It promises an easy solution to all of your problems, but too often it doesn't provide what it promises. So why is gambling so tempting? And is it always wrong for Christians? John McArthur looks at that today on Grace to You. Well, it used to be you'd have to go to Las Vegas or Atlantic City to gamble, but now you can simply go to the nearest convenience store or even gamble online in your living room. So, what about gambling? Why should it concern you? What are the dangers that you'd look out for? John McArthur looks at that very topic today on Grace To You. His study is called, So, What's Wrong With Gambling? John, these days it seems gambling is more socially acceptable than it used to be and much more a part of mainstream culture, yet as harmless as the trend may appear, if it concerns you enough to address it, let me ask, why is that? Well, there are a number of reasons, Carl, why it needed to be addressed. First of all, because it's a moral issue, and it falls under the category of stewardship as far as the realm in which we deal with it. What we have that God has given to us, we become stewards of. And what are the principles by which that stewardship is carried out. Certainly gambling with what God gives us, in other words, you know, basically throwing it to the wind in the hopes that something good is going to happen, is not an act of good stewardship. Obviously, we realize as well that it's a very seductive kind of behavior which can so control an individual that they are virtually helpless in their gambling, and that's why we have organizations like Gambling Anonymous. It makes poor people poorer. It promises people what it never will deliver. It's very destructive for these and many other reasons. And because I think the Bible does speak to this issue, we wanted to help people understand what's wrong with gambling. And that's what we're going to do in this broadcast. I think you're going to be fascinated by it because everybody kind of toys with the lottery to one degree or another. You're going to see that God's Word is not silent on the issue of gambling. And if you have a problem with it, this is especially going to be helpful to you. So stay with us for the series on what's wrong with gambling. What's your view of gambling? Is it no big deal? Is it sinful to even play cards? Somewhere in the middle, maybe? Well, find out what Scripture says about gambling and the very real dangers in John MacArthur's study, So, What's Wrong with Gambling? America is on a gambling binge. It is the new invisible addiction assaulting millions of people in our country and around the world. The lottery has become the number one American fantasy. Estimates of the total amount wagered are very difficult to come to. It's hard to be exactly accurate. We do know that there is about $500 billion wagered every year legally in America. and estimates up to one trillion dollars totally when you add the illegal gambling. The best statistics indicate that there are about ten million compulsive gamblers, and that's more than the number of alcoholics. America is fast becoming a land of gamblers. And not only legal gambling, but illegal gambling makes the actual effect and impact of this thing almost incalculable. Lest you think that's something new, it isn't. We like to look back at the foundations of our country and assume that everything was as it ought to have been in the early Christian beginnings of America. But gambling, in fact, played a very prominent role in early American history. When Columbus came over here and discovered America, his little boats were filled with sailors who gambled away much of their time crossing the Atlantic by playing dice and playing cards. In landing here, they therefore brought their gambling interests with them and it took root in the new nation. In 1612, the British government ran a lottery to assist the new settlement at Jamestown, Virginia. And the father of our country, George Washington, wisely declared, quote, gambling is the child of avarice, or greed, the brother of iniquity and the father of mischief. And we certainly agree with George, however, he himself kept a full diary of his own winnings and losses. In 1776, the First Continental Congress of the United States sold lottery tickets to finance the American Revolution. President Washington himself bought the first lottery ticket to build the new capital called Federal City, now known as Washington, D.C. So our nation was founded on a lottery. The Revolution was financed by a lottery and our capital city was financed by a lottery. From 1790 to 1860, 24 of the 36 states sponsored government-run lotteries. In many schools, universities, colleges, hundreds of churches conducted their own lotteries to raise funds for their own buildings. Now through this period of early American history and involvement with lotteries and government-sponsored gambling, the voice of the church was somewhat uncertain. The church early on was becoming liberal. There were liberal elements that supported these lotteries, and this gambling, the Catholic church to this very day has had an uninterrupted interest in gambling and in lotteries to finance its operations. But the early church also had some detractors. There were some among the Puritans and some among the Quakers, even the Baptists and the Methodists who tended to be the evangelicals, took up, as it were, verbal arms against this government-sponsored gambling. Cotton Mather, one of the early American Puritan preachers, preached against gambling as the denial of the providential control of God. And Puritans and Quakers generally followed and echoing his very message garnered a hearing in places. Yet, the professor of ethics of all subjects at Harvard College, William Ames, defended gambling. In fact, Harvard financed the erection of its building by a lottery and the University of Pennsylvania raised its operational budget through gambling. And there was a protest by none other than Francis Scott Key who was the author of our National Anthem. He was one of the great laymen of the church of his