In a TV news segment from last week's hurricane coverage, a reporter asked some young kids camping inside the Houston Astrodome to name something they really wish they had with them from all their possessions either lost or left behind.

One girl mentioned a favorite stuffed animal. Another girl said it was her television. A boy about seven or eight years old said he missed his Bible.

Anybody who's spent any time on the Gulf Coast knows it's thick with Bible-Believing Christians.

When I rented a car on a vacation in New Orleans more than two years ago, and drove along the Gulf Coast for a day and a half, I couldn't get over finding radio station after radio station devoted to Bible-oriented songs and hymns and even old-fashioned Bible preaching.

I remember being on Highway 90 about 10 at night on a Friday listening to an old-time southern preacher give a folksy sermonette on how the Apostle Paul's epistles were really "love letters" to Believers.

On the outskirts of church-laden Bay St. Louis, Miss., I was compelled to pull over my car on a busy stretch of road and take out my digital camera for a snapshot of a sermon board on the front lawn of a old one-room Baptist church that read: "We are called to be witnesses, not lawyers or judges."

Now imagine then the idiocy of these religious-types this past week suggesting the disaster was God demonstrating his displeasure with the drunken debauchery of New Orleans and the gambling boats and casinos in Biloxi, Miss.

Just yesterday in his Sunday sermon, my pastor, Richard Jordan (Shorewood Bible Church, Rolling Meadows, Ill.), a native of Mobile, Ala., who has plenty of church-going family in the hurricane-ravished areas, said he heard a preacher on the radio in Chicago proclaim that God went after New Orleans because only a week before Katrina hit the city hosted a homosexual convention attended by 50,000 gays and lesbians.

"I'm thinking, 'Okay, they met, went home and then God hit 'em?—His timing's off a little bit,' " said Jordan sarcastically. "Not only that, His aim is off since Slidell, La., took the storm's direct hit. Besides, there's 50,000 homosexuals who live in New Orleans all year round. What'd He wait 'til last week for?

"It's tomfoolery, is what it is. It's a lack of understanding of what God's doing today."

Whenever there's a major calamity, it seems there's always one crowd that says God's executing judgment and another that says they could never believe in a God so uncaring.

There are even those who reason, "Why, He isn't even as good as I am, because if He were, He'd be out there helping like I am. What's the matter with Him that He doesn't care as much as I do?"

All this is human viewpoint that has nothing to do with what God's Word says about God Himself.

Number one, God doesn't control everything that happens in life.

As Solomon testifies in Ecclesiastes 9:11, "I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."

"If you were Muslim, for example, you'd say, 'The will of Allah be done,' " Jordan says in his sermon. "In fact, the name Islam itself means 'submission.' Submission to the will of God. 'Whatever happens, Allah determined it.' "

Average Christendom thinks the same way about the God of the Bible. In fact, history shows American Christianity has been dominated through much of its past by Calvinism, a false doctrinal system that stresses predestination, or the idea that people from birth are committed to the events in their life and their fate is already mapped out for them. Famous proponents of Calvinism include time-revered evangelists Charles Spurgeon and George Whitefield.

"Calvinism is simply the Christian veneer upon the paganist fatalism that comes from heathendom," says Jordan. "That's where it comes into the Islamic religion and Christianity. It's the idea that God controls every event—that there's this pre-arranged, pre-ordained, pre-laid-out map of life and everything that happens, God determined it. Folks, God has not pre-determined everything that's going to happen on this planet at every given moment."

In the Book of Jeremiah alone are several examples of God Himself making this point clear. In Jer. 7:31, Jehovah God says of the pagan practices that were being carried out in Israel, "And they have built the high places of Tophet, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire; which I commanded them not, neither came it into my heart."
What He's saying is it wasn't His intention they do any of the evil things they did.

Similarly, Jer. 32:35 reads, "And they built the high places of Baal, which are in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to cause their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire unto Molech; which I commanded them not, neither came it into my mind, that they should do this abomination, to cause Judah to sin."

"God's saying, 'I didn't talk to them about it, I didn't purpose it, it wasn't something that came in my mind for them to do,' " explains Jordan. "That doesn't mean He didn't foreknow it or wasn't acquainted with it ahead of time. What He's talking about is He didn't purpose for them, He didn't ordain for them, He didn't predestinate for them. He didn't pre-determine for them that they'd do it. If He did, what does the verse mean?"

While preachers like Billy Graham, who popularized the phrase, "the divine providential appointment," encourage people to think whenever anything good happens, "Surely God must have been behind that," nowhere in the Bible—either in Israel's program or the grace program operating today—is there demonstration of God teaching people through events. Circumstances are simply not God's means for teaching.

"When God wants to communicate with someone, He does it with words," says Jordan. "He doesn't use events or circumstances; He doesn't use happenings. In I Kings, for example, Elijah hears all this noise from the thunders, the wind and the earthquake and there's no voice of God, so He sits down in the cave and God comes and speaks to him in a 'still small voice.'

"You and I have that in a Book that sits in our lap. That's why we talk about the Bible versions issue. That's why it's so important. You don't need to go, 'Oh, God, show me what you want me to do.' You know what He says back? 'I already have.'

"You're complete in Christ and you have the complete, total revelation of His will in His Word and when you really get a hold of that it liberates your life from the bondage of religious tyranny and questioning and living by defining yourself and God and others in ways that He doesn't."