God Is Disappointed In You (8 page)

Establishing himself as king was a bloody process, just as it was for his father, but eventually he prevailed. God, who always likes a winner, granted Solomon one wish. Great power, enormous wealth, a ten-inch dong, all the normal wish stuff. Instead of choosing any of those, Solomon asked God to grant him great wisdom. God was so thrilled to get such a noble wish that he made Solomon the wisest man in the world.

It wasn’t long before Solomon’s new smarts were put to the test. For some reason, being King of Israel meant occasionally presiding over custody battles. Solomon was hearing a case between two prostitutes, each of whom was claiming to be the mother of this baby.
Since it was just one prostitute’s word against another, Solomon ruled that the only fair thing to do was to cut the baby down the middle and give each woman half.
 

“Fine with me,” one of the women said. “Half a baby is better than none.”

The other woman collapsed onto the floor and pleaded for Solomon to let the other prostitute keep the baby.
 

Having coaxed these radically different reactions from the women, Solomon figured that the one who was begging to save the child’s life must be its true mother, so he let her keep the baby. In its entirety. 

Word of his shrewd decision quickly spread throughout the land. As luck would have it, this story also worked as an allegory, a moral injunction against any upstarts or ambitious members of the royal family who, like the bad whore, would tear the country in half with civil war rather than let it live intact under Solomon, who may or may not be its rightful mother.
 

Under Solomon’s wise and undisputed rule, Israel entered its golden age. The country doubled in size and Solomon became the richest man in the world. He ate figs and gazelle meat until his legs went silly. He gave lectures on fish and birds. People came from all over the world to be dazzled by his brilliance.

The time had come for Solomon to build God his temple. God had given Solomon a set of blueprints to work from, and Solomon put tens of thousands of people to work on the building. When it was finished, it was a world class temple. Its interior walls were tastefully lined with carved cedar, except for the room where the Ark was going to be kept, where the walls were lined with solid gold. A little flashy, but that’s the way God liked things. The temple was decorated with bronze bulls and furnished with hundreds of washing bowls and wick-trimmers. God couldn’t have been happier.

Once he finished the temple, Solomon celebrated by building himself a massive new palace.
He needed one. Like his father, Solomon had a taste for the ladies and soon had over 700 wives. Solomon was now free to spend the rest of his days hanging out with his wives, composing proverbs, and trying to get his music career off the ground.

The good times didn’t last forever, though. God was jealous because in addition to his temple, Solomon had also built temples to all his foreign wives’ gods.
 

“Why would he do that?” God wondered. “Didn’t I grant him a wish? He even built temples for Moloch and Chemosh and those guys are TOTAL dicks! You know what? I’m done with Solomon. And Israel. The next time they get into trouble, they can ask their girlfriend Moloch to save them.”

After a nice long reign, Solomon died, and the whole country immediately started a long slide into the ditch. Israel became embroiled in civil war, and unlike the baby with the prostitutes, the kingdom actually was cut in half, with the new guy becoming King of Israel in the north and Solomon’s son taking control of the new Kingdom of Judah in the south.
 

The once great kingdom was now two mediocre ones, ruled by a succession of weak and corrupt men.

The worst of the lot was a guy named Ahab, who reigned as King of Israel. His wife, Jezebel, was a pagan who killed prophets as a sort of pastime. Ahab and Jezebel worshiped a rain god named Baal. 

This made God so angry that he sent the prophet Elijah to challenge Baal to a cook-off. The priests of Baal and Elijah each set up altars. They each killed an ox and prayed to their respective gods to send fire down from heaven to cook the sacrificial meat. The statue of Baal, sat there dumbly, looking straight ahead while his priests danced and flailed themselves before him.
 

God fared much better. As if from a divine propane tank, a searing jet of flame shot down from heaven, instantly barbecuing the meat and incinerating Baal’s priests. God had won the cook-off. And as was common in these ancient game shows, the losers were killed on the spot. But the royal family remained unmoved, shrugging it off as “one of those things,” and carrying on with their pagan lives.

Ahab came across a piece of land that he thought would make an absolutely perfect place for his vegetable garden. He went to the landowner and offered to buy it. The man graciously turned down the offer, explaining that the land had been in his family for generations. Later, at dinner, Ahab told Jezebel about his failed land deal.

“It’s really too bad. It would have been perfect. There was a nice patch for cucumbers, I could have planted rhubarb in the corner…a real shame it didn’t work out.”

“Oh, you big pussy,” said Jezebel, who was always taunting Ahab, “is that how a king acts? Don’t worry, I’ll get you your vegetable garden, Sally.”

Jezebel invited the landowner to dinner at the palace. When he arrived, she seated him between a couple of dubious characters. In the middle of the dinner, one of the men stood up and accused the landowner of cursing the king, just as Jezebel had paid him to.
“I heard it, too!” the other man said, corroborating the charge.

Jezebel called in the guards and had the poor, sputtering landowner killed on the spot for treason. His land now belonged to the king.
 

Ahab was happily planning his new vegetable garden when Elijah showed up at the gate and confronted him.

“I came here to tell you that God will not tolerate a vegetable garden built on the blood of an innocent man,” Elijah said. “God is through with you and your rotten wife. As punishment for your crimes, your dynasty will be destroyed, your family devoured by birds and dogs. Have fun with your peas.”
 