day, was a member of the American Episcopal Church. He was evangelical in his convictions. And he introduced a resolution to the General Convention of 1817 calling on that body to condemn gambling as inconsistent with Christian sobriety. dangerous to the morals of the members of the church and peculiarly unbecoming to the character of Christians. But the Episcopalian church declared his resolution unnecessary. The church struggled a little bit in dealing with gambling because they couldn't point to a verse that said, thus saith the Lord, thou shalt not gamble. But they did denounce it as socially harmful and inconsistent with the biblical view of God and with a Christian's understanding of good stewardship. Methodists and Baptists, Puritans and Quakers began some evangelical activism and began to attack this government-sponsored gambling. Under this attack and because of the increasing corruption of the gambling, by 1894 it had disappeared from America. By 1894 there was no more government-sponsored gambling. It ended in corruption and in a financial fiasco. And public gambling at any level was stopped cold at that time because John Wanamaker, who was famous for the department store in Philadelphia but was quite a noble Christian, was the postmaster general of the United States and an evangelical and he barred, quote, all letters, parcels, postcards, circulars, lists of drawings, tickets and other materials referring to lotteries from the mail. And so gambling came to a halt in 1894. And between 1894 and 1964, there was no government-sponsored gambling in America. In 1964, it was reintroduced by the state of New Hampshire, which became the first state to offer a lottery. And now there are 37 states that have government-sponsored lotteries and Washington, D.C. makes 38 entities. There are over 500 casinos across the nation, mostly on Indian reservation land where the government allows them to just about do anything they want to do tax-free as reparations for early American encroachment into the West as settlers came and battled against the Indians, the Native Americans. In 1974, this ten years later, a Gallup poll indicated 61 percent of Americans gambled, wagering $47.4 billion annually. In 1989, 71 percent were wagering $246 billion. In 1992, $330 billion was being wagered. By 1995, studies indicate 95 percent of Americans gambled. Eighty-two percent play the lottery. Seventy-five percent play slot machines. Fifty percent bet on dogs and horses. Forty-four percent on cards. Thirty-four percent on bingo. Twenty-six percent, that's better than one out of four on sporting events. Seventy-four percent frequented casinos. And eighty-nine percent approved of gambling. That means there were six percent who didn't approve but gambled anyway. Interesting. Well, a lot of us don't approve of everything we do. Is that not true? This area of legalized gambling has paralleled the general trend in America toward permissiveness, sex, pornography, drugs and materialism. It's just kind of ridden the crest of that same wave. No longer is gambling confined to Las Vegas and no longer even to Las Vegas and Atlantic City. It is the national addiction. It is everywhere across this country. And as I said, most of the casinos can now be built in various land which was once reservation land and therefore is outside the purview of general national law. Gambling expenditures each year exceed the amount spent on films, books, amusements, music, entertainment combined. people spend more money gambling than do buying tickets to all national athletic events put together, baseball, football, everything else. In 1993, people spent $400 billion. That's legal, and it's at least that much again and not, if not more, illegally. They spent $400 billion in 1993 legally, $482 billion in 1994. And now it's exceeded that, as I said earlier, it's well over 500 billion. Five billion is spent every year just in the slot machines in Nevada alone. Ninety-two million households visit the casinos and ten percent of all money earned by people in America is thrown away in gambling. And frankly, the future is very bright for the gambling industry because they're now adding to their casinos theme parks with the singular goal of attracting children so they can turn them into gamblers at the earliest possible age. And that is a very successful operation. They want to make your little children gamblers. Ninety percent of today's teenagers have gambled. So that's how successful they've been at this. College students are up to eight times more likely to develop gambling addiction than their parents because they have been susceptible to this tremendous escalation in state-run lotteries, development of casinos in the last few years, and this attempt to draw them in. People earning less than $10,000 annually buy more lottery tickets than any other income group. And gambling is linked to organized crime at every level. And speaking with an LAPD officer in the vice area here, been there for over 25 years with special assignment to gambling, he told me some very interesting things about gambling in our own city, illegal gambling, which goes on at a far greater pace than any of us would ever imagine. Some of you, no doubt, in an audience this size, are involved in this. The money earned by those who operate the gambling business is largely laundered through pornography and prostitution. In one four-square-mile area of Los Angeles, just four square miles, there are 120 bookmaking parlors for horse races alone and many more all over the city. Heaviest lottery spending comes from the poorest ethnic groups in the poorest part of the community. New technology makes gambling readily available by telephone. It is now on the internet and you can now gamble with money you don't have by using your credit card, confounding your indebtedness even further. There are so many anecdotes that I read in the last couple of weeks about this that talk about young people getting involved, committing suicide, turning their girlfriends into prostitutes, so many, many sad stories. I could