Q. Does God have a sense of humor?

“A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.”
- Proverbs 17:22

Ancient Hebrew humor may not translate well today, but for the sake of absorption, the Bible is riddled with humor. 

It’s dark, deep, and divinely purposeful. 

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Nowhere in the Bible is Jesus recorded as laughing. However, it does state that He wept. So, we might find it unimaginable that Jesus, being fully God and fully human, would never have laughed. 

God, on the other hand, finds no joke funny. Why? Because He knows every punchline. 

However, He does love to laugh. He mocks His adversaries, scoffs at His enemies, ridicules those who attempt to oppose Him, and treats the self-declared righteous with derision. 

“The One enthroned in heaven laughs; the Lord scoffs at them. He rebukes them in his anger.”
- Psalm 2:4-5

His prophet Elijah told Ahab, King of Israel, to gather 450 prophets of Baal along with the 400 prophets of Asherah at Mount Carmel to engage in a contest – whose god could be directly summoned to consume an altar sacrifice. 

Each desperate attempt from the pagan prophets failed. Elijah taunted them with playground virtuosity:

“Cry aloud, for he is a god. Either he is musing, or he is relieving himself, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened.”
- 1 Kings 18:27

A WORD ON THE WORD: The Hebrew root sahaq (sah-KHAK) covers a wide range of meaning: to laugh, to smile, to play, to dance, to sport, to jest, to mock, to make sexual advances, and to stage combat as entertainment. God’s covenant with humankind would begin with the ancient patriarch Abraham whose aged and barren wife Sarai laughed when told she would conceive. Her subsequent son, Isaac (Yitzhaq), whose name means "he laughs”, had a Semitic name-formation that typically carried a divine subject, something on the order of Yishaq-El: "May God smile."

Talking donkeys. Floating ax heads. A man swallowed by a fish and vomited onto dry land. A patriarch’s son selling his birthright for a bowl of soup. Job, pleading with God for answers to his prolonged suffering, instead receiving a lecture on the quirkiness and speed of the ostrich.

And not to ignore the scatological, Ezekiel is told by God to bake his bread using his own dung. Ezekiel objects. God relents: cow dung will do.

Hard to believe these stories rest comfortably within the very God-inspired book designed to guide humankind to salvation. 

But in contrast and in no uncertain terms, God also repeatedly instructs us to enjoy this life and His creation.

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“…nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God's gift to man.” 
- Ecclesiastes 3:12-13

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Certain Medieval preachers told comic stories from the pulpit on the most holy of holidays - Easter Sunday, the day of the resurrection. The congregation would rise enthusiastically to laugh death in the face and revel in its defeat. 

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"Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh. . . . Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep."
- Luke 6:21, 25

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Hard to believe God would find much humor in humanity today. But I’ll bet Satan laughs a lot. 

He must find it pathetically easy to bend humans to his will and openly defy God’s plan. It only took a few words for the serpent to convince Eve to do what was explicitly forbidden. 

And Adam was not far behind – first failing to stop her, then taking a bite himself. 

Adam‘s sin would soon be compounded by pointing the finger directly at God, then blaming Eve – flesh of his flesh, bone of his bone.

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“The man said, ‘The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.’”
- Genesis 3:12

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The Christian faith has always been easy to ridicule: devotion to a man executed two thousand years ago who hasn’t been heard from since. 

Funny thing is, God has already won. He sent His own Son to be executed upon a cross and raised from the dead.

Through His humble obedience, Jesus defeated both sin and death. Nothing Satan can do about it now. 

It is done. 

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"None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory."
- 1 Corinthians 2:8

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God always gets the last laugh. 

So, is it ok to mock Satan now?  

Not just yet.