Gambling is thus idolatrous and immoral, but it is also simply foolish. The essence of gambling is its unpredictability and to invest resources in totally unpredictable events is irrational. Averages can be predicted but individual events cannot. One gambling win does not affect the probability of the next wager. The “gamblers fallacy” is that, if they are winning, they will continue to win and, if they are losing, their luck is about to turn. This is utter delusion. 

Problem Gambling Awareness Month was observed in March with several items in our local media. This is an opportunity to consider what problem gambling is and how to prevent and recover from it.
A working definition of gambling is essential: gambling is putting resources at risk of loss for gain with no significant knowledge of or control over the outcome. Some consider gambling essentially immoral, others consider it only immoral if it is abused in some way and still others consider it simply foolish due to the sometimes catastrophic outcomes.
For the Christian, all questions of morality are answered by applying the moral law to an issue. The moral law is rooted in creation and valid as long as the creation endures. These creation ordinances are classically summarized in the ten commandments.
First, there are aspects of idolatry that are inherent in gambling. Lady Luck is another god, greed is an idol, and throwing the dice while calling on God for His blessing is taking His Name in vain. We take His Name in vain when we expect Him to bless us when we are not obeying a command and therefore have no promise of His blessing.  “Throw the dice, God will make you win!” is eerily similar to the Devil’s command to Jesus, “Throw yourself from the Temple, God will preserve your life.”
Second, there are aspects of immorality inherent in gambling. God’s command is to earn wages not make wagers. “Six days you shall labor and do all your work.”  “If you will not work, you will not eat.” God also commands prudent investment where you do have significant knowledge and control over the outcome. See the parable of the talents. Work to earn a wage and then make your money work for you. God also commands us to make money “the old-fashioned way”; that is, inherit it. Parents are commanded to save and invest for themselves and their children, to build wealth across the generations so that they can be a blessing to many in many ways. Finally, tithes and alms are to be given from wages, not wagers. Offerings and gifts are to be given from accumulated wealth, not accumulated winnings.
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Why is it comforting that we have a new identity in Jesus Christ? The phrasing of the question shows that Gordon is making an appeal against the expressive individuals that we all are. We almost impulsively reject the notion that anything outside of ourselves could define our identity and that we would find that comforting. Yet the new identity that Jesus Christ imparted upon all whom He has redeemed is still the only true and lasting comfort, both in this life and even in death. The answer contains four sentences. Because the first sentence must be understood in light of the second, it may be more helpful if the answer read: “Because God has redeemed my life with the precious blood of his Son and has also delivered me from the lie of Satan in the Garden, I am being remade into the image of Christ, to have a true identity–in body and soul, throughout the whole course of my life, to enjoy God and glorify him forever.”

