God Calls it Quits

In the two months since they had been kicked from Heaven, Satan and his minions had pushed the world over the edge. A minor assassination of a prince among the human empire of Austro-Hungary had led to war, which was an understandable course among vengeful men. Through divine inspiration, the war would go into stalemate, proving to men the futility of war. With modern technology of print followed by the vocal word from radio, it would be a new chance to inspire love and brotherhood that had been given by Jesus as he had walked the earth. Through the past 19 centuries, he had waited as Immanuel at the right hand of God in Heaven for His Kingdom on Earth, and now was his time to return.

Mankind, however, seemed once again too evil to embrace the government of Heaven. Instead, they wrapped themselves in an unending war, guided by Satan. In the west, soldiers would slay one another with new technologies: machine guns and poison gasses. In the east, near Łódź in the Polish lands, the humans added up hundreds of thousands of casualties in an indecisive battle that, out of arrogance, both considered victories.

God considered waking humanity and ending the war with a new plague, an influenza, but He at last decided the New Earth would not be worth the trouble. Hope had gone out of it. The Earth to come would be filled with decadence, heart-rending poverty, greater wars splitting the atoms themselves, and artificial, digital worlds where men would give up his body as well as his soul to mere entertainment. Having only recently annexed Earth, it already seemed too much to bother.

He had destroyed the world before, of course, with a Flood and planned to destroy it again with fire on the day of Judgment, but it all seemed too much now. There was hope, but it was distant and the rewards too small to carry the pain. God looked upon the whole of Creation and found it... depressing. He decided to end it.

Doing so, however, would mean the loss of His creations, the humans He genuinely loved. The love seemed only one-sided now, nothing but pain. Even so, he would have to eliminate Immanuel as well, His being on Earth. Without an Earth, there would be no need. It was pain, but it would be over quickly enough.

And God said, "Let there be naught," and the Earth was gone.

Now darkness was again upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved alone upon the face of the waters.