God Is Disappointed In You (30 page)

Finally, when the seventh seal is opened, the world will get a breather from all the wars, earthquakes and death. This period of peace will last for a whole thirty minutes. Once break-time is over, seven angels will start blowing their trumpets, and then it’s right back to falling stars, hailstones made of blood, and monsters ripping the heads off babies.
 

While this is happening, a pregnant woman will give birth to a son. But this is no place to have a baby. A red dragon with seven heads will be watching, waiting for his chance to eat the boy when he pops out.

But the pregnant lady will snatch the baby out of the dragon’s jaws and run up to Heaven. The dragon will chase them into Heaven, but God will be all like, “What’s that dragon doing up here?” The angels will swat at it with brooms, shooing it away. Once they throw the dragon back to the ground, it’ll skulk around, vowing to get revenge on all the woman’s children that are down on the Earth.
 

(Psst. Just in case you’re wondering if I’ve been huffing frankincense, I am actually writing in code. The dragon, as I’m sure you’ve figured out by now, is Satan. The woman is Israel, and her son is our Messiah, Jesus Christ. Don’t tell anyone!)
 

To make life miserable for the woman’s children, the dragon will raise two beasts. The first beast will have seven heads and ten horns, and he’ll have obscenities scrawled on each of his heads. He will rule the world. Needless to say, a government ruled by an obscenity-laden seven-headed beast won’t be a model of moderation and pragmatism.
 

(
Pssst. I’m writing in code again! The first beast is an allegory for the Roman Empire. Jesus Christ escaped from Satan, so now Satan is using the Romans to wage war on Israel’s children. They destroyed the temple, and because we won’t worship the Emperor as a god, Nero is killing Christians like he’s trying to win a prize at the county fair. Again, don’t tell the Romans I said ANY OF THIS. I’m already under cave-arrest. I don’t need any more trouble.)
 

Then the dragon will send a second beast. This beast has the horns of a lamb and goes by the number 666.
(For those of you who didn’t go to Hebrew school, that is the alphanumeric equivalent of the Emperor Nero’s name.)
This beast is a false prophet. He will try to force everyone who’s still alive to worship the first beast as a god. But don’t do it, or God…well, let’s just say things will get very weird for you. 

The Roman Emp—uh, I mean the Beast and his false prophet and all the kings of the world will meet in Israel on a battlefield known as Armageddon to destroy God’s people, once and for all. And that is when Jesus Christ will finally come back to Earth. He’ll come riding out of Heaven on a white horse with a sword in his hand, Lord-of-the-Rings style. He’ll kill every single soldier in the Roman army and use their weapons for firewood. Then he will dropkick the Beast and his false prophet straight into the Lake of Fire. I know this doesn’t sound very much like the Jesus you know and love, but hey, the guy’s sick of being pushed around.

And that’s it, the world will be pretty much finished.
 

So what was it all about then? Why did God even bother creating plants and animals and Greeks? Why waste the time leading Moses and his nation of hikers out of Egypt? All those years of wandering through the desert to come to Israel, to set up a kingdom under David and Solomon? What was the point of suffering under the Babylonians for forty years and coming back and rebuilding the temple? Why did God send Elijah and Daniel and John the Baptist and finally, his son, Jesus Christ? Was it all just so he could kill the human race off with earthquakes and falling stars and skin diseases?

No, it wasn’t. God did not create people just to exterminate them. Believe it or not, it’s not out of anger that God will destroy the world, but love.

When the world you’ve known and hated has finally been destroyed, God can finally come back to Earth and start over with a clean slate. God will bring all the dead Christians back to life and give the martyrs sweet government jobs. Then he will rule the entire world as the Kingdom of God, and take care of us like hamsters, like he did in the beginning.
 

The world will be just like it was at the Garden of Eden.
Only a little more crowded this time…and with fewer talking snakes.
 

One afternoon I was having drinks with Shannon Wheeler (yes, we’re afternoon drinkers). I’m not sure how it came up, but I mentioned that I had summarized the Book of Job in three paragraphs for a friend who had never heard the story. Unexpectedly, Shannon said,
 
“You should do that to the entire Bible. I’ll draw cartoons for it.” And that is how this book was born. I figured it would be easy.  
I’d grown up reading the Bible, and how long could it possibly take to write three paragraphs per book?  That was three years ago.
 

