The Story of God (10 page)

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.

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 Ezekiel, 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!

God didn't like Ezekiel, who he felt was making him look bad. He wasn't sure what to do—so he decided to bring some skeletons to life. (Ezek. 37:5) That helped for a moment, but not for long. Finally, Ezekiel died and a bunch of minor prophets came along. None of them was very interesting to God; he didn't talk to them much and when he did, he didn't say much of interest: “You're whores—ruled by your dicks—drunks—lechers—I'm done with you and this time I mean it blah blah blah!” God was depressed during this time. He drank a lot of wine, ate a lot of veal, gained weight. He continued to think about wiping everything out and starting over, but by this time he had serious doubts as to whether he would actually do it.

At certain moments, the answer to God's problem seemed obvious to him: Why not
make
his people love and obey him? Why not make
everyone
love and obey him? He could do that, obviously. Why didn't he? Everyone would be happier. Maybe he'd had some limited hope that people would choose to love and obey him, but that was quite obviously not going to happen. He should just fix things, that's what he should do. Fine, God concluded. I will accept that my creation was flawed and I will fix it. I will do it … right … now!

But once again, he just sat there.

Time passed. God considered bringing more skeletons to life, then decided that was pointless. He felt angry again. He was God. He didn't have to explain or justify himself to anyone. He'd made the Sun, dammit! The idea that humans, lowly worms that they were, would question or doubt him was enraging. He decided, instead of fixing things, to throw shit in their faces. (Mal. 2:3)
That's
what they deserved. He didn't actually go through with it, mainly because he disliked shit so much that he didn't want to handle it—but he wanted to do it, he really did.

There was
one
moment—looking back, God didn't really understand it—when he felt and behaved quite differently. “Jonah seemed to bring out the best in me for some reason,” God noted. “To start with, I wanted him to
convert
people, which I don't remember wanting at any other time back then. For another, when Jonah didn't want to do it, rather than punishing him, which I ordinarily would have done, I taught him a lesson in a, let's say, whimsical way. Finally, when he wanted his converts, the Ninevans (who I normally detested) to be punished, I said no. I told him I wanted to reach people, not hurt them, I didn't even want to hurt their animals.” (Jon. 2:1, 4:11) Honestly, God had no idea what had come over him at this time. Maybe it had something to do with those odd mushrooms one of his angels had gathered on earth and given to him? “After I ate them, I have to admit that I felt calmer, less angry—like somehow I was part of something bigger than myself. It was beautiful.” That
feeling passed, of course, and when it did, God found himself even angrier than he'd been before.

When God looked back at this overall period, much later, he felt that it was the lowpoint of his career. “I wanted to throw poo in my own people's faces, you know?” he said to that stallion-hung angel. “How much worse can it get than
that?
You know?”

Slowly, inexorably, something was building inside God—something dark and troubling. He fought it with everything he could, tried to hold it in, but he simply couldn't do it.

One day, talking to—or technically, shrieking at—Hosea, he heard his voice catch. “I loved you and you forgot me,” he wailed. (Hos. 11:1–7) Another time, talking to Micah, he heard his shuddering voice cry out, “What wrong have I done you?” (Micah 6:3) He felt wetness on his cheeks—something salty—what was happening to him?

Suddenly, it was clear. All God had ever wanted was
love.
Why didn't people love him? Why did they love others instead? No one loved him, no one ever had. He had never been touched, God suddenly realized; never been held or comforted in any way—and the knowledge of that was suffocating and heavy and almost unbearably sad.

God found himself sobbing, his body shaking with rage and pain, anguished at the (literal) infinity of loneliness he had known. No mother, no father, no siblings, no friends. Nothing. He was alone. He had always been alone.

It was time, he knew, to look at that unfortunate series of events that had happened so long before, the ones that he had blocked out, that he had told himself a hundred, no a thousand times, were meaningless—but which he now understood to have been extremely important.

