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[Distributed by Way of Life Literatureās Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Copyright by David W. Cloud. These articles cannot be stored on BBS or Internet sites and cannot be sold or placed by themselves or with other material in any electronic format for sale, but may be distributed for free by e-mail or by print. They must be left intact and nothing removed or changed, including these informational headers. This is a listing for Fundamental Baptists and other fundamentalist, Bible-believing Christians. Our goal is not devotional but is TO PROVIDE INFORMATION TO ASSIST PREACHERS IN THE PROTECTION OF THE CHURCHES IN THIS APOSTATE HOUR. If you desire to receive this type of material on a regular basis, e-mail us, give us your name, address, and the name of the church you are a member of, and request to be placed on the list. Please note that this is not a free service. We take up a quarterly offering to fund this ministry, and each subscriber is expected to participate. To unsubscribe or to submit a change of address, send your name and the request to fbns@wayoflife.org. This is not an automated list. Changes in the database often require two to four days to activate. Some of these articles are from O Timothy magazine. David W. Cloud, Editor. O Timothy is a monthly magazine in its 17th year of publication. Subscription is $20/yr. Way of Life publishes many helpful books. The catalog is located at the web site -- http://www.wayoflife.org/. The End Times Apostasy Online Database is also located at this site.]
September 30, 1996 (David W. Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061-0368, fbns@wayoflife.org) - The lottery is spreading gambling fever across the world. Only a few years ago there were no state-sponsored lotteries in AMERICA. The first was formed in 1964. Today 37 states and the District of Columbia encourage their citizens to throw their money away on lotteries, and the sale of tickets has exploded. In 1994 $482 BILLION was spent on lottery tickets nationwide (Newsday, "Gambling the New National Pastime," Dec. 3, 1995). In 1974 it was only $17 billion a year. An estimated one-third of all American adults buy lottery tickets. In New York State that figure is two-thirds. Americans spend more on lottery games than on movie tickets, plays, and all forms of recorded music combined; and they wager more each year than they spend on national defense (Ibid.).
More than $50 billion is spent on the lottery in the EUROPEAN COMMUNITY. In Spain the Christmas lottery, which offers more than $1 billion in prize money, is broadcast live on national television. In France, televised drawings of the lottery are often the most popular programs of the week (The Economist, "That's so Wicked We'll Do It Ourselves," April 11, 1992, p. 21). Lottery fever is so rampant in BRITAIN that a psychiatrist has discovered a new psychological ailment labeled "lottery stress disorder."
Lottery fever also rages in CANADA. The first national lottery financed the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, and in 1979 the provinces were granted control over public gambling. Gambling revenue nationwide has tripled since 1986 to almost $5 billion, and "governments are becoming as addicted as those who pawn their wedding rings" (Southam News, "Provinces Cash in on Growing Industry," Sept. 4, 1996). It is estimated that 70% of Canadian adults gamble in casinos, lotteries, and video lottery terminals (Ibid.). Statistics Canada reports that in 1992 alone, over two-thirds of Canadians spent an average $225 on government-run lottery tickets. On September 27, an infant was kidnapped from a Kelowna, British Columbia, hospital, "while more than 100 people, including staff, patients and the public were in the lobby waiting to hear who had won $500,000 in the hospital's Good Luck lottery draw" (The Edmonton Sun, Sept. 29, 1996). (The baby was found and returned safely to its mother.) The Canadian Online Explorer (Canoe) advertises its lottery page with this slogan: "Want to quit your job? Buy a new sports car? Spend money lavishly? Why not win the lottery!" The gambling industry in NOVA SCOTIA has an annual revenue of $760 million, almost twice the size of the fishing and farming industries combined (The Daily News, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Sept. 29, 1996). More than $350 million was spent on video lottery terminals in that province in 1995. In QUEBEC, revenues from lotteries, casinos and video lottery terminals totaled $2.2 billion in 1995 (Montreal Gazette, "Kicking the Gambling Habit," July 25, 1996). There are 14,500 video lottery terminals in bars and stores across the province. ONTARIO took in $1.47 billion in gross revenue from lottery games in 1995. Canada's poorest province, NEWFOUNDLAND, takes in more in gambling revenues than from corporate income tax: $73.5 million compared to $63 million (Calgary Herald, "VLT Gambling Terminal Disease for Canada's Unemployed," June 3, 1996). The ALBERTA government lottery revenue increased from $115 in 1993 to $545 million in 1995 (Edmonton Journal, "Alberta Hits Jackpot with Lottery Revenue," Feb. 20, 1996). Income from the lottery exceeds this province's revenue from health-care premiums, fuel, liquor, and tobacco. According to a study released by the Alberta Alcohol and Drug Abuse Commission in June 1996, two-thirds of young people aged 12 to 17 in the province of Alberta gamble. This is believed to be the most extensive survey of adolescent gambling ever done in North America (Canadian News Digest, June 5, 1996). The study found that some 49,000 Alberta adolescents are problem gamblers or at risk of becoming addicted.
