The odds are good that you know someone who wagered on sports in the past year. With the rise in online sports betting, the industry now makes more than all the US major pro sports leagues combined. Americans are expected to bet $35 billion on NFL games alone this season.
Gambling is not a new temptation, but I believe that the advent of online sports gambling raises the stakes considerably on how seriously Christian leaders should address questions around the moral and theological nature of gambling.
Online sports betting companies sponsor broadcasts and sports media, so the push to play is everywhere, and it’s easy to join in. People can register and pay in just a few taps right on their phones. Plus, tying it to sports makes the gambling seem more innocent than poker and blackjack.
While sports gambling in any form is currently illegal in some very large states—including California, Texas, and Georgia—online sports betting is now legal and available in the majority of the country. For states like Texas, where I live and pastor, it seems probable that gambling will be made legal eventually.
As I speak with Christian leaders and church members about gambling, I often encounter hesitation. There is a reluctance among Christians to condone gambling but not enough opposition to condemn it outright. I think many Christians aren’t quite sure what to make of the morality of gambling.
In fairness, the Scriptures do not speak to gambling with the same degree of clarity and forcefulness with which they address other vices like adultery, drunkenness, and theft. It leaves us with the question, “Is gambling sinful?”
In Proverbs 13:11, we see an admonition against the hasty pursuit of wealth: “Wealth gained hastily will dwindle, but whoever gathers little by little will increase it” (ESV). We are repeatedly warned about the love of money in the New Testament: “Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, ‘Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you’” (Heb. 13:5).
We are told in Ecclesiastes 5:10 that money will not satisfy. And 1 Timothy 6:9–10 warns that “those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.”
While 1 Timothy seems to come closest, it’s not a direct command to not gamble. Yet there are many things the Bible doesn’t specifically forbid that Christians of common sense and commitment to Scripture acknowledge as morally wrong. God’s Word doesn’t prohibit cocaine usage, but I don’t believe many Christians would treat the consumption of cocaine as morally neutral. Scripture doesn’t explicitly condemn dog fighting, but if a guy in your small group invited you over to watch his dachshunds square off in the backyard, I believe you’d have no problem objecting to that event.
While gambling of all kinds includes risk, wager, and gamesmanship, not all betting games should be measured in the same way. The extreme instances of foolishness in gambling may amount to sin, but is it wicked to wager ice cream with my daughter over a game of Uno? The beauty of the wisdom we find in Scripture, especially in the absence of clear biblical admonitions in favor of or against a specific thing, is that it provides principles for living prudently.
The ethics of gambling may appear to be hazy in Scripture, but the Bible’s regard for exploiting the plight of the poor is not. Beyond the question of individual morality, we must be honest about the predatory nature of gambling.
Israel’s prophets routinely castigate God’s people for their carelessness and exploitation of the poor. Many of Israel’s codes around money lending are given explicitly to prevent those with many resources to unfairly profit from those with less. This is what the gambling industry is built to accomplish: to exploit those who are eager to build wealth hastily, particularly those who feel as if they have no other viable option.
Big gambling companies have systems in place that limit sharps (people who make excellent bets) but intentionally don’t limit people who lose a lot. The expression “The house always wins” is not merely a statistical reality; it is a system of “game” that keeps gambling profitable for its purveyors.
Some modern readers may suggest that the Bible is not just apathetic toward the question of gambling but actually speaks in support of the enterprise. Proverbs 16:33 says, “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord.” We read that the priest Zechariah was chosen by lot to burn incense (Luke 1) and that the apostle who replaced Judas was chosen by way of casting lots—after the disciples prayed for the Lord to direct this apostolic selection (Acts 1).
Are these passages giving implicit approval to the betting, risk taking, and game approaches of gambling for money?
The casting of lots in ancient Israel is wrongly assumed to be a kind of random gambling for gain. While some mystery remains around the practice, we know that casting lots involved some way of rolling stones. Some scholars suggest that the Urim and Thummim the high priest carried were used for the casting of lots to determine God’s direction. We see in the Old Testament that priests were selected and some priestly duties were assigned by way of casting lots (1 Chron. 24:5, 31; 25:8; Neh. 10:34).
The casting of lots was never accompanied by a wager or profiteering bet of any kind. It becomes clear, then, that the casting of lots among God’s people was not some game of chance for financial gain but a practical way of putting trust in the Lord.
Lot casting was neither foolhardy in its application nor pursued for fun or wealth; it was a simple and ancient acknowledgment that decisions belong to God. However, these descriptive practices are never prescribed as a normative approach to discerning God’s will, and they shouldn’t be treated as such. Nor should they be treated as passages in support of gambling.