It was time, he knew, to look back.

Sometime long before, after the Tower of Babel but before Sodom and Gomorrah, there had been a man named Job who loved God very much. God liked that about him. It made God feel wonderful that this good man—for Job was a good man, a blameless man, really (Job 1:1)—loved him so faithfully.

God was throwing a lot of parties at this time; he'd just started working on heaven and he liked to walk angels around and show them how amazing it was going to be. Sometimes he would invite 10–15 angels and they would all listen, rapt, as God discussed his stunning achievements, how he had literally created everything in the universe in a single week. Sometimes the angels would spontaneously applaud God, and while he didn't expect or demand it, he did enjoy it. But the main thing God liked to talk about at this time was Job. God never got tired of telling everyone how much this flawless man loved him.

And then, at a certain party, Satan showed up. (Job 1:6) He was not invited, obviously. He was not supposed to be in heaven at all, except for occasional and brief meetings about hell. But there he was. God and Satan had had limited interactions since the whole tree of knowledge thing. God didn't like the way Satan had handled it and he
strongly
disliked how insinuating and, at times, frankly, disrespectful Satan had been toward him. So what was he doing here at God's garden party? Did he show up
just to ruin it, because he hated, resented, and was jealous of God (which he obviously was)? God didn't want to get upset in front of his angels, so he didn't do what in hindsight he obviously should have done, which was to kick Satan out. Instead, he tried to stay calm as if, yes, of
course
he'd invited Satan to his party. It's not like he snuck into heaven.

There was a strained pause. The angels looked at Satan, then back at God. Everyone knew these two didn't like each other. Satan stood there, not saying anything, an annoyingly blank look on his face. God was going to stare right back at him, stare him down, he had no problem with that—but then he decided to take the high road, be a good host, actually engage Satan in a friendly conversation. “Where have you been?” he asked. (Job 1:7) Not that he didn't know the answer to this, obviously. He always knew the answer, every single time he asked a question. He was just being polite.

“I have been roaming the earth,” Satan answered, and for a moment God thought about saying, “Why weren't you working on hell,
that's
your job?” But he decided not to. Glancing over at his angels, God nodded grandly and said, “Did you see Job? He's a very good man who loves me and hates evil” (Job 1:8) (Meaning: “He loves me and hates you, Satan. Suck on
that.”)

Satan's response was quick: “Why wouldn't he love you? He has a nice life. Take that life away from him and see if he still loves you then.” (Job 1:9–11) God felt his entire body tense up. Satan was publicly challenging him. “He snuck into my party and then, when I tried to make polite small talk with him, he attacked me. I should kill him right now.”

But God decided that it would look weak if he reacted violently against Satan. “No, I will act as if I am amused by what he is saying,” he told himself. He smiled broadly, shrugged, and in the most supremely confident voice he could affect (which was
very
supremely confident, he felt), he said: “Go ahead then, Satan, ruin his life, I don't care, just don't physically hurt him.” (Job 1:12)

Satan looked at God for a moment, then nodded and walked away without saying another word. Instantly, God regretted what he'd said. He liked Job very much and now he'd given Satan—
Satan
—permission to destroy the man's life. “Why didn't I say something like ‘Think whatever you like, Satan, you obviously are trying to goad me into giving you permission to torture Job, but guess what, I'm not going to give it to you. By the way, you weren't invited to this party and I'd like you to leave!'”

God watched in disbelief as, in a matter of hours, Satan dismantled his faithful servant's life: Job's cows and camels were stolen, his sheep were burned up by holy fire (“unnecessarily harsh,” God muttered to himself), his servants were killed, and then, in one fell swoop, all of his children were crushed in a freak windstorm. (Job 1:13–19) God did have to admire Satan's skill, much as he disliked what was happening. “Killing ten people in one house in a windstorm is not easy,” he noted to himself. (It took him fourteen tries to do it to some Amalekites a bit later.)