THE GOVERNMENT ITSELF PAYS FOR ADS WHICH MAKE QUICK RICHES APPEAR TO BE THE SOLUTION TO LIFE'S PROBLEMS. Each year U.S. state governments spend more than $300 million in lottery advertisements. An ad in New York, where the odds of winning the top prize are about one in 12.9 million, depicts "Happy Gary," a car salesman who wins the lottery, gives away his cars and heads for the Bahamas. Another ad shows a winner floating in a pool outside his new mansion. The New York lottery slogan since 1967 has been "All you need is a dollar and a dream," and ads depict people daydreaming about being rich. A Washington State ad shows a line of workers punching a time clock. An announcer says, "Nothing satisfies the soul so much as honest toil and seeing through a job well done." As if to mock this philosophy of life, the man at the end of the line, a lottery winner, takes his time sheet and throws it out the window, and the announcer adds, "Of course, having a whole bunch of money's not bad either." New York spent $41 million on such ads in 1995. The lottery commission purchased more than 16,000 radio spots in New York City alone. A billboard, erected in an impoverished section of Chicago's West Side, advertised the Illinois lottery with these words: "How to get from Washington Boulevard to Easy Street -- Play the Illinois lottery."
The ads work. Describing the gambling frenzy in Arizona when the lotto jackpot reached $23 million, a newspaper said, "People are buying (tickets) all over the state. It's crazy everywhere." The frenzy is even higher at times in England, where 90% of adults purchased a lottery ticket in the first week of January (Ian Cotton, Unreality Bites, p. 33).
Not only are the state governments addicting their citizens to gambling, THE GOVERNMENTS THEMSELVES HAVE BECOME ADDICTED TO GAMBLING INCOME. New York raked in more than $3 billion in 1994. It is usually claimed that the revenue goes to fund education and other endeavors, but many states put the income into the general budget. In some states, taxes have been raised for education in spite of the promise that lottery revenue would meet the need. New York raised $1.24 billion in 1994, but this did nothing to increase the amount spent on education. "The State Legislature simply puts that much less from the general fund into the education budget." A national study shows that states that earmark some or all of their gambling revenues for education, less than 4 percent of the education budget goes towards schools (Paul Scianna, Missouri Family Policy Center, Straight Talk, Family Research Council, Jan. 17, 1996).
THE RESULT OF THE GAMBLING EXPLOSION HAS BEEN PREDICTABLE. The number of Gamblers Anonymous groups in the U.S. has doubled since 1980, to 1,200. There were 40,000 calls to the Council on Compulsive Gambling's national hotline in 1994. Gambling researcher Rachel Volberg, in a 1991 study in Connecticut, found that pathological gamblers were costing the state nearly $200 million more than it received from legal gambling. Gambling is resulting in increased family breakup, suicide, crime, and overwhelming personal debt. In a warning to government leaders in Ontario, which is phasing in video lottery terminals this year, Robert Goodman predicted that the province must "expect an increase in embezzlement, insurance and credit card fraud, theft, bad cheques, family problems and domestic violence" (Windsor Star, "Author Spells out Video Gaming Danger, July 9, 1996). "A survey of compulsive gamblers by University of Illinois researcher Henry Lesieur found that 22 percent became divorced because of gambling, 40 percent lost a job, 49 percent stole from their employers to cover debts and 79 percent said they wanted to die. Two-thirds of compulsive gamblers commit other crimes to pay for their habit, several studies have found" (William Falk, "Gambling the New National Pastime," Newsday, Dec. 3, 1995). Compulsive gamblers have an average gambling debt of $43,000, and 85 percent of them have stolen from their employers in an attempt to pay their debts.
