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What about gambling?

What about gambling?

JULY 24, 2020

/ Programs / Key Life / What about gambling?

Steve Brown:
What about gambling? The answer to that and other questions on Key Life.

Matthew Porter:
This is Key Life dedicated to the message that the only people who get any better are those who know that if they don’t get any better, God will still love them anyway. That teaching raises a lot of questions. So here’s author and seminary professor Steve Brown, along with Pete Alwinson from ForgeBibleStudy.com with answers to the Bible, that’ll make you free.

Steve Brown:
Thank you Matthew. Hi Peter.

Pete Alwinson:
Hey buddy. How you doing?

Steve Brown:
I’m doing good.

Pete Alwinson:
Good, good, good.

Steve Brown:
You got a cough?

Pete Alwinson:
No. I don’t have a cough.

Steve Brown:
You have a fever?

Pete Alwinson:
No, I don’t. Do you? Cause you and I.

Steve Brown:
Well, sometimes,

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah?

Steve Brown:
You know, I could, you could die,

Pete Alwinson:
[Laughing]

Steve Brown:
coming into the studio this way.

Pete Alwinson:
It’s all clean. They just cleaned it.

Steve Brown:
Yeah. We have a lady who keeps Key Life together. Her name’s Cathy and she sanitizes everything. And so I’m sitting in front of a sanitized microphone in a studio, looking at a sanitized big screen, sitting in front of a sanitized keyboard, sitting across from the glass booth where a producer Jeremy is sanitized and I’m clean. So we’re, we’re okay.

Pete Alwinson:
We’re clean in Christ.

Steve Brown:
There you go. You can’t, doesn’t get better than that.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
By the way, that’s Pete Alwinson. And he comes in as you know on Wednesdays and we answer some of the many questions that we get to you, from you. We love your questions and we take them seriously. You can ask a question 24 seven, you can call 1-800-KEY-LIFE, record your question. And sometimes we place you, uh, on the air with us. Or you can send your question to

Key Life Network
P.O. Box 5000
Maitland, Florida 32794

If you live in Canada, it’s.

Key Life Canada
P.O. Box 28060
Waterloo, Ontario N2L 6J8

Or you can email us at [email protected]. And if you can help us out financially, that will be a plus. And I promise we’ll squeeze every dime for the glory of God. You can charge it on your credit card, include it in your envelope and we’ll rise up and call you blessed. And if you can’t, we understand that too, say a prayer for this ministry that we pay the bills and we always have, and that we’re able to eat. And we obviously always have. So, but that doesn’t mean that if God has told you to send money, not to do it or you’ll get the fever and hives. So, um, uh, help us if he can, if you can’t do say a prayer and Pete why don’t you lead us in prayer and we’ll get to some of these questions.

Pete Alwinson:
Sounds good. Father, it’s so good to come to you in prayer. Thank you that many times a day, we can, um, come back to the reality that we belong to the God of the universe who made us, who knows us, who loves us, who redeemed us, who has a plan for our life. And we honor you. We praise you. And father, in these days still, so many people wonder what’s going to be up around the corner. And we live many of us in fear and trembling. And in, in, in anxiety and Lord, we just come and we give you right now, our anxieties and our fears. We trust you. We believe in you. We know that you will never leave us nor forsake us and that, and that the Gospel is real and true, and we can build our lives upon it. So Lord, you know who we are, you know, our needs. And we come to you. We thank you for Key Life. Thanks for Steve. Thanks for those that do so much behind the scenes. So we pray that you would bless this ministry for your glory. We pray for our leaders, teachers, worship directors who will stand before us, our priests and pastors this Sunday, may they have the grace to bring us the Gospel, to lead us into the presence of the triune God, and to cause us to honor and glorify you. We commit this time to you now, as we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Steve Brown:
Amen. Pete, why don’t we first go to our phone lines.

Caller 1:
Doesn’t gambling. When you go gambling, you’re coveting, coveting somebody else’s money. And if you’re coveting somebody else’s money through gambling, isn’t that a sin? Thank you. Bye bye.

Steve Brown:
Well, don’t you do that when you work too? I mean, don’t you covet your boss’s money and when you go on the stock market, aren’t you coveting… No, I get what you’re saying. That’s a very insightful comment. And I get that. Um, the problem is that I’ve found and you may correct me is that scripture doesn’t say thou shalt not gamble.

Pete Alwinson:
Right.

Steve Brown:
It really doesn’t. And I’ve told you before that, I tried to write a sermon on it one time.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Brown:
That a foundation wanted me to do for all the pastors in Florida. And I thought I’d do it in 20 minutes. And it just, I couldn’t find anything in scripture. Now, the scripture is against things that are caused by gambling. Avarice is not a good thing.

Pete Alwinson:
Right.

Steve Brown:
And our listener mentioned that. And there are a lot of other things.

Pete Alwinson:
Get rich quick.

Steve Brown:
I know.

Pete Alwinson:
Proverbs says, don’t do that.

Steve Brown:
Exactly something for nothing.

Pete Alwinson:
Right.

Steve Brown:
And it goes on, but that’s not, you know, that is the stock market too, in a sense,

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
you’re gambling, when you go with a stock market. But you know, I don’t think you should. I don’t know if you agree with that.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. A hundred percent.

Steve Brown:
Ok.

Pete Alwinson:
No, I agree with you. Gambling is one of those addictive behaviors, right?

Steve Brown:
Oh yeah.

Pete Alwinson:
That has all kinds of bad directions to it.

Steve Brown:
That’s true. And, uh, if you’ve been a pastor, as long as I have and you, not nearly as long as I have, but you’re getting there. Uh, we’ve dealt with that addiction.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
And it devastates. I’ve dealt with it in my own family. My father was a very good poker player, pool shark. Uh, but sometimes we didn’t have anything to eat either and he just couldn’t stop.

