Good Monday morning everyone. We start this new week talking about gambling, and not for the first time. Of course, Pastor John, we have a handful of helpful episodes on this theme already in the podcast archive. Elsewhere, you've talked about how lotteries prey on the poor. It's a point you made in a 2016 article, which was titled "Seven Reasons Not to Play the Lottery." Reason number five was that it preys on the poor.

You made the point, but only briefly there. I'd like for you to dwell on this point here in the podcast. How does the lottery prey on the poor, and why should we care that it does? Let me begin with a few observations taken from various studies. First, just a quotation from that article that you mentioned that I wrote on this some time ago.

I said that the lottery supports and encourages a corrosive addiction that preys upon the greed and hopeless dreams of those entrapped in poverty. I gave this example. Those earning $13,000 or less spend an astounding 9% of their income on lottery tickets. That was a statistic from maybe six years ago or so.

Here's a few more recent things. People who make less than $10,000 a year spend on average $597 on lottery tickets. That's 6% of their income. Another observation. The odds of winning a state Powerball lottery are considerably less than being struck by lightning. For example, the odds of winning the January 21 Powerball drawing in Tennessee was one in 292.2 million, while the odds of a lightning strike death hover in the one in 2.3 million area.

It's a pretty weak possibility, to say the least. Let's clarify what we're talking about. We're not just talking about Powerball with its million-dollar payout. There are many different kinds of public gambling, lotteries, some far more destructive for the poor than others. Lotto America, Mega Millions, Lucky for Life, InstaPlay, Pull Tab, Scratch Games, all of these created by governments to help pay the bills.

So when we think of how the poor spend money on public lotteries, we must not just think about Powerball. In fact, even poor people recognize that the chances of winning millions are so remote, that's really not the main draw. That's not where poor people are spending their money. The main draw is Pull Tabs and Scratch Games.

You buy a ticket, so you can go online and just type in Scratch Games, Minnesota, and find what the offerings are. In Minnesota, the one-dollar ticket that you can buy online or you can buy at a guest station is called "Rake It In." That's the name of the ticket for one dollar.

You scratch it off and you'll know immediately if you've won. The payouts are like one dollar. You get one dollar, or ten, or fifty, or right up to five thousand. So in Minnesota, the extent for the scratch-offs are from one dollar all the way up to five thousand dollars.

These kinds of games are less attractive to middle-class people and upper-class people because adding ten dollars or a hundred dollars even to your bank account really doesn't make that much difference to a middle-class person. But to a poor person, ten, a hundred dollars, or five hundred dollars, that's like a windfall, and therefore the more frequent payout and the greater the likelihood of winning draws in disproportionately more poor people for these kinds of games than for, say, the big Powerball payout.

The poorest one-third of American households purchase one-half of the lottery tickets. The lowest one-fifth of earners in America have the highest percentage of lottery players. One study showed that the introduction of scratch-offs grew three times faster in poor areas than in others. But study after study has shown that across the board, players lose on average forty-seven cents for every dollar.

Or to say it another way, what you purchase on average when you spend a dollar on the lottery, what you purchase is fifty-three cents. And of course, that statistic is highly misleading because to arrive at that average of millions of people investing, you overlook the fact that millions of those people got exactly nothing.

And to bring the average up to getting back fifty-three cents on your dollar, you have to reckon that some people have won a million dollars, a very, very few people. So it's a truism to say the lottery did not become a million-dollar industry due to its large output of winners.

Not the way it works. It's true that states have created lotteries to help pay for social services that aim at benefiting everyone. But there are ironies. Most states allocate some of the lottery income to providing services for gambling addiction, and some try to provide a good kind of education, which creates, supposedly, habits of mind and heart, which are the opposite of the habits they exploit by the lottery itself.

Very ironic. Addictive behaviors are more common among the poor, and living by immediate rather than deferred gratification is more common among the poor. Publicly funded gambling feeds these kinds of habits, which are destructive to people's lives. Now, for all these reasons, the lottery has regularly been called a regressive tax on the poor.

Here's what that means. It's a way of luring the poor, who pay almost no taxes for social services, to pay a kind of tax in a way that worsens their situation rather than making it better, which is what taxes are supposed to do. They're supposed to make life better for us, and this is a regressive tax in the sense that it makes life worse for the poor rather than better.

Now, it would be easy to sarcastically say, "Well, no, actually, it's not a tax on the poor. It's a tax on the stupid." And I know there are a lot of people who think that way about the poor, as if the only factor in making a person poor is all their bad habits or, they might say, stupid habits.

And of course, it's true. Personal responsibility and the failure to act with righteousness and integrity and dependence on God through grace and through patience and through trust in Jesus Christ is a huge factor in why many people are poor. But there are many other factors as to why, say, a widow might be stuck economically earning $20,000 a year, working full-time and spending half her income on her apartment and unable to afford a car and facing physical and mental challenges few people know about that make advancement for her of any kind unlikely.

There are more factors. The number one reason why people in such seemingly hopeless situations purchase scratch-offs is because things already look so hopeless for improvement that the so-called stupidity of wasting this dollar won't really make any things worse, so why not try? That's, I think, basically the mindset that drives most of the purchases, a sense of hopelessness.

It's not going to make things worse because there's no hope that they could get better. And when you already feel hopeless, then arguments against gambling lose most of their force. Now, from a biblical and Christian point of view, then, I don't think we are the least bit encouraged by God's Word to stand aloof, roll our eyes at the stupidity of millions of dollars that roll into the state coffers from people who can barely pay their bills.

I don't think that is basically a Christian standpoint. When I read my Bible, I see a different disposition, a different heart, a different mind. For example, "Blessed is the one who considers the poor. In the day of trouble the Lord delivers him" (Psalm 41). "Whoever mocks the poor, insults his Maker.

He who is glad at calamity will not go unpunished" (Proverbs 17). "Whoever oppresses a poor man, insults his Maker, but he who is generous to the needy honors him" (Proverbs 14). "Open your mouth, judge righteously, defend the rights of the poor and the needy" (Proverbs 31). "God raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap" (Psalm 113).

So I think the upshot of all this for Christians is that we should disapprove of and resist an institution—every form of gambling, I would say. I've written about that elsewhere. We've talked about that APJ on several occasions. Just gambling itself is a major biblical problem. So I think we should resist all forms of gambling, all forms of lottery, which fly in the face of how God intends for His creatures to use the resources He has entrusted to us.

You don't gamble with somebody else's money. It's all God's. And we wittingly or unwittingly prey upon the vulnerabilities of the poor, and we should resist that kind of institution. And instead, we should give our thinking and praying and advocating and investing and planning toward, one, the removal of unnecessary barriers to productive work and gainful employment among the poor; two, the removal of incentives and allurements toward waste and squandering and irresponsibility; and three, instead seek to put in place encouragements toward deferred gratification; and finally, the creation of responsibility and hope, especially through the gospel in people's lives.

Yeah, you don't gamble with somebody else's money. That's a great point. Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for joining us today. You can ask a question of your own, search our growing archive, or subscribe to the podcast, all at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. We've all been there. Maybe you're there right now.

You see problems in every direction in your life. All you see are difficulties. You see your sins, your shortcomings, your challenges, the places in your life that have been neglected. And you are now tempted to live a life that has shrunk down to the size of all the problems that you see in your life.

Well, Pastor John has been there. And if this is where you're at, you need to hear what he learned from a season in his life. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. We'll see you back here on Wednesday for that. We'll see you shortly.