tell you story after story, but you need to know that the large number of statistics indicate how many real stories there are. Now the question comes up, and I've been asked this several times, since the lottery has become such a prominent thing in the state of California, people have often asked me this question, what is the proper definition of gambling? What is the proper definition of gambling? And I want to give you that. I want to answer that question so that you understand what gambling is. If we're going to deal with it biblically, we need to know what we're talking about. Now let me say this first of all. Gambling is not taking a risk. There is risk in gambling, but that's not...that's too simplistic a definition. There's risk in everything. I mean, life basically is risk because we don't know what tomorrow brings. Your life is a vapor for appearing for a little time and vanishes away, and you can't even say, tomorrow I'll do this or tomorrow I'll do that, James says, because you don't know. We all understand there is risk. It's an uncertain world, and life itself is uncertain. And there are many legitimate labors and many legitimate investments and many legitimate things that you do that have risk tied to them, but they're not gambling. And the reason they're not is because the risk is connected, listen carefully, to reasonable, wise and manageable processes and rewards. For example, if you're a farmer, there is risk. You made a profit from last year's crop, you take all the money you made, you go down and you buy seed and you buy a new tractor or whatever equipment you need and you basically put all your money in the soil with the hope that you're going to receive five-fold on that investment when the harvest comes in. But if you have a terrible winter, or if you have a blight, or if you have a locust invasion, or whatever it might be, you could lose everything. Or it could well be that your investment succeeded, your crop came in, but unfortunately they were producing the same thing in the Philippines at a third the price because labor is so much more cheap and land is so much more cheap and you have no place in the market. You have to sell at a loss. There's risk in any kind of business. That's not what we're talking about. That's just the way life goes. You might decide to start a company, and you've figured out how to build a better mousetrap, and you've got your little mousetrap all figured out, and you know the world is going to come running to the feet of the one with the better mousetrap. And boy, the day yours comes out, you're going to be so excited. But one week before yours arrives in the market, a better one than yours came out, and you didn't know somebody was working on it. Sorry. You made your best effort, you used wise management, you got people who studied and you did some surveys and you did all you could, but there's risk in that. Some young people go to college and they spend a fortune for four years to get a college education, believing that they're going to go down a certain track, and by the time they come out, there's no job opportunities. I think of so many people who went through that in the engineering field when there was such a cutback on military engineering effort, and people who were engineers wound up doing all kinds of things, flipping hamburgers and things like that because there just was no market. Life is full of risk. People say, well, is putting money in the stock market gambling? No, because what you're doing is investing, and if you do it well and wisely, you're going to look at a company, and all you're doing is taking apart ownership in a company, a company that is large enough to have gone public, successful enough to produce at a level to produce that kind of income that it could go public, and you're saying, I think it's a wise use of my money to invest in that company. It may go up, it may not, but that's the way life goes. In anything in life, there's risk. But investment has risk, but it's manageable. It's based on rationality or reason, wisdom, and it promises a reward if it's used carefully. You bought a house. Some of you bought a house at a high price during the time when real estate was inflated. And you figured that prices were just going to go up and your whole future was in this house and your retirement was in this house and all of a sudden there was a turn and the value of your house started to drop. I know even the house I live in dropped to half of what it at one time was worth. Fortunately, I bought it long before it ever got to that high point. But many of you didn't. You bought a house and now it's got a mortgage on it that's more than what it's worth. And you thought your future was going to be secure because there was going to be enough in your house to retire. And it was a wise decision. And how do you know what the future is going to bring to bear? And you still don't know what yet may come. But life has risk. We're not talking about a risk which is a rational thing, which has some track record of experience to which you can apply some wisdom, and over which you have some control. Even insurance is a risk. Do you know, I risk a lot of money that I'm going to die. Do you know that? I have insurance on my car. I have insurance on my house. I have insurance on, you know, my books. I have insurance. I have a lot of insurance. And so, you know what's going to happen? We're going to waste all this money and get raptured. But I mean, I can't convince my wife that I shouldn't buy some insurance for her because, you know, she wants to be sure that she and the children are cared for. And that makes reasonable sense to me. And it's a manageable kind of risk, but it's a risk you're hedging against the unknown. Where there's reasonable, manageable risk, you don't have gambling. Gambling is not simply risk. The word gamble, gambling, gambler are related to the word game. They come from an old English word, gammon. It's the idea of a game. Gambling is a game. It is not a game based on skill. It is not a game based on reason. And it is