In the Book of Genesis, God creates the Earth and all of its creatures, sees that it is good, and rests. Three pages later God wakes up, decides it isn't maybe that hot after all, and drowns everyone. Before He shakes his Earth-sized Etch-A-Sketch, God tells Noah to find two of every animal on the planet. The Lord’s apparently hesitant to spare a further seven days to simply remake the planet. Having a boat-building geriatric locate two of every animal on the planet and poke them until they fuck each other strikes Him as the simplest alternative.

Once He’s drowned every living thing, God realizes shit might have gotten a little out of hand. “I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake,” He decides. “Neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.” Smooth sailing for Earth, it seems.

Uncanny X-Men’s only got thirty years of continuity, and their writers are always forgetting who knows whose secret identity or which villain is supposed to be dead this year. The Old Testament was written over the course of hundreds of years — it's a wonder they didn’t lose a Commandment. So it's certainly not surprising when God does an about-face on his no-kill stance a few hundred pages later in the Book of Zephaniah, once again actively plotting our deaths.

“I will utterly sweep away everything from the face of the earth,” says the Lord. “I will sweep away humans and animals; I will sweep away the birds of the air and the fish of the sea. I will cut off humanity from the face of the earth.” (Zeph 1:2) God's justification for his kill-rampage is that He gave us all free will to decide whether or not to worship Him, and it turns out a few people didn’t.

This is Old Testament God, though, so honestly, who fucking knows. Maybe someone got lippy with a prayer or dropped their keys or something. Either way, half of the Book of Zephaniah is God telling us how much we should love Him, and the other half is composed of graphic depictions of Him murdering us, grabbing birds out of the sky and strangling trout.

God describes His kill spree in loving microscopic detail, stopping just shy of pulling out an Earth phone book and threatening everyone in alphabetical order. It's funny how God only works in "mysterious ways" when he's pulling the sort of insane shit you usually do jail time for. Giving people the choice to worship you then killing them if they don't isn't "mysterious." David Copperfield's mysterious. It's entirely possible God’s just a complete madman, and everybody's too polite to say anything. If you ask someone for some potato chips and they say “You’ve got free will – it’s up to you,” I don't think they’re allowed to blow up Europe if you grab a handful. In movies, the lunatic threatening to kill everybody because they don't love him enough is the guy Bruce Willis shoots a lot of times. In the Bible, it's the guy Bruce Willis prays to.

At one point God says He’ll “search Jerusalem with lamps” (Zeph 1:12) so He can hunt out anybody who might have accidentally survived His initial murder-wave. The Lord doesn't explain how He can invent the universe but needs a lamp to find people when it's dark. But forget that for a second. Just imagine how angry you'd have to be to obliterate all life from a planet, then actually take the time to walk through parts of it with a flashlight to double-check the body count.

When children aren't responsible enough to care for a pet, you give them a goldfish instead of a puppy and see if they strap it to a Hot Wheels car and fire it off the staircase. Maybe God should have given hamsters free will first, just to see how that played out. On their free willingest day, a hamster maybe makes a ballsy decision to poop in its food dish. If that's the sort of thing that results in one dead hamster and five Lord-shaped hand marks on its windpipe, chances are God's the sort of guy to launch humanity out of a Hot Wheels first chance He gets.

According to the Book of Zephaniah, people who say “The Lord will not do good; nor will He do harm” are dead wrong. It’s not that you have free will and He won’t get involved; He honestly just doesn’t care. Worship someone else, though, and He’ll be running around slinging fireballs at pregnant women before you even have time to alert Batman.

It’s easy to forget that when the OT was written, everyone was immensely stupid. Nowadays theologians have built up entire schools of thought around the concept of free will — that God doesn’t stop holocausts and whatnot because He gave us the ability to decide for ourselves not to put people in ovens. Free will means we can choose the path of God or the path of evil – it’s like The Price Is Right, except instead of Bob Barker tantalizing you with washer/dryer combos behind Door #2, the wrong choice means an eternity of Satan inserting charcoal briquettes directly into your anus.

Two thousand years ago, nobody’d actually worked free will out yet. The closest thing to an intellectual was the guy with the least amount of mud caked around his penis. So it’s small wonder the Book of Zephaniah's only theological contribution is that evil apparently exists so that when you complain, God has an excuse to hunt you for sport. Rent a copy of The Running Man, then replace the villains with the Lord and Schwarzenegger with humankind. You’ll save the price of a Bible and still walk away with a pretty comprehensive understanding of God’s teachings here.

Prophets were God’s assistants, much like Britney Spears has assistants now. When God wants to spread His message to the people, He’s got people for that. If God wants a bowl of figs with all the round ones picked out, you know damn well He’s not picking them out Himself. The only real difference is, when Britney Spears has her competition and their fans killed, she doesn’t get on the cover of People Magazine to threaten them. It’s done quietly by experienced professionals in the dead of night, and the next morning Christina Aguilera’s found dead of an “overdose” of “stabbing”.

God, on the other hand, has a prophet issuing a press release every other month about what a great idea it is to kill you. The theological implications that God could stand to learn something from Britney Spears notwithstanding, you have to wonder why prophets never put out any scathing tell-all books about God, like celebrity assistants do now. It’s tempting to reason that because God’s all-powerful, he just turned their arms into sausages or something, thus preventing them from putting pen to papyrus for a gossipy memoir. My theory is that being God just means you can afford the best lawyers.

“Because they have sinned against the Lord, their blood shall be poured out like dust, and their flesh like dung.”
(Zeph 1:17)