Some researchers believe gambling is the fastest-growing addiction among teenagers. The director of the Maryland Council on Compulsive Gambling blamed the lottery for the steep rise in two new classes of compulsive gamblers--women and teenagers (Sword of the Lord, Nov. 20, 1992). A survey among college students revealed that roughly one-fourth gamble at least once a week. As noted earlier, an extensive survey completed this year in Canada found that two-thirds of young people aged 12-17 in Alberta are gamblers, and large numbers are in danger of becoming addicted. Jeffrey Devevensky, director of McGill University's school of applied and child psychology, observed that "this is the first generation of kids who have grown up in a society where gambling has been totally legalized." What will be the frightful result of this unbridled lust for easy riches?
State-sponsored lotteries have unleashed a gambling fever which is expanding in other directions. There are more than 500 CASINOS in America today, and casino gambling is allowed in 23 states. Minnesota has more casinos than Atlantic City. "In Mississippi, more money was gambled in casinos in 1994 than was spent on all taxable retail goods" (Newsday, Dec. 3, 1995).
One of the newest gambling rages is VIDEO LOTTERY TERMINALS (VLT), which, because of their extremely addictive character, have been called the "crack cocaine of gambling." Robert Goodman calls VLT "McGambling -- gambling's fast food equivalent." These are extremely popular among young people who have grown up with video games. The VLTs are similar to slot machines, in that the customer feeds coins into the terminal and looks for matches on the numbers or cards or cherries which spin at the drop of the coin. In St. John's, Newfoundland, a province with 20% unemployment, many of the bars are filled with patrons seven days a week, and one of the big draws are the VLTs. There "is hope that a loonie or two plugged into one of the ubiquitous video lottery terminals will return a jackpot. It is that hope that keeps machines everywhere blinking in four-color neon and eating coin after coin, quietly humming a siren song that draws the poor to their promise everywhere in Canada" (Calgary Herald, "VLT Gambling Terminal Disease for Canada's Unemployed," June 3, 1996).
The Bible repeatedly warns against seeking easy wealth. Covetousness is a sin that is placed in the same category as immorality. In fact, God's Word calls it idolatry, because it puts the things of this world in the place of God in one's heart. "Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and COVETOUSNESS, WHICH IS IDOLATRY" (Col. 5:3). God instructs His people, rather, to seek to be contented with basic needs and to focus on serving Him and laying up treasures in Heaven --
"Labour not to be rich: cease from thine own wisdom. Wilt thou set thine eyes upon that which is not? for riches certainly make themselves wings; they fly away as an eagle toward heaven" (Prov. 23:4,5).
"Remove far from me vanity and lies: give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me: Lest I be full, and deny thee, and say, Who is the LORD? or lest I be poor, and steal, and take the name of my God in vain." (Prov. 30:8,9).
"Wealth gotten by vanity shall be diminished: but he that gathereth by labour shall increase" (Prov. 13:11).
"Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the desire: this is also vanity and vexation of spirit" (Ecc. 6:9).
"He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver; nor he that loveth abundance with increase: this is also vanity. When goods increase, they are increased that eat them: and what good is there to the owners thereof, saving the beholding of them with their eyes? The sleep of a labouring man is sweet, whether he eat little or much: but the abundance of the rich will not suffer him to sleep" (Ecc. 5:10-12).
"But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. And having food and raiment let us be therewith content. But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows. But thou, O man of God, flee these things; and follow after righteousness, godliness, faith, love, patience, meekness" (1 Timothy 6:6-11).
"Let your conversation be without covetousness; and be content with such things as ye have: for he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee. So that we may boldly say, The Lord is my helper, and I will not fear what man shall do unto me" (Hebrews 13:5,6).
"Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also" (Matthew 6:19-21).
The philosophy behind gambling and lotteries is 180 degrees contrary to these biblical injunctions. The lotteries encourage covetousness. They create a lust for easy riches. They mock contentment. The message of the lottery is that wealth would solve your problems and end your difficulties.
The Bible exposes the lottery for the lie that it is.
It is a bad testimony for a Christian to commit himself and his money to "Lady Luck." Our faith is in our Saviour God who has promised never to leave nor forsake us. Let the world, which is stumbling in darkness, trust the mythical "Lady Luck." We are not in darkness that we should participate in such folly. We know the One who is in control of the circumstances of our lives, and it is NOT Lady Luck!
"And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose" (Romans 8:28).
David Cloud dcloud@wayoflife.org http://www.wayoflife.org/
1701 Harns Rd., Oak Harbor, WA 98277
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