Of Monsters, Minions and Men: Job does a Job on himself

This is the first part of a two part series. Part two:  Zits? You kill my kids and now you give me zits?  is here.  I've added an epilogue.

I've been perusing the book of Job and it's filled with interesting and surprising discoveries for a biblical semi-literate like me.  For example, there's a definite hierarchy established in the book based upon who talks to whom.  In our world we conceive of ourselves as standing between God above us in Heaven and that rat bastard Satan below us in hell.  We're closer to God because we're on His team and after all, everyone says He 'loves' us.  So 'yay' us, 'boo' Satan.  And we conceive of Satan trying to 'tempt' us from below and us asking God to help us tell the squirrely red devil to buzz off but we always assume that YHWH isn't comparing notes about us with the Devil incarnate, much less teaming with him to maximize our suffering.

And that would be wrong because when you take a peek at the Book of Job you find God and Satan working hand and....claw to do some rather...well anyway let me tell you the whole story:  In the Book of Job Satan and God are reviewing Job and his family - imagine it's Mayday in the Old Soviet Union and the Politburo are all lined up in their parkas in the snow on the wall of the Kremlin:  The General Secretary - that would be God - on down.  And there next to God, in a particularly commie red suit with all the Hero of the Satanist Union medals is Satan, one of the 'bigs' taking a gander at the 'best of the best' of God's people scuttling by.  Job's not up there, he's down in Red Square with the rest of the scuttlers.  In fact no 'child of God' is there at all, they're the ant like figures marching anonymously by the thousands and millions and billions by the Great Leader Himself and I guess the dear leader in the cherry tights next to him.  Hmm.

And Satan is making snide remarks about God's people being 'bought' and if  they weren't how they wouldn't be marching in line but instead would be shouting rude slogans and flipping God the bird.  And God just takes it - stuff that He wouldn't take from you or me without giving us a good hard smite. Even an anti-semsmite, which everyone knows ever since Samson invented it, is the worst kind of smite of all. (Which is why tough luggage is called Samsonite because it smote even Samson's anti-semsmites.)

So Satan's snide, unsmited remarks get under God's skin (I'm not sure God has skin per se but whatever keeps whatever God is from spilling out over whatever God isn't, Satan got under that).  And that's kind of weird when you think of it - not whether God has skin, although that's weird - but why would a created creature like Satan who God has already deposed, fired, stripped of his rank, evicted, incarcerated and for all I know disembowled and defenestrated be standing (well if he'd been D-Ded, hunched over) with the Politburo on Godday getting under His non-skin-skin?  I mean I guess it goes without saying that whatever God has for skin is notoriously thin - that's why there's all the smiting for everything from making cow jewelry, to being Egyptian management in a labor dispute, to touching the wrong doohickey at the wrong time on the Ark thingy, to a little harmless tax fraud.  God is notoriously cranky about almost anything that concerns him.  Tick him off and he goes to pieces faster than a collapsing Jenga tower.  And smites - boy does he smite.

Well I guess we'll never know why Satan got to hang out with God and the rest of the Politburo at the top of the Kremlin with the open bar and bottomless caviar bucket while God's most faithful servant was freezing his loyal nuts off in what passes for a Moscow spring day.  Because the very next thing that God does after Satan razzes him about Job's loyalty being bought and paid for is that God says "hokay, I'll prove it:  whack Job's family, his business, his slaves, chattel, cattle and rattles for that matter, waste 'em all and Job will still march on Godday without flipping me off".#

Which is even weirder than all the other weird stuff.  Because if there's one thing that Satan likes to do it's kill, rape, infect, cast aspersions, bowdlerize, insult, tease, mock, irritate and mildly vex God's people.  It's what he lives for (does he?  I mean live? Do angels live or do they exist and what's the diff?  And if I tell Satan to get a life does that hurt his feelings? Or does he just go kill someone?).  So why would God give Satan his 'heart's' desire given that Satan is supposed to be anti-God and all, isn't God supposed to be punishing Satan? Instead he seems to be underwriting Satan's brutal torture of God's top servant, Job.  And not only that, it's God's idea.  Which if you're Job, has got to burn.  But not as brightly as the houses of his kids and his barns and every other asset or fixture that he had because Satan absolutely wasted JobCorp, down to the ground.

So then Job's wife comes up to him. Now isn't that just like Satan - given the mandate to waste JobCorp to the ground, the one thing he spares is Job's wife so that she can rag on him 24x7 about how he screwed up and didn't fireproof the barns and the kids and how she told him he should have gotten more insurance and that now that the servants were dead he was just going to have to make his own dinner because if he thought that she was going to do all this work just because everyone had been burnt up by the Devil he had another thing coming and anyway why didn't he just flip God the bird and get it over with so she could go back and marry that Chiropodist like her mom wanted, not Mr. "I'm so tight with God" and so on and so forth.  Satan truly is a rat turd, isn't he?

So the next Godday comes around and all the muckety mucks file up onto the Kremlin roof in the brisk Muscovite breeze.  Satan is looking particularly natty that day in a cranberry colored cape and tights combo that he nicked from the Archbishop of Canterbury, you know, the one that got sent to hell for saying Jesus was just this guy with a swell personality (okay, so it could have been any of them, don't be so literal).  And the ants go marching by so to speak and everyone's craning to see Job and whether he's going to win the bet for Satan and everyone's a bit aflutter about the whole thing because it's not very often that anyone gambles with the infinite God who sees and knows everything. I mean have you ever tried to draw to an inside straight when Big Guy is sitting across from you?  You lose every time.  So this was quite the unusual occasion and as Job rounded the corner leading a couple dozen singed crippled cattle and chattels (Satan made a note to torture his burn crew for inefficiency) we noticed that Job's face was blubbery and barely in control but that his hands were resolutely in his pockets a fact that Satan tried to make light of with a crude pocket pool joke but everyone could tell that God had won and were patting the big Guy on the back.  Well, not really, because to touch him is to die a rather horrible death, but you know what I mean.


#This is where I must defer to the authority of the theologians in the audience.  Hello?  I know that there aren't just crickets out there?  So explain to me why the God of everything gets punked by a two bit defrocked angel?  Or better yet, explain to me how a two bit defrocked angel gets by security and on to the wall on Godday, year after year after year as if he's Jesus' A list pal?  Or even better than that, explain why the infinite God lets this little weiner get under his skin when any child knows what he's up to? Or better than all of them, explain why if God is so swell and powerful and clever and perfect and all does his best friend and his family end up on an all expense paid tour of the ancient Auschwitz?