The Game of Life Is Rigged

Sit tight, friend. I’ve got a startling revelation to make. At least, it will be mighty startling to many.

Ever been to Las Vegas? Ever try your hand at blackjack or roulette or — pardon the expression — craps? How did you make out? Win a time or two? Good!

Be honest, now. Even if you won a few bucks once or twice — did you wind up losing more than you won? Maybe a lot more? And was that partly because you were making rash bets, trying to win back what you’d lost already?

You and I know that’s the sad story for millions of people. In my many engagements at several big Vegas hotels (I once held the attendance record at the Sahara), I personally have had a small taste of that experience. Before I caught on, I’d lost a few thousand, foolishly. But I’ve met quite a few doormen, waiters, limo drivers, and others who lost everything they had and wound up doing menial work in the graveyard of their finances.

Some of my longtime entertainer friends lost so much in the casinos that they performed over and over again, for a month at a time, for nothing, as the only way they had to cover their losses. And while they were doing that, some gambled and lost more!

Thank God, I figured it out. The game is rigged! Ask any hotel operator, any dealer or pit boss, and they’ll readily confirm that the games are set up with the odds definitely and irrevocably in favor of the establishment. That’s how they can keep building bigger and bigger hotels and louder and more lavish casinos. It’s with the millions and billions that people leave at the tables and machines.

Or did you know that already? I thought you did. But that’s not the revelation I’m referring to.

I’m talking about life itself. I’m talking about the world and everything in it. I’m talking about you and me, our futures, our businesses, our governments — everything.

The game is rigged. The one who created the worlds, the cosmos, who breathed into creatures in his own image the breath of life itself — the one who hung the stars and other planets on nothing, who spun this planet on its course around the sun, the one who fashioned everything from a physical trinity of light, mass, and energy — this one is the owner, the establishment.

And he makes the rules. Rules that are heavily weighted in his favor, designed to accomplish his purpose in creation, rules that not only must be obeyed but that punish severely those who disobey or take them lightly. If you or I stupidly think we can navigate around those rules, we will find that it’s impossible, and at great cost.

You may never have met the owner of a Vegas hotel, but believe me, he exists — and what he says goes in his establishment. Woe to the one who tries to cheat.

It’s just that way in this life game. The rules are fixed, and the game is rigged. Think the law of gravity is arbitrary, irrelevant? Step off your roof and you’ll find it works just as it always has, every time, no exceptions.

Oh sure, the Wright brothers and some others discovered a couple of other laws — forward motion and the physics of lift — and by obeying and utilizing those laws, they were able to work with the law of gravity and fly. But in no way did they change the immutable law of gravity.

That’s the great side of all this. The owner/designer wants us to know all the laws, the rules of the game, and he even wants to show us how to do things like fly, cure disease, and be prosperous and joyous all our lives in this place he created.

He even provided us the manufacturer’s handbook, sometimes called the Bible.

In the Psalms and elsewhere, he mentions “hanging the circle of the earth” on “nothing.” Copernicus and Vesalius discovered that the sun is the center of our planetary system and that the earth revolves around it. This was counter to the scientific opinions of their day, but they were right and the opinions wrong. They didn’t create those facts — they discovered them.

The same with Galileo, sometimes referred to as the “first modern scientist.” He conducted mathematical studies of the motions of bodies on the earth, and, using his discoveries of the way things work, he invented the telescope which enabled us to eventually look into outer space and get a partial “God’s eye view” of the cosmos. Again, by discovering how the game is permanently “rigged,” he could take society into a brighter future.

So it has been with Pasteur, Isaac Newton (law of gravity and properties of light), Madame Curie, Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and even Ben Franklin (rudimentary understanding of electricity). So it was with Edison and Bell and Marconi and countless others. The contributions they have made to the modern world all came from their discoveries (not their inventions; they came later) of the way things work.

My point in this revelation? That this game is rigged in every area of life, including finance, government, society, health, everything. God made it, and he makes the rules. Thomas Jefferson acknowledged this in our Declaration of Independence (not presuming independence from God, but acknowledging dependence on God), when he referenced the creator who alone endows all men with unalienable rights. Life, liberty, and the pursuit — not the guarantee — of happiness are designed for us by him, and they will be obtained or guaranteed, nowhere else.

“The Lord has made everything for its own purpose, even the wicked for the day of evil.” — Proverbs 16:4

That’s something to ponder, isn’t it? Very briefly, I see many examples in biblical history where the owner, reading the hearts of men, even employed wicked and rebellious people to accomplish something good for those who respected him and his rules — like the Pharaoh of Egypt whose heart God “hardened” to show his power on behalf of Israel.

Believers, take heart! Even today, when some seem hellbent on undermining our democracy, destroying our economy, and changing the rules. It won’t work! The game is rigged.