(upbeat music) We are joined once more by Dr. Vern Poitras. He has degrees from Cambridge and Harvard and Caltech and of course Westminster Theological Seminary where you now live and work. He's a genius, a New Testament scholar, a mathematician, a man who can talk with authority on just about any topic under the sun and we're talking about your book, "Chance and the Sovereignty of God, "a God-centered approach to probability "in random events," which was published in 2014.

At the end of this episode, I'll tell you how to get the book for free online. Yesterday we talked about coin tosses and today I want you to explain, without going into too much of the detail, just why are casinos confident of making a profit off of the gambling industry?

You explain the math in your book, but for us here in like five minutes, can you explain why casinos don't lose money in the end? - Oh, right, well, they make sure. (laughs) They wouldn't stay in business otherwise, but God has put in place in this world, in his governance of the world, regularities even with respect to what we call chance events, events that we cannot predict.

The thing of the shuffling of cards or if you've got a roulette table where there's a ball running around, God is in charge of all that. And part of the marvel of it, if we can separate it from some of the moral evils that crop up in gambling, part of the marvel of it is that there's regularities and faithfulness and such wonderful consistency, even in this area of so-called chance events, events that we cannot predict, but you see the regularities.

If for instance, you flip a coin a thousand times, roughly 500 of them are gonna be heads. Why is that? It's an expression of the wisdom of God and the faithfulness of God in a very specialized and small area. Well, the casinos and the lottery situation, they are actually the people, there are experts now who know about these regularities, they've studied them and they make sure that they're depending on those regularities.

They're depending on God, even if there is moral corruption by the people who use them, they're depending on those and they know that certain numbers are only gonna come up so much a percent of the time. So when they promise a payment, it'll be a little less, they'll take a little cut out of that.

On the average, the excitement for the gambler is, maybe I can win a bundle and you might, because we can't make those predictions. But if you make a bundle and you go back the next day and try to make another bundle, you'll probably lose it all back because in the long run, and this is the thing of God's regularity, in the long run, things average out.

And as I say, in these casinos and setups like that, the house, the owner is taking a small percentage. He wants to make it interesting, right? And he wants people to be there who have the excitement of sometimes winning, but he's taking a small percentage out with a roulette wheel, American roulette wheel, there's a zero and a double zero in addition to 36 numbers.

Now that's getting into the details, but if the ball falls on those two numbers, then you lose even bets. You can bet for odd, you can bet for even and zero and zero, zero, you lose. So that's the little percentage. It's about one out of 18. One out of 18 times, you're not gonna break even on the average.

So that little bit is enough for the casino to make its amount. The fact is that most people who are gamblers don't think in terms of those things. They think in terms of getting a break and it's as if they're worshiping lady luck. So again, the issue of idolatry is there in the background.

They think I can beat the odds because I'm special or something that I will do will give me a blessing, but they ought to be looking to God for a blessing. - Yeah, and we'll get to the ethics of gambling in just a moment, but I mean, this point is so huge.

We need to camp here for a minute because what you're saying is that God equally governs chance events and he rules over regularities and he does both of these things at the same time. I mean, this is mind-bending because I think even many good Calvinists would tend to assume that the 500/500 split on coin tosses, heads and tails is purely random naturalism.

But you're saying that divine law is what makes that predictability a reality. Unpack this for us more. - Yeah, it's because he's the God who is the creator, who's the innovator. So anything that is new, right, he's behind it. That's the element of the novelty and the unpredictability. And he's also a God of faithfulness who maintains the world in its place.

And the thing with the coins is just as a simple example, but it's related to the issue of weather. And there's a number of passages in scripture that make it clear that God brings the snow and the rain and sometimes a famine because there is no rain in a agricultural country.

God is in charge of all those things. But if you think of the snow, it's each individual snowflake contributing to the snow or it's each individual raindrop contributing to the rain. So there is a combination of this creativity. You don't know where each individual raindrop is gonna fall and of regularity, you know that there's gonna be rain.

And God is clearly showing in the scripture that he is to be thanked for the coming of rain with its combination of predictability and unpredictability. We can predict the seasons and that's promised by God in Genesis 8, right after the flood, he says, "See the summer and winter and see diamond harvest will not fail as long as the earth remains." That's God there.

And we think of weather. Yeah, I know we live in an environment, you know, where people pretend that God is absent, right? So weather is just weather. No, it isn't. It's God bringing the weather. The seasons are his doing and he's so faithful that we can make predictions, right?

And you can run the computers to make these weather models and it works pretty well. You're relying on the faithfulness of God. At the same time, you can't predict the weather on this day of the year, a year from now. That's something God already knows, but we don't. So it's both unpredictability and predictability.

