Online sports gambling has been around for a while, but it has really put the pedal to the floor over the last few years.

This is partly because the activity enjoys much more legal leeway now than it has in the past. Only just a few years ago, states were forbidden by federal law from operating or sponsoring sports lotteries, but the Supreme Court struck down that law in the case Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association (2018).

Sports betting dramatically increased after this, and in the five years since the decision, a full thirty-eight states—in addition to D.C.—have legalized the practice.

More than half of the U.S. population now lives in a state where it is legal.

But there’s more to the story than just legalization.

As NBC News observes, sports gambling was especially exacerbated during the pandemic. Even though casinos closed during the pandemic, that didn’t remove the urge to gamble—gamblers simply went online to satisfy their addictions. Furthermore, since people were shut in at home for long periods of time and many needed some way to escape—especially young men in their 20s—the urge to gamble only increased.

We now see these legal and societal factors playing out in the sheer number of people involved in sports gambling. In a survey published last summer, Men’s Health magazine interviewed 3,800 American men, and 1,500 of them had betted at least once in the last year.

Of those gamblers, sixty-one percent bet either daily or weekly.

The consequences aren’t pretty.

Men’s Health found that nearly one in five men (of the 1,500 admitted gamblers) shell out a quarter of their paycheck on sports gambling. And fifty-one percent would risk ten thousand dollars on a game if the potential reward were one million.

Furthermore, fifty-eight percent admit that sports gambling has impacted their mental health, and forty-three percent say the same of their physical health.

One interviewee told NBC News that, after the pandemic prompted a craving for sports gambling, he practically started to bleed money. After taking out high-interest loans and emptying his 401K to fund his addiction, he says he can barely look at his wife and daughter anymore.

And he’s not the only one.

Sports gambling provides an aggressively strong temptation for men to hole themselves up in their room and spend exorbitant amounts of time flushing money down the drain, all the while neglecting their responsibilities to others and wasting their potential.

The thing that should make the addiction of gambling especially repugnant to Christians is that—if you think about it—it’s one step worse than the servant who buried his master’s money.

In Matthew 25, Jesus gives us a parable for the kingdom of heaven: a man entrusted his servants with sums of money so that they could make good use of them while he was away on a journey. When he returned, the servant who had been given five talents of money had put it to work such that he had earned five more.

But another servant decided not to do anything productive with what he had been entrusted; instead, he buried his master’s money and then gave him back the exact sum upon his return. The master chastised this wicked and lazy servant for not producing any increase on what he had been entrusted. He had been given a resource with which he was expected to be productive.

Simply giving back the same amount later on was not satisfactory and instead earned a sharp rebuke.

I believe that this principle applies to all aspects of life—God has given every one of us not only a sum of money, but a set of gifts, a network of relationships, and a finite amount of time here on earth that He expects us to make the most of. And failure to use His gifts is failure to please Him with them.

But I believe that gambling takes this one step further.

It’s one thing to let your resources lie dormant. It’s another thing to actively flush them down the drain. Instead of using the money, talents, and relationships they have been given to impact the world for good, the addiction spawned by sports gambling is driving large swaths of young

American men to ignore their talents and potential, isolate themselves in their bedroom, and hemorrhage their money. They aren’t just guilty of “not using what they’ve been given.” They’re guilty of “actively wasting what they’ve been given.”

And so, on top of the financial, health, and relational curses associated with sports gambling, we can add a very serious theological rebuke: an addiction to gambling flushes God’s gifts down the toilet.

If only our society would take to heart the serious warnings that Scripture provides as a guard against the addictive lies that are becoming more and more socially prevalent.

Diligence leads to abundance (Proverbs 21:5), but those who hasten to be rich will end up being punished (Proverbs 28:20).

And even if you win the jackpot, what good is it if you gain the world, but lose your soul (Mark 8:36)?