilated. It would be worse than Sodom and Gomorrah! “I will club children to death!” God growled, eager for his bloody vengeance. (Jere. 51:22) God rubbed his hands together, prepared to obliterate Babylon. “Run away,” he told his people, “I’m just about to do it.”

  And then … and then …

  He didn’t do anything. Babylon burned Jerusalem to the ground, looted it, stripped it bare—and God didn’t do a thing. (Jere. 52) He just sat in heaven and watched it happen, silent and motionless.

  Chapter Seventeen

  God felt confused and conflicted, sometimes immobilized with uncertainty and doubt at this time. He couldn’t help but notice that as things went from bad to worse, his prophets became less and less appealing as people. David and Solomon—now they were men! These days he was dealing with the likes of Isaiah (“a windy bore”), Jeremiah (“a schemer, playing all the angles”)—and now, ugh, the worst one yet: Ezekiel.

  “This guy is a freak,” God thought to himself as soon as he and Ezekiel started working together. God wanted to test Ezek
iel, see just how crazy he was, so he told him to eat a scroll, which Ezekiel promptly did. (Ezek. 3:1) God then tested him again, telling him to eat poop, which Ezekiel also did. (Ezek. 4:12) Finally, God told Ezekiel to shave his beard and divide the hairs into three equal parts, burning a third, attacking a third with a sword, and scattering the final third in the wind. Also, God told him, save a few hairs and sew them up in your shirt. “He’ll never do all that,” God told himself. “He’s not that loony.” But of course, he was. Ezekiel did everything God told him to. (Ezek. 5:1–4) God was stuck with him.

  And it wasn’t just that Ezekiel was insane. He was also, to be honest, a creep. He started claiming that God was saying things that God would never actually say, like talking about Jerusalem as a young woman and referring to her firm breasts and pubic hair. “I saw that your time for love had arrived,” Ezekiel had God saying to Jerusalem, implying that he wanted to have sex with the city! (Ezek. 16:7–8) Which was outrageous! God had made it abundantly clear, over and over, that sex was not something he approved of. (Also, God had very little interest in breasts.)

  But Ezekiel didn’t stop. He kept talking about perverted things. He brought up how God’s people had taken all the gold and silver God had given them and melted it down into … well … “phallic items,” shall we say? (Ezek. 16:17) (“You mean dildos?” Satan had later chuckled, vulgar as always.) This was true, they had done that and God had been incensed about it, no doubt—but it was crass to talk about it.

  God wanted Ezekiel to shut up. The guy kind of repulsed him—he was so warped. God thought of killing him but the truth was, he didn’t have a lot of great men to choose from at this time; he couldn’t honestly be sure that the next guy would be any better. So God let Ezekiel live.

  But he sometimes regretted it. Ezekiel wouldn’t stop with the sex stories. Now he started saying God was talking about young women with “virgin nipples” who lusted after men whose “organs were like those of stallions.” (Ezek. 23:8–21) This was ridiculous! One time, God had referred to a certain angel that way—once. It was not something he was in the habit of saying!