It wasn’t long before I realized that I could recreate the Bible from memory about as well as my ass can chew gum. What’s more, three paragraphs wasn’t enough to do justice to any but a handful of the Bible’s sixty-six books. Thus began two years of study, reading the entire Bible from front to back twice, constant editing and revision, and hassling phd candidates for free advice. This had become a quest to not make this just a collection of Bible stories, but to really understand the book on a meaningful level. To give some insight into this ubiquitous, but somehow unknown, holy book.

Some of the Bible translated easily into this truncated, hyper-condensed medium. Books like Ruth, Job, and Esther had a nice central narrative with a tidy ending and were easy to squeeze into Biblical concentrate. Other books didn’t have much of a plot, but an embarrassing depth of good material to work with. Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and James were easy to write simply because the originals were so witty and profound.

Other books stubbornly resisted this process. How does one condense a book like Psalms, which is just a collection of songs? This one had me baffled until it occurred to me to present it as you would any collection of 150 classic songs: as a greatest hits boxset. The most difficult book to write, though, was the Book of Revelation. A lot of it reads like a really bad game of
Dungeons & Dragons
. It was by far the hardest book for me to get a handle on. It was so cryptic, confusing, and open to interpretation—how could I hope to get it right? Luckily, at this point I encountered Elaine Pagels’ utterly invaluable
Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation
.
For the first time in my life, I felt I understood this book, not as predictions of events thousands of years in the future, but rather, as the prayer of a man who had witnessed the destruction of everything he loved and thought the end of the world was at hand. To me, this made the book infinitely more powerful, more human, than anything televangelists or the
Left Behind
series had to offer.
 

I wasn’t sure how this book would be received. It’s highly irreverent, for one thing. If I had a religion, I suppose I would call it Irreverence. I feel that the sacred exists only at the expense of the truth. So I always feel it my personal mission to try to catch things just as they’re getting out of bed, to get a look at the truth before it puts its makeup on. What I really wanted to accomplish with this book was to not only to make the Bible easy to understand, but to throw out all its sacred baggage so we could really get to know it. To not mince words about God’s anger management problems, or his weird pseudo-marriage attitude towards his people. To be perfectly frank in reflecting Paul’s hilarious sexism, or how douchey and self-serving King David could be. I realized that some people would not take this well.
 

Mostly to promote the book, but in part to gauge the reaction, Shannon and I made some samplers containing early versions of a few of the selections from this book. And they did make some people angry. But I was surprised to discover that far more of the people we gave them out to really liked them. As it turns out, most Christians actually have a pretty good sense of humor about the Bible. One pastor snapped up about a dozen samplers to give to members of his congregation, and a sixty-nine year-old nun told me that she was going use the sampler in teaching her Bible class. They seemed to get that that the book’s blunt, and often profane, sense of humor was an attempt at honesty rather than assassination.
 

One of these samplers happened to fall into the hands of Chris Staros at Top Shelf Productions, who wrote Shannon and I a really nice e-mail expressing interest in publishing the book. Once we agreed to publish the book with Top Shelf, the first question to come up was “What do we call it?” After a few abortive suggestions, all of which I’m glad we turned down, we all started to focus in on “God Is Disappointed in You,” which is the perfect title for this book, because if I had to condense the entire Bible down to a single phrase, that would be it.

This journey has taken three years of research and writing, of second-guessing whether words like “shit” and “tip-slip” belong in the Bible, of befuddlement and epiphany. I don’t claim that this book was the beneficiary of divine intervention, though there were moments when it sure felt like it. Or maybe “divine intervention” is simply what we call our hard work, hand-wringing, and the hope that we somehow got it right.

—Mark Russell

Mark Russell
lives in Portland, Oregon, where he writes and occasionally draws cartoons. His work has previously appeared in
McSweeney’s
,
Bear Deluxe
,
Unshod Quills
,
Blog of the Damned
, and several now-defunct magazines.

Follow Mark Russell on Twitter: @Manruss.
 

His website is www.freemarkrussell.com.

Shannon Wheeler
is the creator of the comic book and opera
Too Much Coffee Man
.
 
A variety of publications have run his weekly comic and single panel gag cartoons including
The New Yorker
and
The Onion
. Wheeler currently lives in Portland, Oregon, with his cats, chickens, bees, girlfriend, and children. He has multiple books that are easy to find.