6 Bible Stories Where The Moral Was 'Haha F*ck You, I'm God'

6

God Goes Fear Factor On Ezekiel

The Book of Ezekiel is about a conversation between God and the priest Ezekiel, mostly about why God is going to destroy Jerusalem (spoiler: because they're a bunch of assholes). Ezekiel is supposed to go to the city and tell them about it, but God doesn't really expect them to listen (remember: assholes).

To make things fun, there's a catch: Ezekiel can't just tell them God's plan. Instead, he takes away Ezekiel's ability to speak, and then forces him to communicate the message through an elaborate game of charades. See? Fuckin' with us.

First, God gives Ezekiel a scroll and tells him to eat it.

Kizhi Monastery
"Can I get some ketchup?"

OK, that's not the weirdest thing God has ever told someone to do. Plus it tastes like honey. So far, so good. Then God tells Zeke to construct a little scale model of Jerusalem out of clay, and stomp the crap out of it like a bully wrecking a sand castle. This is, we guess, the less subtle part of the prophecy.

Then God just wants to see how far he will go. He tells Ezekiel to lie down on his left side and stay there for 390 days. Then he's allowed to roll over -- presumably with one hell of a cramp and a bad case of bed sores -- but he has to lie on his right side for another 40 days, pointing at the squashed remains of the Jerusalem model the whole time so that people really get the message.

Gustave Dore
Future artists would be less subtle.

God, snickering, just cannot believe he's doing all this, so he really ups the game: The entire time, Ezekiel is allowed to eat nothing but bread that he cooked on a bonfire of human poop. This is the part of the prank show where most victims would start looking around for hidden cameras, but not Ezekiel. He just stoically bargains God down to cow poop instead and mistakenly calls it a victory.

5

God Thinks It's Hilarious When You Eat Your Kids

At various points, the Bible dictates that children who disobey their parents should be executed, while those who mock their parents should merely get their eyes plucked out. At one point, kids who laugh at a prophet for being bald get eaten by bears. Oh, that doesn't mean God really, really wants children to be good. He just hates kids. And you, for having kids. In fact, fuck you buddy, eat your kids.

Wiki Commons
If there are any left after the bears get through with them, obviously.

Seriously, God makes that threat a lot. In Leviticus, he warns the people of Israel that if they fail to obey his laws, he will strike them down with famine and disease until "You will eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters." In Deuteronomy, he does it again, but expands the threat to assure his people that they won't be allowed to eat their nephews instead: "Even the most gentle and sensitive man among you will have no compassion on his own brother or the wife he loves or his surviving children, and he will not give to one of them any of the flesh of his children that he is eating."

4

God Hits The Purge Button On Aaron's Sons

Moses' brother Aaron had two sons, Nadab and Abihu. They appear only briefly in Leviticus, when Moses is showing the priests how to priest properly. Following the rules prescribed by God, Aaron slaughters some animals, cuts off the bits he's supposed to cut off, lays the offerings down on the altar in the correct way, lights up some incense, and waits. God approves of the ritual and makes a big light show to tell Aaron that he did well, and all the priests celebrate a job well done.

3

God Has Ten Plagues, And He Is Going To Use TEN Plagues

Exodus: Moses wants to free the Israelites from Egypt, but the Pharaoh won't let them go, so God sends ten horrible plagues against the Egyptians to show them who's boss. After each plague, the Pharaoh remains stubborn, so God has to step it up a notch, over and over again, until he's finally just straight-up killing babies.

Pietro Paoletti
It was a tossup between that and kicking puppies down the stairs.

2

God Don't Want No Uglies

The Book of Leviticus is a particularly uneventful part of the Old Testament. It's mostly just a bunch of rules about rituals, instructions for priests, and obscure moral laws that God pulled out of a hat. It's marginally more interesting than reading a law school textbook, if only because of the graphic violence.

William Blake
Here's a man being stoned to death, in one of the more lighthearted moments.

But if you can read Leviticus without falling into a coma, you'll notice that God has some pretty high standards for who should be allowed to worship at his altar. There are the slightly more reasonable rules -- like God doesn't want any bald or beardless guys, and nobody who isn't married to a virgin. Absolutely no divorcees or widows, and absolutely no prostitutes. It's like a bizarrely specific dating profile; he stops just short of demanding you be both cut and vegan.

1

Don't Ask God For Things When He's Hungover

While Moses is leading his 600,000-strong congregation of Israelites out of Egypt to the Promised Land, they begin to complain that the Arabian Desert isn't exactly a Golden Corral Buffet. The only thing they have to eat is bread made out of coriander seeds, and they start begging for meat. Moses, who has a direct telephone line to God, can tell that he's getting mad, and tries to get everyone to calm down, but they got the hangries.

Nicolas Poussin
"I told you it was going to be 40 years. You shouldn't have had your Snickers right when we set off."

Eventually, God speaks to Moses and tells him he's changed his mind -- he will give the Israelites some meat. In fact, and we're actually quoting God here, he's going to feed them meat "until it comes out of your nostrils and you loathe it."