God Is Disappointed In You (15 page)

Once again, Ezekiel was ignored. God finally gave up on the idea that his people were ever going to come back to him. He was ready to move on. God withdrew his protection, letting the Babylonians storm into Jerusalem and kill everyone they could find. They razed the temple and set fire to the city.
 

Ezekiel was depressed. His wife was dead. His country lay in ruins. His people had been sent away into exile. God woke Ezekiel up amidst the rubble and destruction.

“What do you want now?” Ezekiel asked.

“One last thing, Ezekiel, I promise. You do this for me and you’re done.”

God led Ezekiel to a battlefield littered with bones and told him to bring the bones back to life.
 

“Bones! I command you to come back to life!”

“Well, you don’t have to be a dick about it!” God said, “Just ask them nicely.”

“Bones,” Ezekiel said, “please come back to life, if you would?”

“That’s better!”

The bones in the field slowly began to come together to form into skeletons. The skeletons stood up, drowsy from years of sleep. Tendons and muscles soon began to grow over the sun-parched white of the bones, and then they were in turn covered by skin and clothes and armor until Ezekiel saw a vast army standing in front of him.

“You see how easy that was?” God asked. “This is the fallen army of Israel. You’re upset with me because I killed your wife, let the Babylonians destroy your city, and reduced your people to slavery. I get that. But that’s small beer, son. You’re thinking like a man, not like a god. You see? Look at how easily I can put all that back together again.

“Don’t worry, this story isn’t over by a long shot. I’ll fix the nation of Israel. I’ll bring Jerusalem back to life, just like I did this army. I’ll even rebuild the temple. The only difference is that next time around, people will appreciate it more, because they’ll know what it’s like to be scattered, to be separated from their homes, their people, and their God.”

As they walked away, God told Ezekiel about his plans. “When we rebuild Jerusalem, I’m thinking we might go for a nice, symmetrical design. Long, straight streets. That’ll be a good look, don’t you think?”

“So we’ll just wait here, then?” asked one of the ghost soldiers, as God and Ezekiel disappeared into the distance.

Running a global empire is a serious business. You need administrators, advisors, viceroys, and satraps.
 
You can never have too many satraps. To ensure that they always had a large and competent executive class, the Babylonians designed a school specifically to train young men to rule the world. It was sort of like Yale. Among those enrolled in the school were four promising Jewish boys named Daniel, Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego.

Now, this school had the best cafeteria food in the history of higher education. Every morning, they put out a massive feast of roast pig, stuffed peacock, quail eggs, wine, and unlimited breadsticks. Despite all the amazing food, though, Daniel and his friends refused to eat there because they didn’t have a kosher menu. Instead, they ate raw carrots and salad in their dorm room, which they washed down with water.
 

The Babylonians weren’t entirely sold on the boys’ vegan diet, but they dropped the matter when they saw how chiseled, sexy, and smart they turned out to be.

In addition to being strong, good-looking, and brilliant, Daniel also developed a knack for interpreting dreams, which in the ancient world, really put you on the fast track to success.
 

King Nebuchadnezzar had a dream which really shook him up. He summoned all his advisers and magicians to interpret the dream, which normally wouldn’t have been a problem, except that he wouldn’t tell them what the dream was.
 

“This is the only way I can be sure your interpretation is coming from the gods,” he explained, “rather than just some pop psychology bullshit you picked up in college.”

When nobody could tell him what his dream was, Nebuchadnezzar threatened to have his entire council executed.
 

“But I’m a foreign policy expert!” one of them protested.

Luckily for the council, Daniel stepped in and revealed that Nebuchadnezzar had been dreaming about an enormous statue.

“Go on,” the king said.

“The statue’s head was made of gold, its chest and arms were made out of silver, its midsection was made out of bronze, and its legs were cast from iron. The statue’s feet were made out of clay. Then a giant boulder rolled into the statue, shattering it into a hundred pieces.”

Everyone held their breath, waiting for the king’s reply.

“That’s it. That was my dream. But what does it mean?”

Daniel explained that the statue’s golden head represented Babylon. Babylon would someday be defeated and replaced by another empire, represented by the somewhat less impressive silver chest. This empire would itself be defeated, and its successors would in turn be replaced by increasingly corrupt and dysfunctional nations, until one day when God would come down like a boulder, smashing all the kingdoms so that he could rule the entire world as the Kingdom of God.

“Well, I don’t take a lot of solace in those predictions,” the king said, “but at least now I can put this whole dream business behind me, and focus on the company picnic.”

King Nebuchadnezzar threw an enormous company picnic for all the satraps, governors, and middle managers of the Babylonian Empire. As a team-building exercise, he decided to have everyone bow down to the same giant idol at the same time.

“This is a very simple game,” Nebuchadnezzar explained. “When the music plays, start bowing! To add to the fun, we have constructed this blazing furnace so that anyone who doesn’t bow will be burned alive. Okay, everybody ready?”

The flutes and the drums struck up and, on cue, everyone bowed down to the statue.

“Hey, the Jews are cheating!” somebody complained.

Nebuchadnezzar looked over and saw Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, still standing while everyone else was bowing. He called them over.

