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Acts of God: Acts 16:16-34

An old insurance company term for natural disasters is “acts of God,” which unfortunately links the Holy One with everything awful and unforeseen that can befall humanity, as if God were not just capricious but wrathful and cruel. Jesus, of course, depicted his father in a completely different way, and in this passage from the Acts of the Apostles we see how Paul has learned from Christ how to discern rightly what is indebted to God and what is a counterfeit—an important lesson for all of us.