Is It Okay to Knowingly Benefit from a “Sin”

Many Christians have very strong feelings about (not) playing the lottery, or gambling, or just plain playing cards, for that matter. For the record, I don’t engage in any of those, but it is not necessarily out of a conviction that they are a sin. I am still not convinced that gambling, in and of itself, is a sin.

For those of you who used to frequent the forum topics on the old Challies.com format a few years ago, I even had this discussion with the quite capable Phil Johnson, who is John MacArthur’s book editor and main contributor to the Pyromaniacs blog site. And while he put forth his position with strong conviction, I found his arguments to be unpersuasive. He had even posted a series on Pulpit Magazine at the same time I had raised the question on the old Challies forums, but I thought that he never convincingly proved that gambling, in and of itself, is a sin.

Instead of focusing in this post on whether gambling is a sin or not, I would like to ask a question of those who do hold that it is a sin. In my great state of Georgia, we have a lottery-funded scholarship program called the Hope Scholarship, as well as a prekindergarten program which is fully funded through the state’s lottery. Since the HOPE program, “began in 1993, over $3.8 billion in HOPE funds have been awarded to more than 1.1 million students attending Georgia’s colleges, universities, and technical colleges.”

Here’s my observation…

There are many who have no problem at all receiving financial assistance from the HOPE program, but who consider gambling a sin and to be an activity that is absolutely wrong to participate in. My question to them and to you is this: how is that being consistent with one’s position and convictions?

If the act which generates the income (lottery) is a sin, how can the act which benefits from the sinful act (HOPE scholarship) be acceptable to do?