#44. Saying God is not funny.

I hate this one. There I said it. I used the “h” word as my mom used to say. But seriously, this is no good. There’s a general belief that God is not funny or sarcastic. I don’t know where it got started but it’s pretty popular. I once heard a minister at a massive church talking about how in good marriages you need to know if your spouse is a safe person or an unsafe person. On one column of the bulletin he had indications that they were unsafe and on the other indications they were safe. The information was fill in the blank so that me and the other 5,000 people in the crowd could play along.

I read ahead because TiVo has ruined my attention span and here’s what I saw for his last point:

Unsafe:
________ humor

I flinched because I knew what was coming and I was right. He told us to pencil in “sarcastic” humor as one of the signs of an unsafe spouse. If that’s true, then I am horrifically unfit to be married. But here’s the thing though, that guy was wrong.

In one of my favorite and least quoted verses in the Bible, God delivers some classic sarcasm to his buddy Moses. Basically, in Numbers 11:23 Moses does one of his “you gotta be kidding me God” monologues about how there’s no way there will be enough meat for the Israelites. This is God’s response: “Is the Lord’s arm too short?” At that point in their relationship Moses had witnessed God open and close the Red Sea, rain frogs from the heavens and countless other miracles. Was God really asking Moses about the length of his arm? No, He was being sarcastic.

He was expressing himself using sarcasm. And I have this saying I use, “if it’s good enough for God, it’s good enough for Jon.” See that? I was being sarcastic and he didn’t strike me down with lightning.
God is funny. God is sarcastic. Let’s laugh.