The Deliverer (5 page)

“Why do I let you live?” he snarled at me.

I know a rhetorical question when I hear one, so I didn’t answer, but, oh, how I would have liked to tell him what I thought about the way he ran things. Just once I wished I could stand up to him. I wished anybody would, but nobody dared. He slammed me to the floor and continued berating me, belittling every single thing I’d ever done as if I’d never once gotten anything right. I wanted to remind him how over the centuries of human history I had an exceptional track record for being right. Not that he would have cared anyway.

“Find Moses, you idiot,” he steamed. “Who else did your pitiful mind think I meant? He’s living in the desert with the Midianites.”

“Oh, I really doubt that, sir,” my mouth uttered before my brain engaged. “Not that you could be wrong, you understand, but it’s quite unlikely Moses would still be alive after forty years or we would have surely heard something from him by now. And as for living with the Midianites? Highly doubtful, if you please, sir. They don’t like Egyptians, and they don’t like Hebrews, so there you go. Whoever Moses thought he was or claimed to be, it wouldn’t matter. No one of either race could have lasted long with the Midianites.”

It was Tammuz who hissed at me and said, “If you had been doing your job, imbecile, you would know Moses is married to Zipporah, the daughter of a Midianite priest.”

How could I have missed such a thing?
Tammuz interacted on a regular basis with the territorial principalities over Midian, and if something strange was going on in their territory, they would be sure to know. One of those demons must have come across Moses somewhere in the desert lands and reported it to Tammuz. I needed to think of something fast.

“But what of it?” I blurted out as if Tammuz’s news flash were no news at all. “If Moses married the daughter of a Midianite priest, there must have been a religious ceremony of some kind.”

“And so?” Satan asked.

“And so it could not have been kosher, so to speak. Moses would be in violation of the no-god-but-Yahweh rule or at least complicit in the goings-on.”

They all looked at me as if I hadn’t finished a sentence, so I knew they hadn’t put the obvious two and two together.

“If Moses had ritual with another god,” I spoke slowly so they’d understand, “it means he abdicated, flunked the test, jumped the fence, whatever you want to call it. He’s forfeited his opportunity to be the deliverer.”

It was as if I hadn’t said a word.

Once Satan made up his mind about something, he wouldn’t change it regardless of evidence to the contrary or even if it was in his own interest to do so. Why? you ask. Well, let me just tell you it wasn’t because he was always right or even usually right. The extraordinarily stupid idea of rebelling against God to start with and getting all of us tossed out of paradise into the ghetto of the second heaven ought to be proof enough of that.

No, the reason Satan never changed his mind was because God never changed His. Never mind the simple fact that God was always right, always thinking ahead, always moving the earth forward through time (though toward what I do not know), while Satan was rarely right. He spent most of his time wasting everyone else’s and overreacting to the last thing that happened. This whole manhunt was a case in point. But nothing would do except for me to launch out on a pointless search for Moses.

“And if I find him?”

Satan glared, and I tried again. “
When
I find him”—
that was better
—“then what?” Which was a very good question seeing as how I couldn’t do anything
with
him or
to
him. I was a watcher, end of function.

“Watch him,” Tammuz growled.

“Watch him do what? Count goats?” I muttered under my breath. I’d stalled as long as I could, so I set my course and started winging it toward the desert.

You might wonder how I could have been so sure of myself when I said Moses was no longer a threat to Satan because he’d flunked the test for being the deliverer. The truth is I took a chance and lied to Satan; I thought just the opposite of what I said. Oh, I know I took a big risk because I’m not a convincing liar and Satan would devour me if he caught me lying to him, but I was highly motivated.

The truth is I disparaged the idea to Satan that Moses was still in the running to be the deliverer because I desperately did
not
want to go to the desert to look for him. Nobody did. The desert was the training ground for hell. There’s no other way to describe it. The worst of our kind inhabited the hot, arid sands of the wasteland. The desert devils weren’t anything like the fat and happy—at least by comparison—demons in Egypt who indulged on the spoils of the land.

No, not at all. The desert rulers were deprived of any of the booty of the earth. Although they were ravenous to gratify their demonic nature on human flesh, like all the rest of the demons, they were assigned, or sentenced, to an empty place with few humans to hunt. Their prey was limited to unsavory life forms that lived under rocks or deep in the scorching sand. If I was discovered soloing it in their territory, there would be a food fight, and I would be the food they were fighting over. Never mind that I was on a mission from Satan. No one would have bothered to ask why I was in the neighborhood.

So try to imagine my relief when I flew deep into the wilderness only to find no one at home. The spiritual realm was silent. It wasn’t just a case of no demonic chatter going on; it was deadly silent. It was empty. The territorial rulers were out of town, gone, completely gone. There were no telltale signs of demonic activity or presence. How could I be sure? Sometimes you know what
is
by what is
not
.

What
was not
was the unmistakable odor that emanates from demons. Most humans still haven’t learned how to interpret smell. When demons are anywhere about, the air smells bad because they smell bad. The worse they are, the worse they smell. One time in Egypt during a demonic orgy, the odor got so bad I almost threw up. When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I took off for one of the gardens by the Nile and plopped myself right down in a patch of pansies. I breathed in the fragrance of flowers until I was tipsy. I didn’t even bother to exhale.

Unless you have personally wallowed in a flower bed, you might not know that the perfume from flowers is an intoxicant. When the others found me, I was rocking back and forth on my tail with a snootful of pansy petals, reminiscing about the good old days before we were thrown out of heaven. Satan was in a dither because I’d left my post. He had me locked in the dungeon until the effects of the pansies wore off and then assigned me to the morning-after crew for the cleanup of the orgy. I’ll spare you the details.

