GAMBLING
Mark Green
The church of the Lord Jesus Christ has long recognized the evils of gambling and has insisted that its members strictly avoid them. This is a historical fact. The old Kehukee Association advised that it was wrong to hold in fellowship a member who cleared his land for race tracks, or allowed it to be done. When asked, in 1919, if it was wrong for a Primitive Baptist to raffle off his horse, Elder C. H. Cayce replied, “If a member of the Primitive Baptist Church has been engaged in such practice as raffling off his horse, the church should bring a charge against him for gambling at the first conference meeting and notify the guilty party of the charge, and then deal with him accordingly.” There can be little doubt about the strong historic stance of the church against this practice.
Some would object that there is nothing specifically listed in the Bible against gambling, and also that all life is a gamble, for we risk things every day in our ordinary transactions. To the first objection we would answer that the root of gambling lies in covetousness, and Paul tells us that the love of money is the root of all evil, or all kinds of evil. There are very strict prohibitions against God’s people joining with that which has the stench of evil about it. “Abstain from all appearance of evil,” Paul told the Thessalonians, and gambling certainly has that appearance. Where you find gambling you will commonly (indeed, usually) find drunkenness, marital infidelity, indecency, prostitution and organized crime, just to mention a few. Elder Sylvester Hassell noted in his history that the low morality of the latter part of the 17th century produced in the following century “an extraordinary and terrible crop of worldliness, selfishness, avarice, venality, wild speculation, lotteries, gambling, intemperance, profligacy, political corruption, robberies, murders, and almost social chaos.” That was a very sordid company that gambling kept in his day. There are activities that are so inextricably linked with all manner of evil that they should be strictly shunned by every decent person, and gambling is one of them. To the second objection above, we would reply that it is not calculated risk-taking in our everyday activities that we are speaking about, but the institutionalized games of chance that are such a plague upon society, and have been for centuries. Gambling has its basis in greed, and when the root is rotten the fruit can hardly be expected to be good.
In our day, gambling has put on a veneer of respectability by drawing the government, with its own insatiable greed for funds, into its web of deceit. Tax dollars from gambling are frequently earmarked for education or some other good cause in order to make the legalization of gambling more palatable to church-going folks, and therefore the end is supposed to justify the means. Is our educational system in such a condition that it must stoop to this source for its funding? Why not do the same with illegal drugs, if that is our logic? Why not do the same with any vice? If the only object is money, without regard to its source, then why be squeamish about the source at all? If an activity is justified by the fact that the taxes upon it are going to education, then why not stoop to the very lowest and most profitable of activities? We have started down a slippery slope of deceit with that sort of logic.
Government-sponsored gambling never tells the other side of the story. A professor at a Midwestern university has said that national statistics show that for every dollar the state gains from a gambling establishment, there are $3 in social costs, which come in the form of divorces, bankruptcies, embezzlements and other crimes – but that part of the tale is never told, is it? Mark Green, The Christian Pathway, April, 2006.