And that combination is due to the fact that God is in harmony with himself, ultimately. It's creativity, the things that are new and surprising are in harmony with his faithfulness, the things that are the same. And so it can all be traced back to God. And in fact, to God as transheron God, because the differentiation of three persons is God is in back of the differentiations of the variations we see in the world.

There's a vast area here. I get excited even as I'm talking about it. There's a vast area for us to explore and praise God for and to recover the biblical teaching that God's hand is in all this. And it's not just, oh, this happens as if by a mechanism or without God being present.

- Yeah, and you should get excited. I mean, this point has stunning implications. Okay, now back to the ethics of gambling. It has been humorously said that gambling is a tax on people who are bad at math. And in the book, you write this, quote, "Gambling is a tax on people "who do not know probability theory," end quote.

But as you point out in the book, the essential problem is not bad calculations. The essential problem is bad hearts. And you write this, quote, "Gambling is a tax on alienation from God," end quote. That's powerful. I mean, perhaps another way we could say it is fundamentally gambling is a tax on people whose hearts are not satisfied in God.

Would you say that? - I would, yeah. Yeah, because it's related to the fact I want to trust in something, a break, some special event where I will get a windfall rather than trusting in God. It's an alienation of affections from where they should be. And that at a deep level, I mean, people, of course, many people will suppress what are their true motivations, because that's the way sin works, right?

You can seal from yourself some of the more rotten aspects of your own sinful tendencies. So people don't, aren't conscious of it, but underneath there is this discontent with what the lot God has given you. And sometimes discontent with the plodding nature of hard work. So, you know, if I'm putting in work in a job nine to five, five days a week, I'll get some benefit from that, but it's painful in a fallen world, and it takes a long time, and I'd rather get rich quick.

You know, that's what people think. - Yeah, okay, finally, anytime we address the lottery or gambling, Christian Skoff, we hear from people, people familiar with DG and John Piper, who will instinctively respond saying, you know, you fuddy-duddy fundamentalists, yes, I get the math, but leave me alone, it's just a hobby, you know, my 20 bucks in nickels for a casino slot machine on a Friday night, or my $5 scratch ticket, or my one lottery ticket I buy annually, it's all benign fun.

Get off my tail, Piper, get off my tail, Poythress, I'm not a God rejecter. What would you say to Christians who believe that gambling, even on a small scale, is a harmless side hobby? - Well, I mean, I think there's several things to say. One is that the issue of motivation is indeed primary, because Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount goes after that underlying issue.

So it's not simply a question, well, I can keep to the letter of the law, and then no matter where my heart is, it doesn't matter, it's for the rivers, you know. You've got to guard your heart, because from it are the issues of life. And the heart is deceitful, above all things, and desperately corrupt, Jeremiah.

So it's easy to conceal the fact underneath, you know, I wanna have fun, I wanna just have a relaxing time, yeah, but there are different ways of having fun and relaxing, and what is underneath that? So I think that has to be the challenge, rather than saying, mainly, we have a rule.

But there are other sides to the issue as well, because the whole gambling industry is intrinsically has areas of corruption. And I think the Puritans, they saw the destruction that came out of that more broadly, and they were just horrified by that. And it also takes place in terms of the question of, even if I win money, is it illicit games?

Because people talk about, the Proverbs has that first one, it says that if you seek for sudden riches, it's folly, but if you gain little by little, and of course, it's also the virtues of hard work, because that's the calling that God has given us. Then, you know, that's the way to follow the Lord's way.

So I think there are principles like that as well, that ought to make us ask a lot of questions about what are the motivations of the individual, but also what's the larger picture? And what makes me most sad is that there are people who they talk about an addiction as if an addiction is kind of like a medical thing, but it's really a spiritual addiction.

It's a bondage to sin, and there are people who are addicted gamblers, and they're destroying their families, and they get themselves into debt and all kinds of things. It preys, I'm told, a lot on the poor, because the poor are looking for a quick way out of all the struggles of their situation, and this seems to offer salvation.

And again, when I use that language, you can see, it's really a kind of counterfeit form of salvation. Here's what will get you out of your troubles. - It is, and it is a sobering way to end our time this week, but Dr. Poythress, thank you for being with us these past couple of days.

- You're welcome, I'm glad to have been here. - Dr. Vern Poythress, you can get his book, "Chance in the Sovereignty of God" for free at his website at frame-poythress.org, frame-poythress.org. The entire PDF is there, you can download it and read it. It's a book publishing strategy very similar to ours at Desiring God.

Well, we must break now for the weekend. On Monday, John Piper returns to answer a listener question who wants to know if sin has a necessary place in God's plan. Does sin have a necessary place in God's plan? It's an interesting way to put it. You can find all the stuff you need to enjoy and engage with this podcast at our online home at desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn.

I'm your host, Tony Reinke. I'll see you on Monday. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)