The Story of God (14 page)

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.

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.

The eyeball-monsters did not all have equally great singing voices. The human-shaped one had a good voice, and the lion wasn't too bad, but the cow was often off-key, and the eagle was horribly screechy. The song did not sound quite as perfect as it should have—but it still sounded very good. And God adored the lyrics. And the way the eyeball-monsters
looked
at him with their hundreds of eyes … honestly, it never ever got old.

Overall, heaven was fantastic. Beautiful and elegant and classy. God looked forward to spending eternity there. But when Tanfoot Jesus looked around, he seemed unimpressed, disappointed even, as if he was thinking “You're the creator of the universe, Father, why do you have the taste of an effeminate dictator?” Tanfoot Jesus never actually
said
anything like this, it was more the look in his eyes, but God felt it, and it pissed him off. He began to think that he might need to create a new version of Jesus—maybe several new versions—maybe including an
animal
Jesus. He began to imagine a version of Jesus who would have a sword that popped out of his mouth and killed people! “That's the Jesus I should have created in the first place,” God muttered to himself. Tanfoot Jesus was too old, too soft; also, his super-high-pitched voice invariably put God in a bad mood.

It was time to get started with the destruction of the earth. God rubbed his hands together. This was going to be fun. “Break out the seven seals,” he whispered to Tanfoot Jesus. The first “alternate Jesus” to arrive was a lamb with seven horns and seven eyes. (Rev. 5:6) God was on a “seven” kick at this time. It had always been his favorite number, but he was kind of obsessed with it now. He liked three and a half too (Rev. 11:9); he was even looking for a spot to use one and three quarters. To be completely honest, the seven eyes didn't quite work; they were meant to look intimidating, like “he sees all”—but honestly, they looked weird. They all rolled in different directions and that made the lamb look brain-damaged. Lamb Jesus broke open the first seal and now yet another Jesus, riding a horse, arrived. (Rev. 6:2) “Welcome, Swordmouth Jesus,” God murmured to himself. Swordmouth looked like a regular Jesus, but when one of the elders approached him with a garland of flowers—
ziiing
—his mouth opened and a sword shot out and, in a flash, there stood the elder's body with a blood-spouting neck and a gaping-mouthed head on the ground next to him. As the body slowly toppled over, God clapped his hands together in delight. “Haha!” he laughed. “I love it!”

The second seal was broken open and Satan emerged. (Rev. 6:4) Or, not Satan, exactly, but a very bad character who would be in league with Satan; he would be called the “anti-Christ.” (“Kind of yet
another
Jesus when you think about it,” God mused.)

God's original plan for Judgment Day had been simple: Go to earth, wipe out all the bad people (i.e., almost everyone) and reward the good people (i.e., almost no one). But as the moment of truth neared, God had begun to find that ending to the story a little bit … well, ordinary. This was the ending to
everything
after all and God wanted it to be bigger, more dramatic and exciting. That's why he decided to put an Anti-Jesus into the story to work against his team of Jesuses. (Wait … he
did
decide that, right? Satan didn't sneak into heaven and take over a few of the seals, did he? No—absurd.)

More seals were broken, three, four, and five. The third one seemed to release—who the hell was that guy? He talked like some sort of salesman. (Rev. 6:5–6) “Where did he come from?” God demanded, but no one really knew. Another seal split open and
—what the eff?
Why was Death here in heaven, riding a horse around, clacking his jaws and pointing a bony finger at people? (Rev. 6:8)

As the sixth seal broke open, God sent a bunch of stars crashing into earth. (Rev 6:13) (He was surprised in a way that they didn't destroy the earth. They were apparently very small stars, he concluded.) God then rolled the sky up like a scroll, which looked incredible. (Rev. 6:14) He smiled thinly and announced loudly to his angels, elders, and eyeball-monsters: “Now things are going to get really interesting!” Some angels blew their trumpets (which sounded irritatingly like Tanfoot Jesus' voice), the seventh seal was broken open and, in short order: God sent bloody rain (“Good thing I've been collecting blood for so long,” he murmured approvingly to himself), burned up half the earth, sent giant flaming mountains crashing into the ocean, turned a third of the oceans to blood, and extinguished a third of the sun, moon, and stars. (Rev. 8:7–12) (“Wait … can I
‘extinguish' the moon? It's a rock.”)

By the time God was done doing all this, to assorted “ooohhs” and “aaahhhs” from his angels, earth was a charred, bloody mess. People were screaming in terror; it was wonderful. (His 144,000 followers on earth were also getting punished, but hey, you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs now, can you? Something occurred to God: “After all this time, all the tens of billions of people who've walked the planet, after all my efforts, I only have
144,000
followers? Isn't that kind of an embarrassingly low number?” A moment later, he bellowed, “No, it is excellent!” to no one.) God hadn't let humans have it like this since … well,
ever,
really, but at least since the Flood. After that, he'd made that unfortunate promise to Noah not to kill everyone, and he had stuck to it … but damn, he had missed this. Humans had frustrated him for
thousands
of years, and now, finally, he was getting payback. “And in a delightfully eclectic variety of ways, if I do say so myself!” he crowed to his angels, who applauded him vigorously.

“And guess
what?”
God proclaimed over their applause: “You ain't seen nothin' yet!” God sent another star crashing into earth. This was not a regular star, however;
this
star was filled with insects that would sting his enemies for five straight months. (God later realized he should have made it either three and a half or seven months.) That was splendid, but the best thing about these insects was that they had little human faces and long hair and wore little
gold crowns!
(Rev. 9:7–8) “
Any
god could torment mankind with stinging insects!” God boasted to his angels. “Only
I
can send insects that have little faces and wear crowns!”

Heaven was still buzzing about the crowned, tiny-faced insects when God, riding a wave of creativity, topped himself by sending two million angels down to earth on horseback to attack the humans. “Why do angels need flying horses?” he briefly wondered. The answer came quickly: These were not mere flying horses. No,
these
horses had lion-heads and breathed fire! Also, their tails were snakes that bit people! (Rev. 9:17–19) There
were gasps of amazement and wonder from the elders and angels as God created them. “BRAVO, LORD!” an elder cried out. So
what
if some of the lion-heads attacked some of the horse-bodies and mauled them midair, causing them to plummet to earth? It
looked
fantastic!

God sat back, basking in the adulation. This had been an incredible run for him—imaginative and inspired. He felt proud and pleased, and looked forward to seeing his human enemies, the nonbelievers, shriek in horror at his wrath, then renounce their beliefs and beg for his forgiveness. He would not give it to them, of course. It was far too late for that; they were going to suffer on earth before they suffered eternally in hell. But he did look forward to seeing them grovel. God loved to see people grovel, he made no apologies for that.

But those fucking humans were enraging to the bitter end. Even at
this
moment, when it could not possibly have been more obvious that God was punishing them for their disbelief—even now!—
unbelievable
—what was wrong with these fools?—they
still
didn't believe in him! (Rev. 9:20–21) No one pleaded for mercy or forgiveness. They just more or less ignored him. “Who do they think is
doing
all this?!” he thundered at his cowering elders. God found himself briefly discouraged by this turn of events. He sat and stared down at the devastated, smoking, blood-sticky earth and shook his head. “What do you people
want
from me?” he whispered to himself.