Christianity: it’s a religion for whiners. Here’s Moses in Monday’s OT reading:
“What did I do to deserve the burden of all these people? Did I give birth to them? Did I bring them into the world? Why did you tell me to carry them in my arms like a mother carries a nursing baby?…If this is how you intend to treat me, just go ahead and kill me. Do me a favor and spare me this misery! (Num 11:10-15)
I laughed maybe a little bit too loud, especially since nobody else was laughing at all. My parents always taught me to laugh when the Bible’s being funny, which is pretty often, so I recognized the passage ahead of time and knew what was coming. Actually, it struck me a little differently this time: I started by hearing it from Moses’ side, getting all melancholy right along with him. It was really the “just go ahead and kill me” that broke the spell. He sounded like me at my most melodramatic, and I had to laugh.
The reading reminded me the part in Jonah where he’s moping because God didn’t destroy Nineveh:
And as the sun grew hot, God arranged for a scorching east wind to blow on Jonah. The sun beat down on his head until he grew faint and wished to die. “Death is certainly better than living like this!” he exclaimed. Then God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry because the plant died?”
“Yes,” Jonah retorted, “angry enough to die!” (Jonah 4:8-9)
Seriously: God arranges a little object lesson about not being angry (Look, I made that plant! I’ll kill it if I want to!), but Jonah’s spitting mad and won’t back down. And, really, when someone is angry, is roasting him half to death the best way to pacify him?
Speaking of laughing, here’s another one:
Then the Lord said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh and say, ‘Will I really have a child, now that I am old?’ Is anything too hard for the Lord? I will return to you at the appointed time next year and Sarah will have a son.” Sarah was afraid, so she lied and said, “I didn’t laugh.” But he said, “Yes, you did.” (Gen 18:13-15)
And that’s the end of the chapter; the next scene happens a few hours later, as if the Lord’s parting shot were the point of the whole vignette. I know He is being just and merciful—he wants Sarah to acknowledge her disbelief, for her own good—but what it sounds like is that He just can’t let it go.
As has been recently (and justly) pointed out, I’m no theologian. I can’t say why the Lord sometimes appears in the Bible to be acting sort of like a human being, which is to say, moody and unreasonable. I can, on the other hand, tell you the effect these passages have on me.
These passages act as a corrective against the sort of creeping deism to which I am prey, the idea of a God who is utterly distant, alien, and detached. But this idea doesn’t come from the Bible; however else the Lord may appear in the Bible, he isn’t distant. It comes from everyday life, when it’s hard to feel His presence, when He so often seems to be ignoring us; until we look back years later and start to glimpse what He was up to.
And there’s the other part of it. Sympathizing with Moses and Jonah and Sarah, and then laughing at them, means you have to laugh at yourself too, and recognize that for anybody looking at your problems from the outside—and for yourself, looking back years later—you might look a little bit more petulant than you thought. You might even look a little bit whiny, and your grievances a little less tragic.
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