Not long after, Ahab got shot with an arrow during a battle and died. They buried his body before any animals got to it, but dogs did get in to lick up his blood, so Elijah gets partial credit on that one.

Somewhere along the
line, God and the Jews became more than just friends. In fact, God considered himself to be married to the Jews. Like most marriages, it was a non-sexual affair, but unlike most marriages, it was anything but snoozy and passionless. God’s marriage to the Jews was a tempestuous, rancorous affair.
The Jews were always drinking too much and flirting with other gods, while God would lose his temper and storm out of the house.

Every now and then, God would appoint a prophet to act as a sort of marriage counselor. These prophets were always trying to patch things up between God and the Jews.

The Prophet Elijah’s marriage counseling career had come to an end. For his retirement party, God sent a golden chariot, which came swooping down from the sky and carried Elijah naked up to Heaven. Elijah’s marriage counseling practice passed on to his protégé, Elisha.

Elisha cursed the idolaters who’d forged the emotional wedge between God and his people, and validated God’s feelings of neglect. Elisha then tried to take the Jews on an “empathy adventure,” getting them to understand God’s feelings of abandonment. To help him with his work, God granted Elisha miraculous powers. Elisha traveled the country, using his powers to remind the Jews of the spark they once felt for God.

Most of the miracles Elisha performed were quite practical and helpful. He focused on things like multiplying small amounts of food into great feasts, making water appear in the desert, or healing people of food poisoning. He even helped a man retrieve a lost axe head from a river.
 

“Wow, thanks, Elisha!” people would say. “Maybe we can work things out with God, after all.”

Not all of his miracles were so benign, though. Elisha was bald and touchy about it. A lot of bald men are. When he arrived at the town of Bethel, he was teased by a group of boys who called him “baldy.” Elisha responded to their taunts by summoning a team of wild she-bears. The bears mauled the boys to death, leaving the bloody remains of forty-two children littered on the ground.
 

Nobody knows why Elisha didn’t just summon a full head of hair.
 

Ahab was dead, but his Baal-worshiping family still ruled Israel. Elisha felt that a change in leadership would make it easier for Israel and God to rediscover their lost intimacy and rekindle the embers of mutual trust. So Elisha talked a local thug named Jehu into taking over the government.
 

Jehu rode to the home of the new king of Israel, Joram. When Joram saw Jehu in the distance, he and his entourage hopped in a chariot and drove out to meet him.

“What are you doing here?” Joram asked.

“Well, if you must know,” Jehu replied, “I’m here to kill you.”
 

When Joram tried to race away in his chariot, Jehu shot him in the back with an arrow. Joram slumped over, dead. Panicked, his friends dumped Joram’s body into a nearby field and fled the scene. Ironically, the field where the corpse of Joram lay, being devoured by birds, was the same field Ahab had stolen to make his illicit vegetable garden.
 

When Jehu arrived at the royal palace, Jezebel finished putting on her makeup and slowly walked out to the balcony, flanked by her eunuch bodyguards. “Oh look, it’s that hillbilly who killed my grandson,” she said. “What do you have to say for yourself?”
 

“Just that there are job openings in my kingdom.”

Knowing a good career move when they saw it, the eunuchs threw Jezebel off the balcony to her death. Her body was dragged off and eaten by dogs. Somewhere God high-fived Elijah, who had scored 2.5 out of 3 on his prophecy.

As the new King of Israel, Jehu asked the priests of Baal to meet him at their temple, so he could get off on the right foot with their god. This turned out to be a sting operation. When they showed up, Jehu killed all the priests. Then he converted Baal’s temple into a public restroom. As a joke, Jehu changed the sign on the doorway from Beelzebul, which meant “Baal: Lord of the Heavens” to Beelzebub, which meant “Baal: Lord of Flies.”
 

Elisha was right about the positive impact regime change would have on God’s relationship with the Jews. With Jehu in charge, God and Israel were able to begin the healing process and it saved their marriage, at least for a while.

Elisha’s career as a marriage counselor had also come to an end, by which, I mean he died.
No chariot ride for Elisha, though, he was interred at a local cemetery. As an interesting side note, another funeral was going on at a nearby grave when it was interrupted by a bandit attack. The terrified pallbearers ditched their dead loved one into Elisha’s grave by mistake. When the dead man toppled down onto Elisha’s still miraculous corpse, he instantly came back to life. I can only imagine how confused he must have been.

After King Jehu died, Israel’s kings went right back to worshiping foreign gods, and God’s relationship with Israel took a turn for the worse. God was constantly threatening to leave. Eventually, God would make good on his threats. Having finally had enough, God let the Assyrians conquer Israel and evict the population, forever scattering ten of the twelve tribes of Israel.

Judah, Israel’s cousin to the south, was so disturbed by Israel’s demise that the King of Judah immediately called for his nation to recommit itself to God.

There is perhaps no surer sign that a marriage is in serious trouble than when a couple decides to renew their vows. The king of Judah paid for a big, glitzy ceremony at the temple to reaffirm Judah’s dedication to God.
It was a beautiful ceremony and everyone agreed that God looked great. But somehow, the whole thing stunk of forced smiles and masked contempt.