The mysterious forces of money

The film: Bruce Almighty (2003)
What happened: God (Morgan Freeman) gives Bruce Nolan (Jim Carrey) all His powers and responsibilities (though mostly limited to Buffalo, New York). However, like God Himself, Bruce can't "mess with free will." Bruce uses his new powers for his own personal gain. After failing to propose to Grace (Jennifer Aniston) at the restaurant where they had their first date years ago, Bruce starts hearing thousands upon thousands of prayers, which he had so far ignored. God tells him he must do something about the prayers before they pile up further. So Bruce puts them on a computer as e-mail and spends the rest of night trying to answer many of them. The next day, having barely made a dent, Bruce decides to grant all requests. At the next lottery drawing, some 400,000 players, all of them from Buffalo, win, reducing each individual's prize money to $17.
What doesn't quite make sense: If God created the universe, surely He has the power to let a few thousand people win the lottery simultaneously. But how would this particular 'miracle' be accomplished, exactly? Especially given the respect for free will explicitly stated in the movie: Bruce can pull down the Moon and give his girlfriend a remote orgasm, but he can't make her love him. Can we even assume that those who pray asking to win lottery actually play the lottery?
The thing is that playing the lottery involves quite a bit of free will, even after making the decision to play the game. In the State of New York, according to the New York Lottery website, there are a number of different lottery games people can play: Mega Millions, Powerball, Sweet Million, etc. The film does not specify which of these games the simultaneous winners played, but it does seem clear that they won the grand prize, which is usually shared by all those lucky enough to hit on the right numbers (splitting a few million with two or three other players still leaves you a heck of a lot of money).
And after you choose your game, what numbers do you play? Maybe after Bruce decided to let everyone win the lottery, God whispered into the prayers' ears the numbers to play. If they are not as resistant to God's messages as Bruce is, they could be convinced to play something other than their usual numbers. Or maybe God told them to let the computer pick the numbers, and then He made the computer give them all the same set of numbers? After that it would have been a simple matter of guiding the number balls accordingly at the drawing. And yet this explanation seems somewhat unsatisfactory.
There is another detail: the matter of the suddenly rising tech stocks. The stock market may seem even more mysterious and capricious than the lottery. But free will is also involved there. After you buy shares of a stock, you are free to sell them at any time afterwards (as long as they don't go all the way down to $0).
A quick note: I've been tempted to refer to God as "She" or "Her." In a Kevin Smith film, I could do that. In this film, and its sort-of sequel Evan Almighty, I can't do that.