In the preface, Gordon says that he based this catechism upon the Heidelberg Catechism, which was approved in its final version in 1563 and was written by Zacharias Ursinus and Caspar Olevianus (who were both in their twenties when they first wrote). While the Westminster Shorter Catechism is unrivaled for instructing in sound doctrine, the Heidelberg remains in use nearly five hundred years later largely because of its devotional warmth. We see this distinction in the opening questions of both catechisms. The Westminster begins with establishing the end or purpose (telos) for all of mankind. In other words, it begins with what we were created to do. The Heidelberg, however, begins with the only source of real and lasting comfort that can be found in this broken and sin-stained world. As we will see, Gordon’s use of the Heidelberg is most evident in these first two questions.
Question 1
Whenever I first read the questions to my wife, I don’t think I even finished reading the answer to this first question before she asked me: “Why does a catechism on sexuality begin with identity?”
And that is a great and necessary question to answer right from the start. I answered Tiff that she likely thinks of identity in the much the same way that anyone would have throughout most of human history. My identity is who I am, and that is likely to be expressed through many external factors. I am the son or daughter of X and Y. I am the husband or wife of Z. I am the father or mother of my children. I am a citizen of… And the list goes on.
For the ancients, understanding one’s identity was crucial for being able to live out the virtue of piety, which meant doing one’s duty to whomever that duty was owed. For the Romans, Aeneas was the standard of such piety. Throughout the Aeneid, he repeatedly sets aside his own interests and happiness in order to do his duty to the gods, his country, and his family. The most famous example comes in book 2, where Aeneas escapes the burning of Troy while leading his son by the hand and carrying his elderly father on his back. That was an act of masculine piety, guiding the next generation while also shouldering the weight of the previous generation. Indeed, the Roman government saw the catechizing potential of that image, so they imprinted it upon their coins. Again, to live piously required understanding one’s identity or place within society so that you could properly fulfill your duty.
Yet you may have noticed that that notion is rather foreign to us today. Samuel James writes:
Over the past several years, Christian theologians and others have described the emerging generation of Western adults as belonging to the spirit of “expressive individualism.” The scholar Robert Bellah defines expressive individualism this way: “Expressive individualism holds that each person has a unique core of feeling and intuition that should unfold or be expressed in individuality is to be realized.” In other words, what most people in the modern, secular world believe is that the key to their happiness, fulfillment, and quest for meaning in life is to arrange things so that their inner desires and ambitions can be totally achieved. If these desires and ambitions align with those of the community or the religion, great! But if not, then it’s the community or the religion that must be changed or done away with. Life’s center of gravity, according to expressive individualism, is the self.
pp. 5-6
For our discussion, this means that most Americans today do not approach identity as a statement (this is who I am) but as a question: Who am I? This is crucial to understand because as Carl Trueman notes:
at the heart of the issues we face today is the phenomenon of expressive individualism. This is the modern creed whose mantras and liturgies set the terms for how we think about ourselves and our world today. It is the notion that every person is constituted by a set of inward feelings, desires, and emotions. The real “me” is that person who dwells inside my body, and thus I am most truly myself when I am able to act outwardly in accordance with those inner feelings. In an extreme form we see this in the transgender phenomenon, where physical, biological sex and psychological gender identity can stand in opposition to each other. I can therefore really be a woman if I think I am one, even if my body is that of a male. But expressive individualism is not restricted to questions of gender. When people identify themselves by their desires–sexual or otherwise–they are expressive individuals. And to some extent that implicates us all. The modern self is the expressive individual self.
That is no exaggeration on Trueman’s end. We are all, in some sense, expressive individualists. James opens up his book with David Foster Wallace’s fable about the fish. An older fish swims past two young fish and asks them how’s the water. As the older fish swims away, the young fish look at each other and ask, “What’s water?” The point of the fable is that it is incredibly difficult to notice what is all around us. Expressive individualism is the water that the modern West swims in, and failing to notice it does nothing to change the fact that we are still swimming in it. Even simple notions like being a cat or dog person or a morning or evening person give away that we are all expressive individualists to some degree, since the very notion that I can be defined by what I like or dislike is fundamentally modern.
Practically, this means we and virtually any person that we know has an ingrained propensity to look within ourselves for happiness, fulfillment, and meaning. And it makes sense right? Shouldn’t we know best how to best satisfy and comfort ourselves? Despite the reality that we live in most comfortable, wealthiest, and safest time in human history, the pandemic levels of anxiety and depression screams that something isn’t quite right. Indeed, for the first time in human history young people are more likely to kill themselves than be killed by almost anything else. The world has never been better, but in some ways, we have never been more broken.
The Heidelberg began by speaking comfort into a world filled with pain and death that were ever-present and inescapable, asking:
What is your only comfort in life and death?
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Written by R.C. Sproul |
Saturday, March 12, 2022
If you neglect what Jesus says, and you neglect what God proves, then we’re back to the theme. There is no escape. Beloved, if you come to church every Sunday, every single Sunday of your life, and go to Sunday school every week of your life, you may still be neglecting this great salvation. Is your heart in it? That’s what I’m asking you. I can’t answer that question for you. You know if you’re neglecting your salvation. I don’t have to tell it to you. I just have to tell you what the consequences are if you continue in that neglect. So I pray with all my heart that God will awaken each one of us today to the sweetness, the loveliness, the glory of the gospel declared by Christ.

