Rev. Mark Creech
RevMarkCreech.org
North Carolina’s Education Lottery is now exposed – not merely as a failed policy, but as a spiritual and moral deception.
A new audit shows that while lottery sales surged to $6.586 billion in 2025, the share returned to education collapsed to just 16 cents on the dollar, down from the 35% promised to North Carolinians when the lottery was created. Citizens gambled more than ever, yet schools received less.
This outcome is not accidental. It is precisely what many of us warned would happen when the lottery was first proposed. The state would expand gambling, normalize addiction, prey on the vulnerable, and incrementally abandon the very education mission used to justify its existence. And now – voilà – here we are.
But the problem runs deeper than broken promises.
It strikes at the heart of biblical truth.
Scripture repeatedly warns against the love of money and the pursuit of gain through chance and speculation. “He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver; nor he that loveth abundance with increase: this is also vanity” (Ecclesiastes 5:10). “Wealth gotten by vanity shall be diminished: but he that gathereth by labour shall increase” (Proverbs 13:11). Gambling trains the heart to seek provision not through stewardship and labor, but through luck, impulse, and illusion.
The Bible calls God’s people to honest work, not wagers of chance. “The thoughts of the diligent tend only to plenteousness; but of every one that is hasty only to want” (Proverbs 21:5). The lottery doesn’t direct people toward diligence and hard work – it does just the opposite. It tempts us with false hope, especially the poor, and sells pipe dreams while draining households least able to afford their losses. For the state to partner with such is grossly immoral.
Worse still, when Christians play the lottery, they support the baneful and insidious practice of gambling. We can be certain God is not pleased with it, but angered by it.
Now the state openly admits that education funding is shrinking because players are “winning more,” while the lottery aggressively expands “digital instant” games designed for constant play. This is not harmless entertainment. It is an engineered dependency, and it is profoundly wrong.
Even the lottery’s name has become a lie.
North Carolina’s motto is Esse Quam Videri, which means, “To Be, and Not to Seem.” Yet the Education Lottery now seems to support education while no longer truly being about education. It presents itself as a public good while functioning as a massive gambling enterprise whose primary product is false hope.
Scripture calls such systems what they are: “Divers weights, and divers measures, both of them are alike abomination to the Lord” (Proverbs 20:10). The lottery trades on moral language while delivering moral harm.
This passage provides a perfectly ethical lens for evaluating the lottery’s double-speak and deception. Christians should especially note that the Bible says such deception is an “abomination to the Lord.”
So yes, it is definitely time to say what many of us have said for more than two decades: we told you so. Not to boast, but to plead for repentance and reform. North Carolina must confront the truth about what the lottery has become and turn away from a policy that exploits weakness, distorts priorities, and contradicts the Word of God.
If this state is to honor its own creed – to be, and not to seem – then it must abandon the lie that gambling is an acceptable instrument of public virtue. God does not build His blessings on deception, and neither should we.