not a game based on anything controllable. It is a game based on sheer chance. Gambling is an appeal to sheer chance, random luck without skill or one's personal involvement. That's gambling. It's not like competing for a prize where you have to produce something or run faster than somebody else or do something better than someone else does because you have control over that. That's a rational, manageable, controllable activity. is not like that. It's not like risking in business for a return. It is an appeal to sheer chance without any control, purely random. Let me give you a definition, a formal definition, sort of summing up what I've been saying. Gambling is an activity in which a person risks something of value, usually money. It's an activity in which a person risks something of value to forces of chance. completely beyond his control or any rational expectation. That's it. It is an activity in which a person risks something of value to forces of chance completely beyond his control or any rational expectation in hope of winning something of greater value, usually more money. But it's an appeal to sheer chance. The foolish thing about chance is the idea that if you do it, longer, your odds get better. That's not true, because there are no controllable elements, so the odds cannot be reduced. Pure chance, sheer random luck never changes its odds. You have about as much chance of winning the lottery as being eaten by a shark on dry land. Now gambling, this appeal to sheer chance, has devastating effects. I don't want to talk about those effects for a few minutes. It provides wealth for a handful of people at the expense of the masses, mostly the poor. People in the lowest income bracket spend four times as much of their income on gambling as others. Gambling is the exploitation of the poor. It is the exploitation of the uneducated. It is the exploitation of the undisciplined, the people who lack self-control. It is the exploitation of the lazy people. It is unthinkable in my mind that a government supposed to exist for the welfare of the people, a government of the people, by the people, for the people, said Abraham Lincoln. It is inexplicable to me that a government for the benefit of the people would get to the place where our government has, where it exploits the poor to the degree that it does. And the exploitation is massive. On the one hand, you hear all of this promotion, all of this constant promotion about raising the taxes of the wealthy. taxing the wealthy, the people who work hard, the people who produce, the people who are successful, increasing and increasing and increasing their burden of tax, which of course limits the people they can hire because they have to give so much of their money to the government they have to cut back on their workforce. On the one hand, the government is saying, We've got to give benefits to the poor, benefits to the poor, tax the rich, tax the rich, tax the successful people, and let's give benefits to the poor. At the same time, in an absolutely clear act of hypocrisy, the government institutes government-funded or government-sponsored gambling and exploits the poor. Takes money right out of their hands under the fantasy and the seduction that somehow they're going to get rich. And gambling exploits the poor and the undisciplined and the weak. because it increases their debt, it demeans work, it robs families of their resources, it breaks up marriages, it leads to suicide, and it produces crime. They used to say that if we bring in gambling, it will build up all the businesses. If we create a big casino world, they said, in Atlantic City, it will build up all the businesses. The fact of the matter is, it doesn't do that. It doesn't do it at all. Since Atlantic City legalized gambling in 1976, its population has shrunk 20%. Unemployment is higher. Crimes are up 380%. The police force has doubled. Half of the 2,100 businesses have closed. And four of the past six mayors have been indicted for corruption. Three are currently serving jail terms. Gambling doesn't alleviate social ills. It just generates. That sobering warning comes from John MacArthur. He's president of the Master's College and Seminary. His message today is from his current study on Grace To You called, So What's Wrong With Gambling? Now, if you're being encouraged and strengthened by John's teaching, let me remind you that this broadcast is available in your community because of the faithful support of listeners just like yourself. To partner with this ministry and help believers around the world benefit from John's verse-by-verse teaching, make a donation as you contact us today. You can express your support when you write to us at Grace To You, Box 4000, Panorama City, California, 91412, Or you can donate when you call toll-free 1-800-55-grace. Or remember you can also give online at gty.org. While you're at that website, be certain to take advantage of the thousands of free resources available. For example, you'll find previous broadcasts like this one, video clips of John's various conferences and television appearances, and the Grace to You blog. You can also download any or all of John's sermons, more than 3,400 titles currently, free of charge in the MP3 or transcript format. That web address again, gty.org. This reminder, John is the president of the Masters College and Seminary, both schools in the Los Angeles area. To get more information about either of these accredited institutions, you can find links to the college and the seminary when you visit the Grace to You website, gty.org. And now for John McArthur and the staff, I'm your host, Carl Miller, wishing you a great weekend, reminding you to watch Grace to You television Sundays on DirecTV, channel 378, or watch online at gty.org. And then join us here next week as John continues unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace to You. You might think it's just harmless fun, just a game, but John MacArthur will show you there's a side of gambling you may have never considered. That's next week, here on Grace To You.