Pete Alwinson:
Can’t imagine.

Steve Brown:
It’s awful. And so if you’re thinking about it and you do it, Jesus will forgive you.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
But stop it.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
It’s not a good thing to do. And even if you can’t find it in the Ten Commandments, it’s still not a good thing to do. What about a Saturday night poker game with the boys?

Pete Alwinson:
You know, I was gonna say that, I think there are some, some elements where we’re, if it’s under control, it’s not a big deal. A buddy of mine was talking about a golf game. He was playing with a younger guy and the guy said, all right, I get the first three holes at this. And if I do that, and then you pay me or I pay you as kind of like, alright, it’s just putting a little skin in the game and make it a little bit fun, you know?

Steve Brown:
So it may not be what we’re talking about.

Pete Alwinson:
But there, there is a form of gambling that is super addictive and, and we, like you said, we’ve seen the devastation of it.

Steve Brown:
Yeah. So don’t do it.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
Just don’t do it.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
Okay. Will we be able to be married in heaven? And I don’t know whether he scared that he will be or scared that he won’t be, or her, or if we’re already married and our spouse is saved, will we stay married to them in heaven? And what about singles who have never experienced marriage on earth? That’s a good question.

Pete Alwinson:
It really is.

Steve Brown:
You know, I had a woman in a, in a, another religion who had been high up, this is true, been high up in their women’s movement. And she wanted to join our church, which was a real surprise, that never happened. So she sat down in my study and I said, I don’t understand this. Why he, she said, can I be honest with you? He said, they, she said, they teach that I have to be married to my husband for all of eternity and I can deal with a lifetime, but I’m not staying with that. And she used some very strong language, for all of eternity. [Laughing]

Pete Alwinson:
[Laughing] Oh man. Well, you know, marriage is, uh, in the category, uh, of some other things like childbearing,

Steve Brown:
Yeah.

Pete Alwinson:
That is reserved for planet earth, uh, in the, in this time and in this, in this historical context, but is not for the, the new heaven, new earth in the eternal state.

Steve Brown:
Now for those, uh, who, um, are happily married.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
And you and I are, that’s not a very good news about heaven.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. It begs the question. Well then what will our relationship be? Will we know each other? Of course, there’ll be continuity, I believe.

Steve Brown:
I do too. And that relationship that is so deep and important and real will be one that will be shared across the board with brothers and sisters who were there. And there won’t be a sense of loss.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. That’s right. So we, we trust God because we know he’s good. Those who have never, those who were single. Well, there it is. But they won’t think that they lost anything by being in the new heavens and the new earth.

Steve Brown:
And that, which they have this thing in their mind about, you know, most single people really would like to be married and most, and a lot of married people would really rather not be married. But that idea in your mind of having someone with whom you can be totally open, close to stand with, no matter.

Pete Alwinson:
Right.

Steve Brown:
That will be your experience

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
when you’re in heaven,

Pete Alwinson:
ultimately

Steve Brown:
it’s a promise for all of us,

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Brown:
but we don’t have any wiggle room on this, because Jesus was pretty clear on this, wasn’t he?

Pete Alwinson:
Straight out. You guys, you Pharisees asked him this question with the Levirate marriage thing.

Steve Brown:
Yeah.

Pete Alwinson:
And the, the, the case of seven theoretical brothers who died. Who’s been,

Steve Brown:
Hey, talk about that. So we got a little bit of time.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
Talk about what he was talking about.

Pete Alwinson:
Well, he said they were obviously trying to trip up Jesus. They’re always trip up Jesus. Whose wife will she be in the, in the marriage? The Old Testament Levirate marriage thing was if, if your brother dies, um, then you have to marry his wife so that you can raise up progeny for him and keep his land in his name, in the family.

Steve Brown:
Yeah. And so they said, what if he went through seven?

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
And Jesus said,

Pete Alwinson:
This woman will go through seven brothers.

Steve Brown:
Yeah. You’re bozos. You’re trying to trip me up. And then you’re trying to get me to the cross and I’m going there, but I’m going in my own time.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
Not because of your dumb questions. And then he said, there’s no marriage in heaven.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we’ll be like the angels in heaven. So in that sense, and again, heaven is the new heavens and the new earth. Um, it’s, it’s here. It’s not an ethereal mist. So there it is. It’s going to be a great time.

Steve Brown:
All right. One quick question.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
This is an email to do. Do I need to participate actively in the church in order to live out my faith?

Pete Alwinson:
That’s God’s design. That’s God’s design, but

Steve Brown:
You got to say, how do you define active in the church?

Pete Alwinson:
Exactly, how active, what does that mean? Go to church and have four ministries? No. No, and a lot of people are not connected to a local church right now and they’re following Jesus. Uh, but, but we follow Jesus better in community in the context

Steve Brown:
So true.

Pete Alwinson:
of the, of the local church.

Steve Brown:
And that’s not easy.

Pete Alwinson:
No, it isn’t.

Steve Brown:
You know, church is messy.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
And if you, I used to say sometimes the congregation, if you’re new and you’re visiting here, take some advice from the old guy, leave before you get hurt. [Laughing]

Pete Alwinson:
Yes. You said it in my church and I was deeply resentful.

Steve Brown:
I know, so were a lot of other people

Pete Alwinson:
[Laughing].

Steve Brown:
and boy did I get letters.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
You gonna come back next week?

Pete Alwinson:
If you’re nicer to me. [Laughing]

Steve Brown:
Guys again, let me suggest you check out ForgeBiblestudy.com You’ll be glad I told you about it. All things, Pete Alwinson. Now we gotta go. But first, Key Life is a listener supported production of Key Life Network.

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