{"id":4252,"date":"2013-05-30T10:44:11","date_gmt":"2013-05-30T10:44:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/fellowshipofsaintsandsinners\/?p=4252"},"modified":"2018-07-20T18:09:07","modified_gmt":"2018-07-20T18:09:07","slug":"8-reasons-god-must-have-a-sense-of-humor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fellowshipofsaintsandsinners\/2013\/05\/8-reasons-god-must-have-a-sense-of-humor.html","title":{"rendered":"8 Reasons God Must Have a Sense of Humor"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Here&#8217;s the beginning of that list I promised earlier, just for starters- 8 reasons for why I&#8217;m convinced God has a sense of humor, in no explainable order:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>1. God plays with dirt to make human beings and even heal them (like in the healing of the blind man, when Jesus essentially puts a mud pie on the man&#8217;s face and tells the man he&#8217;s better).<\/p>\n<p>2. Jesus tells a fumbling Peter who denies he even knows Jesus that Peter will be &#8220;the Rock&#8221; on which God will build God&#8217;s church. We know what happens some time after that: an absolutely ridiculous project bound for brilliant failure: the church, as a rag-tag collection of broken human beings trying their best to live into God&#8217;s promises of resurrection for themselves and the world.<\/p>\n<p>3. Jesus turns water into wine and then saves the best wine for last. That&#8217;s one of the best practical jokes I can think of- and can you imagine how many people were already laughing by the time the best wine came out? What a riot!<\/p>\n<p>4. In the book of Job, God lets Satan &#8220;test&#8221; Job&#8217;s faith. (Usually, when Satan &#8220;tests&#8221; you, you can expect things won&#8217;t be pretty, and sure enough, Job loses all his possessions, his ten children and his complexion, when he incurs a bad case of boils.) I call that a pretty sick sense of humor.<\/p>\n<p>5. There&#8217;s that line in Scripture where &#8220;Enoch walked with God; and then he was no more&#8221; (Genesis 5:24). That&#8217;s some slapstick imagery if I ever saw any.<\/p>\n<p>6. God lets a book like Revelation become canonized Scripture, resulting in centuries of entertainment- all those wild interpretations of number sequences and predictions of the Second Coming and the end of the world that make Monty Python&#8217;s &#8220;Life of Brian&#8221; seem tame by contrast.<\/p>\n<p>7. God tends to show up in the least expected places. You might call this tendency a game of divine peekaboo. The &#8220;boo&#8221; part tends to elicit at least a smile.<\/p>\n<p>8. There is that verse in Scripture that actually says that &#8220;the One whose throne is in heaven sits laughing&#8221; (Psalms 2:4).<\/p>\n<p><em>Got other reasons to add to this list? Send them along!<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s the beginning of that list I promised earlier, just for starters- 8 reasons for why I&#8217;m convinced God has a sense of humor, in no explainable order: 1. God plays with dirt to make human beings and even heal them (like in the healing of the blind man, when Jesus essentially puts a mud&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":461,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,43],"tags":[1795,1785,1796,1797],"class_list":["post-4252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-god","category-humor","tag-book-of-job","tag-does-god-have-a-sense-of-humor","tag-enoch","tag-jesus-turns-water-into-wine"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>8 Reasons God Must Have a Sense of Humor - Fellowship of Saints and Sinners<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fellowshipofsaintsandsinners\/2013\/05\/8-reasons-god-must-have-a-sense-of-humor.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"8 Reasons God Must Have a Sense of Humor - Fellowship of Saints and Sinners\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Here&#8217;s the beginning of that list I promised earlier, just for starters- 8 reasons for why I&#8217;m convinced God has a sense of humor, in no explainable order: 1. 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