“Look, maybe you guys didn’t understand the rules. When the music starts playing, you’re supposed to bow down to that statue over there. Otherwise, I got to throw you into this furnace. Got it?”

“I understand the rules,” one of them said, “and believe me, if I’d thought there was any chance of getting incinerated at the company picnic, I would have called in sick. But our God won’t let us bow down to idols, and frankly, I’m more afraid of him than I am of you.”

When Nebuchadnezzar heard this, he snapped. He ordered his servants to stoke the furnace before throwing the trouble-makers in. “I’ll show you some team-building!” he barked as the servants stoked the furnace. The fire was so hot now that the soldiers disintegrated as they threw the three men into the flame.

Inside the furnace, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, stood miraculously unharmed. They waited there, enjoying the heat until Nebuchadnezzar ordered his servants to fish them out. They emerged from the furnace without a single hair out of place. King Nebuchadnezzar was so impressed by their devotion to their god, and by his devotion to them, that he welcomed Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego back into the land of the non-burning and rewarded them all with nice fat promotions. Surviving an execution was also a good way to get ahead in those days.

Not long after the thing with the furnace, Nebuchadnezzar was walking around his balcony, taking in the Hanging Gardens, when he suddenly went insane. For the next seven years, he lived like a wild man, growing a feathery, totally out-of-control beard and fingernails like bird claws. He would run around on all fours and tear grass out of the ground with his teeth, and people would say, “Hey, didn’t that guy used to be king?”
 

After he went crazy, Nebuchadnezzar’s son Belshazzar took over ruling the Babylonian Empire. At one of his dinner parties, he thought it would be fun to eat off the holy goblets and plates the Babylonians had stolen from the temple in Jerusalem. Halfway through the dinner, a large phantom hand appeared in mid-air and began writing strange words on the wall. This bothered the king so much that he summoned Daniel to make sense of the writing.
 

Daniel told Belshazzar that using the holy dinnerware made God extremely upset and that, consequently, his reign would be coming to an end that very night. God doesn’t like people using his cup. 

During dinner, Babylon was conquered in a sneak attack by the Persians, and Belshazzar was thrown out like an old calendar.
 

As the new ruler of Babylon, the Persian King Darius was so impressed with Daniel, and his abilities to interpret dreams and supernatural graffiti, that he announced his intention to make him second-in-command over his entire empire. This made everyone else in the Babylonian civil service extremely jealous. They were all facing layoffs as a result of their merger with the Persian Empire, but now the new guy was going to be the Vice Emperor?

“Daniel? The dream guy?” they asked incredulously.

It was even worse for the Persian ruling class, who’d spent their whole lives climbing the corporate ladder.

“Thirty years and I’m still the Associate Vice President in Charge of Cups and Bowls,” one of them complained. “Now, suddenly, some prisoner of war is going to get the number two job? I’m shitting pure rage right here!”

So a group of Daniel’s disgruntled co-workers got together and hatched a crafty plan. After seeing the stunt Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego had pulled during the company picnic, they knew that Daniel’s religion wouldn’t allow him to worship another god.
 

So they went to King Darius and said, “You know what, King? You’ve been working so hard, and doing such a great job, we all think you deserve a little treat. How about this? For the next month, everyone in the whole empire will have to pray only to you. And just to make it official, we’ll pass a law which says that anyone who worships another god during that time will be dropped into a pit of lions. What do you think of that?”

“Well,” the King said, “that does sound pretty nice. If you all think it’s a good idea, I suppose it would be okay.”

Despite the new law, every morning Daniel would kneel toward Jerusalem and pray to God, just as he had done his entire life. The advisers, peeping through Daniel’s window, called the police the moment he began praying. King Darius was annoyed. He had no idea that Daniel’s religion would trap him into violating the law.
 

“I
thought
that was kind of a weird suggestion,” the king said. “I’m so sorry, Daniel, I let myself get tricked into signing this stupid law. But unfortunately, stupid or not, it is the law. Once I sign it, even I have to obey the law.”

Having offered his apology, the king had Daniel lowered into the pit of lions. King Darius went home, but was too bummed thinking about Daniel getting torn apart by lions to enjoy his evening snack or watch his dancing girls. “I think I’m just going to go to bed,” he announced glumly.
 

The next morning, he got up and went down to the lions’ den, expecting to mop up whatever was left of his friend and protégé. Instead, he found Daniel alive and unscratched. God had spared Daniel just as he had saved Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego from the team-building exercise.
 

The king had Daniel hoisted out of the lions’ den. Then, to teach them a lesson, he threw the advisers who’d tricked him into the pit of lions, along with their wives and children. The lions immediately devoured them and everyone had a good laugh.

Despite the fact that he was a Jew in the Persian Empire, Daniel never stopped dreaming. Literally.
He began keeping a dream log, which was soon filled with apocalyptic visions of the future and the end of the world. In his dreams, the Jews would be allowed to return to Israel. They would rebuild the temple. Then they’d be invaded again. The next nation to occupy Israel would put an end to animal sacrifices at the temple and, three and a half years later, the world would come to an end. The important thing was the Jews had to keep the faith, even as the whole world crumbled around them.