Doctrine and Practice
Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it. For since the message declared by angels proved to be reliable, and every transgression or disobedience received a just retribution, how shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation? It was declared at first by the Lord, and it was attested to us by those who heard, while God also bore witness by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will —Hebrews 2:1–4
Did you notice the “Therefore” that begins this text? What the author of Hebrews is getting at is the perfect marriage between doctrine and practice. If we believe the things that he has declared in the first chapter, that has radical implications for how we live our lives. He’s beginning to show that now when he says, “Therefore we must pay much closer attention.” There’s a little grammatical problem in the words of that particular translation. The tension of these words is because it’s not certain grammatically whether the author is using a comparative or a superlative. And so I would prefer that he would simply say that we therefore must pay the most possible attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it.
Think of that image of drifting. Some people go fishing in boats, and they don’t set the anchor down. They allow the boat to move with the current, and they just drift. Where they end up can be somewhat problematic. The Scripture uses this kind of figurative language elsewhere when it talks about an anchor for our soul, which is the hope we have in Christ. Here he is saying, “Don’t allow yourselves to drift aimlessly away from what you’ve heard.” Again, he’s speaking about this marvelous comparison that he’s given in chapter 1 about the superiority of Jesus over the angels and over all created things. You’ve heard that. Don’t drift away from it; instead pay the closest possible attention to it. Verse 2 says, “For since the message declared by angels . . .” The author is referring back again to the Old Testament and the idea hinted at in Deuteronomy 33 of the law being mediated by the angels. When Moses received the law from God, there were myriads and myriads of angels present on that occasion.

So he says, “For since the message declared by angels proved to be reliable, and every transgression or disobedience received a just retribution . . .” Again, the comparison continues. If the law that came from the angels was ignored by the people in the Old Testament and received a just retribution, a punishment, how much more responsible are we to that which has come to us directly from Christ? Now, beloved, the central theme of this chapter, or at least this portion of the chapter, is the theme of escape. When you think of escape, you think of some kind of deliverance from a dire and threatening life situation, like escaping from a kidnapper. Or you think of soldiers who are surrounded in battle and finding a way to retreat safely. That’s an escape. But the most common idea with which we associate escape is imprisonment, not just from any jail, but from those prisons that are the most notoriously inescapable, such as the former condition of Alcatraz in this country, or Devil’s Island, or perhaps the most dreadful of all French prisons, the Château d’If.

A Great Escape
You remember the story; it’s my second-favorite novel. Edmond Dantes is falsely accused and unjustly convicted of a crime. He is sent forth to the most dreaded prison, Château d’If. There he suffered for years in solitary confinement, until one day he met a co-prisoner, an aged priest who had been there for decades and had spent much time trying to dig a tunnel to escape. But he didn’t do his math correctly and ended up burrowing into Dantes’s chamber. So the two met and had fellowship together. The old priest became Dantes’s mentor and counselor, teacher of science and philosophy and theology. The priest also told Dantes about a map that led to a vast treasure, hidden under the waters in the sea. The old priest died in prison. Through an extraordinary series of circumstances, the death of the priest led to the possible escape of Edmond Dantes from Château d’If. Dantes found the vast treasure that financed the rest of his life and his nom de plume became the Count of Monte Cristo.
What an escape story that one is. But as dire and as dreadful as the circumstances were in the Château d’If, there’s even a greater and more dreadful kind of captivity. The author of Hebrews speaks of an escape from this captivity when he asks the question, “How shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation?” Beloved, this is a rhetorical question. The answer to the question is simple. How shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation? The answer is, we can’t. Alcatraz could possibly be escaped from, or Devil’s Island, or even the Château d’If. But the one prison from which no one ever escapes is hell. There’s no escape route. You can’t dig under it. You can’t climb over it. No guard can be bribed. The sentence cannot be ameliorated. So the author of Hebrews is saying, “Do you realize what we have heard from the Word of God Himself about a great salvation?” We use that word salvation all the time in the church. What does it mean?
When somebody says to me, “Are you saved?” the first question I want to say is, “Saved from what?” The idea of salvation suggests the idea of some kind of escape or deliverance from a dire circumstance. The Greek verb sodzo in the New Testament is used in a variety of ways. If you are saved from a threatening illness, as people were in the New Testament by the touch of Jesus, Jesus might comment, “Your faith has saved you.” He’s not talking about eternal salvation. He’s speaking about their rescue from a dreadful disease.
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