Is gambling sin? I don’t believe that Christians can see every instance of making a wager as sin. Is gambling wise? Rarely. Should Christians gamble? As a norm, I believe they should avoid it. Why? Well, not everything that is lawful is beneficial. There are things that don’t break the dictates of Scripture but are not wise.
Gambling treats what God has entrusted to our care with a spirit of carelessness. Its enterprise is exploitation, and its endgame is the hasty making and taking of wealth. Christians should be reluctant to participate in and support gambling of any kind, and I believe Christian leaders should begin addressing online sports gambling with clarity and precision now.
For fellow ministry leaders, here are five practical ways to address this issue:
1. Talk about money.
It is simply a failure of the church’s discipleship strategy that most Christians have no positive conception of wealth. If we don’t provide a coherent account of what wealth is, how wealth is gained, and how wealth can be stewarded for the good of households, communities, and churches, we should not be surprised if people squander it.
Most Christians in our churches have been presented with what appear to be two messages about money: Wealth corrupts, and you should give generously. Beyond the simple contradiction of these two messages, there is a lack of purpose and vision for the pursuit, stewardship, and maintenance of wealth.
The Christian shouldn’t worship wealth, but they also shouldn’t waste it.
2. Provide opportunities for healthy and fraternal competition.
Many men are drawn to sports gambling because of the competitive and communal nature of sports. In a digital age of exacerbated loneliness, men are flocking to online sports gambling to catch a whiff of something that they miss: fraternal play.
Christian leaders of all kinds can help engage in holistic discipleship by recovering simple invitations into fraternal play that benefit the men in their churches and communities. Host a charity golf tournament, organize a men’s softball team, or set up a pickleball league. As your brackets fill with men engaging in the embodied community of healthy competition, you are providing them a chance to practice a better way than what online sports gambling provides.
3. Speak prophetically to respectable and “fun” vices.
One reason the church is suspiciously silent about gambling is that it is not one of our “vicious vices.” Like gluttony of various kinds or slothfulness or bitterness, we don’t feel the same pressure to address gambling because it is a vice of abdication. When it reaches the point of sin, it is something close to a “sin of omission.” Gluttony is the abdication of self-control, sloth the abdication of work, and bitterness the withholding of forgiveness; and gambling can often become the surrender of stewardship.
We have to consider that sanctification includes not only growing to not do what we shouldn’t but also working to do what we’d rather not.
As the Book of Common Prayer confesses, “Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone.”
Gambling, in its worst forms, is the undoing of stewardship. It is leaving care for what God has entrusted to us “undone.”
4. Help people see that the system that allows for one person’s “harmless indulgence” is the same one that allows for another’s exploited enslavement.
The calculus of odds makers and gambling enterprises is to offer the illusion of opportunity so they can eventually take it all from participants. For some, losing $1,000 on the Super Bowl may be a negligible loss. But the same system that allows for this harmless play will take the last $100 of grocery money away from a gambling addict.
We exist in the context of communities. The pursuit of wisdom and righteousness will often mean suspending our freedoms to indulge in what is not harmful for us, specifically because it harms and hinders the weaker among us.
5. Tell your local, state, and national leaders that you don’t want to live in places with state-supported vice.
Even if you remain unconvinced as to the immorality and foolishness of gambling, it is a fact that gambling creates centrifugal energy for vice. Prostitution, trafficking, illegal drug sales and abuse, and violence are pulled toward centers of gambling. Wherever gambling is allowed to grow unchecked, the weeds of wickedness will grow abundantly.
If we truly are to “seek the peace and prosperity of the city” (Jer. 29:7), then we must oppose the cultivation of fertile soil for what is obviously wicked, evil, and dehumanizing. Gambling may be ethically gray, but it serves as the breeding ground for vices that are simple in their sinfulness.
To those who might believe that this is nothing but the moralizing of yesteryear, convinced that this same kind of reasoning was invoked to complain about the “young folks dancing” back in the traditional churches of our youth, I say, “You might be right.”
But I for one think we could do with a bit more gospel moralizing in these immoral days. I remain unconvinced that it is good for us to pretend as though the public, economic, and leisurely affairs of our civic life are better off without the principles of Scripture guiding them.
If you are inclined to disagree, then I guess all I have to say is “May the odds be ever in your favor.”
Kyle Worley is a pastor at Mosaic Church in Richardson, Texas, and hosts the Knowing Faith podcast with Jen Wilkin and J. T. English.
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