God’s Temper Tantrums and General Bad Behaviour: Part One

God is a kind god; God is a loving god; God loves you; God cares about you; God is a compassionate god; God is a forgiving god; God is a merciful god. You see it on church billboards – “God loves you anyway”. We’ve nearly all had that drivel rammed down our throats since we were kids in Sunday School and some of us actually believe it. Does the hype match the Biblical reality? Can pigs fly?

Assuming there is a God and assuming that the Bible is God’s word and an historical record of His activities (and you won’t hear anything to the contrary in church and from other formal Christian religious organisations) then the standard hype you hear, the standard image projected of God (and son) tends to be ‘warm and fuzzy’. It’s all about love, compassion, mercy, kindness and forgivingness, not hell, fire and brimstone. There’s at least one Bible-oriented Internet site that gives you a “verse-of-the-day” which is always ‘warm and fuzzy’ – a Biblical verse you’d whisper to your dying grandmother. However, if the church, religious organisations, even Biblical Internet sites stuck to a ‘wrath of God’ message they would be way more intellectually honest. Alas, people want to hear ‘warm and fuzzy’ not ‘wrath’.

Here are just a few selected ‘warm and fuzzy’ KJV Biblical quotations.

2 Corinthians 13: 14: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all. Amen.”

Daniel 9: 9: “To the Lord our God belong mercies and forgivenesses, though we have rebelled against him;”

Ephesians 2: 4: “But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us,”

Ephesians 4: 32: “And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you.”

Joel 2: 13: “And rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the LORD your God: for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repenteth him of the evil.”

So now let’s turn to and examine the Biblical ‘wrath of God’ and see how ‘warm and fuzzy’ God really is. In the beginning, God spits the dummy…

GENESIS: In the beginning God starts off on the wrong foot and continues out of step throughout Genesis.

Well Adam and Eve get booted out of the Garden of Eden by you know who. Now this is hardly the action of a good host, especially when there wasn’t a readily available hotel room down the road as an alternative for our original loving couple. There’s no mercy, compassion or forgiveness here.

Then God drowns nearly the entire human race with forty days and nights of torrential rain. Only Noah and a few of his kin plus a few selected animals ever get to see dry land again. Now if that’s not genocide, I don’t known what is! Hitler could have cited this as a precedent for his own extermination philosophies. One interesting puzzle here is that if God singled out Noah and a few of his relations to survive that flood, then Noah and kin must be God’s chosen people. Therefore their descendents must also be God’s chosen peoples. Alas, since those descendents repopulated the planet, and since not all of that repopulation were favoured by God, then something’s screwy somewhere.

Then we come to the Tower of Babel. People build a tower (early prototype of the skyscraper) upwards towards the sky (i.e. – Heaven). God is apparently terrified by this action, and retaliates by creating and fostering numerous languages on these upstarts so that the architects and builders, etc. can’t communicate since they all speak now in different tongues. How that is accomplished isn’t adequately explained. Still, it’s a rather painless way of learning a foreign language even at the expense of forgetting your own native tongue. Further, to ensure that no correspondence will be entered into, all and sundry get scattered to the four corners of the globe – did God hire a fleet of jumbo jets to transport them? Anyway, since even the tallest of modern terrestrial structures don’t remotely reach Heaven, God worried needlessly. It’s often said that “God works in mysterious ways”. My translation of that pithy but copout statement (something that explains nothing) is that God is as loony as the Mad Hatter. God needs not only to chill but is in desperate need of some serious therapy. 

God then, having gotten up on the wrong side of the bed again, terrifies poor Abraham and nearly gives him a heart attack by ordering him to execute his son, Isaac. An animal is substituted at the last minute and so God says “ha-ha, fooled you, I was only playing a little joke”. However, the damage was done and that sort of joke is hardly good PR designed to command loving respect. Ask yourself, is this the way a real loving God would behave? Would you appreciate being on the receiving end of God’s little joke?

After another bad hair day, God gives Sodom & Gomorrah the A-bomb treatment since the good folk of the twin cities don’t meet God’s moral standards - moral standards? Talk about casting the first stone, or the pot calling the kettle black! God did such a good job of destruction here that to this day no trace of the twin cities has ever been found! Some alchemy is also practiced as the complex multi-element biochemistry of Lot’s wife’s human body is transformed into a pure compound of just two elements – sodium and chlorine. Neat trick that one.

Throughout Genesis God’s composure is anything but cool, calm and collected. He really needs an aspirin and a good lie down at this point, and, we’re only through just the first Biblical book. What horrors are yet in store?

EXODUS: Apparently God was just warming up in the bullpen with his temper tantrums and smiting in Genesis. His nasty side really shines and comes to the fore in Exodus.

Ancient Egypt is ground zero for starters when God inflicts the ten plagues on the Egyptians (obviously not His chosen people). Those plagues included mass murder of the first-born as the grand finale.

God’s not done with the Egyptians however as for an encore He drowns Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea, or was that the Sea of Reeds?

God’s personal Constitution is then imposed on His own Chosen People, the Israelites. That Constitution is more widely known then and now as the Ten Commandments, but God exempts Himself, especially the bit about “Thou shall not kill”.

LEVITICUS details a potful more of God’s ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ and ‘or else’s’. God loves laying down the law – as long as it’s His law. In any other context He’d be considered a bully at best or a dictator at worst. He’s certainly not into making laws via the concept well known as democracy.

NUMBERS continues the ‘do this’ and ‘don’t do that’ parade, but also contains some bits not fit for kid’s TV viewing – violence!

There is dissention in the ranks of the Chosen People out there in the Sinai wilderness and so there’s mutiny afoot and the Biblical equivalent of Captain Bligh (i.e. – God) will not be denied His wrath.  Actually there were two related mutinies. The first and minor mutiny ends with a whimper and not a bang. The second and major mutiny ends with a bang and not a whimper. It ends when God kills thousands of His Chosen People with a plague (love those germs) and an earthquake (shake, rattle and roll) as punishment for rumblings in the ranks. Further on down the wilderness track we have the episode of the ‘golden calf’ mark II (i.e. more idols; more idle worship). So God, knowing that His Chosen People didn’t build up sufficient immunity from His last plague, sends another – the local undertaker gets to bury another 24,000 Israelites.

Somewhere along the line here, a pissed-off God does an about-face and instead of leading His Chosen People to the Promised Land via a pillar-of-fire by night and a pillar-of-a-cloud by day in quick-smart fashion as in Exodus, He now dooms the Israelites to wander about aimlessly in the desert wilderness for forty years instead. Not even the Spartan army toughened up its recruits via living-off-the-land survival training in this sort of barbaric way. Who’d want to be an Israelite? So with ‘friends’ like God hanging around looking after you: who needs enemies! But enemies there were.

To be continued…