A little 5-year-old girl dies of bone cancer. A religious friend, seeking to comfort the little girl’s distraught parents, says: “It was the will of God.” An earthquake demolishes a large section of a major city. Buildings give way and crush the life out of men, women and children. A hospital is turned into into a bloody ruin. Someone says, “It was the will of God.” A tornado causes a wide path of destruction in South Georgia; life and property are destroyed. A way of life is disrupted never to be the same again. Someone suggests, “It was the will of God.”

No expression has been more blasphemously misused than expressions about the will of God. People who claim to know their Bibles sometimes use them in tragically unbiblical ways. And notable harm is always the result of such careless theology.

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The Rev. Hal Brady is an ordained United Methodist minister and executive director of Hal Brady Ministries, based in Atlanta. You can watch him preach every week on the Atlanta Interfaith Broadcasters TV channel Thursdays at 8 p.m.

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