The only smell in the desert now was, you might say, the desert—rocks, sand, clean air, nothing else. Where were the demons? They had no place to go. Even if there had been a place to go, they would never have dared leave a whole section of ground unoccupied. There would be no excuses with Satan on that one. He was positively paranoid about unoccupied ground. If the principalities were gone, and they most definitely were, what could have happened to cause them to leave? It could only be one thing: something scarier than them. But what?

I settled down on the side of a sand dune and tried to figure out what to do next. When I heard the bleating of goats, I crawled up to the top of the dune and peered over to the other side. I didn’t have to see his face to know that the man with the goats was Moses. After all those years, I still recognized his voice.

Demons brag about how they can read the human mind, an undocumented claim at best. But whether
they
can or can’t,
I
can’t, so I was grateful when Moses began to talk to his goats. That was the only way for me to know what was on his mind. There he stood, an old man by then, leaning on his staff and carrying on a one-sided conversation with a nanny goat. It wasn’t as odd as you might think. After all, most of you humans talk to animals now and then. It doesn’t seem to bother you at all that the animals never talk back.

It wasn’t like that in the beginning, you know. When God first created the animals, they could speak. They chatted with Adam and Eve all the livelong day. How do you think Adam got them to line up and parade by so he could name them? He simply told them what to do. He actually made up a little song for them to sing as they marched along. Let me see if I can remember how it went. Hum along with me.

Single file, elephant style, we went to the animal fair.

There were lions and tigers there.

The monkey made fun of the skunk, who sat on the elephant’s trunk.

The elephant sneezed and fell to his knees and that was the end of the monk, the monk, the monk.

Something like that anyway. The animals all laughed at Adam’s silly song.

Not convinced about the talking animals? Have you ever wondered about why neither Adam nor Eve panicked and ran away after encountering a talking snake in Eden? They weren’t the least bit surprised the serpent could talk, because in the beginning, all animals in the garden could talk. At least they could until the Fall. That knockout punch God delivered to the serpent was so powerful that the ripple effects spilled over into the whole animal kingdom, and every species lost its ability to speak the human language. I’ve always wondered if God really meant to do that. Anyway, now you know why all people in all cultures talk to animals, even stuffed animals. It’s in that genetic code thing God put into humans. Until now, you probably never thought about how odd it really is to see a grown person talking to a dog.

Moses seemed to be looking at something over the rim of the next sand dune when he turned and asked the lead goat, “What is that?”

The goat didn’t seem to know, so Moses said, “Let’s go over and see this strange sight.” I stayed low to the ground and followed after the last nanny, who kept turning her head and sniffing in my direction.

Moses had never seen anything like it, but I had. Well, not exactly like it. I’d never actually seen a bush burning brightly yet unconsumed by the fire, but I had witnessed enough of the creative antics of Adonai to know one when I saw it. No wonder the demons had vacated the territory. God Himself had shown up once more on the earth.

The burning spectacle was so beautiful. I was captivated myself, so I could just imagine what was going on in the mind of Moses. When the voice called out of the bush and said, “Moses, Moses,” he jumped backward with such force that half the flock panicked and headed for cover over the next hill.

The voice continued, “Do not come any closer.” Judging by his trembling, I could see that going any closer was about the last thing Moses intended to do.

“Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.”

Moses obeyed, and the voice spoke to him again.

“I am the God of your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” “I knew it,” I jumped up and yelled out before I caught hold of myself. Moses didn’t hear me, but the goats did, and they all began bleating like a tripped burglar alarm. If the angel of the Lord saw me, He ignored me, but just in case, I dove back to the ground and hid along with the frightened goats. Moses didn’t know what was going on, so he fell to the ground also and buried his face in the sand. Whether he believed it really was God or not, it was something strange, and he was too scared to find out what.

From His long experience with His humans, God knew the goats would die of old age before Moses got it together enough to ask a few obvious questions, such as, “If You’re really God, why are You pretending to be a bush?” For most people, a burning bush that wasn’t burnt up would be a real conversation starter, but not for Moses, who was much more comfortable talking to goats than to humans.

Knowing He would have to make the first move, God began telling Moses what was on His mind, just as if Moses had a perfect grasp on the idea that God Almighty had dropped by.

“I have seen the misery of My people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land flowing with milk and honey.”

Moses still had his head in the sand, but he pulled back slightly and opened one eye when he heard this. He didn’t speak, but I knew what he was thinking.

Is this something I’m supposed to care about? I tried to help them once, and look what it got me.

“So now, go,” the voice continued. “I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring My people the Israelites out of Egypt.”

“You have got to be kidding, God,” Moses said. No, wait. Moses didn’t say that; I said that.

Moses actually said, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”

But it meant the same thing. As far as Moses was concerned, this was not an idea that could work at all. His window of opportunity to be a hero had long since closed, and he no longer had the desire or the will to try to open a new one.

God tried to reassure him. “I will be with you. This will be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship Me on this mountain.”

When I heard that, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit sorry about the fate that awaited the desert demons who had abandoned their posts. They’d given it up without a fight, and now God had it staked out as an altar to Himself. Satan would have a fit when he learned about it. Not that I would have acted differently in their circumstances. Spiritual warfare against the heavenly host is one thing, but if any one of the Trinity enters the fray,
see ya’; wouldn’t want to be ya’.

At first, Moses was tracking with me; it was all over his face that he had no appreciation for why this was a good idea. Slowly rising to his feet, he stared at the ground, shifted from one foot to another, and finally spoke to God.