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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)
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