"Moody board chairman and top author Jerry B. Jenkins is among Christians who have taken up tournament poker."

[Greg Long]

For the biblical case against gambling, see http://teampyro.blogspot.com/2009/11/is-gambling-ok-dont-bet-on-it.html

Thanks for sharing, Greg. I don’t necessarily agree with his conclusion, but I think this is probably the best case that can be made from Biblical principle.

Controlled gambling (i.e. limited buy-in games as mentioned in the WORLD article) can avoid the excesses wild wastefulness. In essence, its no different from expending money on skydiving or watching movies. There is a certain amount of enjoyment that comes from an activity.

Gambling can be a form of stealing…I view the lottery system as a “tax on poor people who can’t do math.” But the lottery is different than poker in every way. Poker is like two kids playing rock/paper/scissors in the lunchroom to see who eats the Lunchables and who gets stuck with the PB & J.

Years ago I knew a non-Christian who owned a Sporting Goods store. His main items for sale were bikes and skis. The store also sold skateboards. But after a while, he dumped the skateboards and would not sell them or their replacement parts. His reason? He didn’t want in his store the “culture” that came with shoppers of skateboards. There was nothing wrong with skateboards themselves, but they had an undesirable set of traits that came with them. The same thing applies here. It isn’t “just” the poker game, its the entire casino context. When the apostle John admonishes us to love not the world, neither the things that are in the world (1 John 2:15), the temptation for believers is to think like the certain lawyer in Luke 10 who was wanting to justify himself and asked Jesus “and who is my neighbor?” Applied to 1 John 2:15 we like to react to John’s instruction by asking “and what is the world?” seeking to justify our actions and desires. From what little I know about casinos as advertised in our culture and as I have heard from those who have been to them, I cannot understand how the casino scene would not fall safely within the bounds of “love not the world.” On the contrary, the casino scene is more what I would picture that led to God telling Noah to start building an ark.

Ten years ago Bill Bennett was scalded by the liberal media, because he wrote so many books about “Virtues” and spoke so often on the subject, but was a gambler himself. They mocked him mercilessly for his hypocrisy. He quit gambling.

See, for instance http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/readme/2003/05/bill_ben….

Funny, even though the secular media sees hypocrisy in preaching virtue while gambling at casinos, Christians find gaming at casinos belongs in the area of Christian Liberty, because the Bible says nothing about it.