If God had caused Tim Tebow to win, did He change His mind Saturday?

By David McElroy · January 15, 2012

For weeks, we’ve been subjected to talk about God being responsible for Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos winning football games. If God has been pulling strings for this young man who’s so open about his faith, He must have taken the night off Saturday, as the Patriots destroyed Denver 45-10.

This isn’t the first time Tebow has been humiliated in a big game, of course. Two years ago, in his last important game as a Florida Gator, he entered the SEC championship expecting to win and move his team to the Rose Bowl to play for the national championship. Instead, it was my university’s team — the Alabama Crimson Tide — that left Tebow crying on the sideline as the last of the game ticked away.

I don’t bring up these crushing losses in Tebow’s career to make fun of him. I admire his athletic ability and I admire him far more as a person. He’s tremendously talented on the football field at times, and he’s an even better human being off the field. What I’d like to know is why people can’t let the game be the game and real life be real life.

Too many Christians today are trying to make God into a spiritual Santa Claus. They want you to believe that if you follow God, everything is always going to go your way. This is just plain bad theology, but it’s been presented to shallow church audiences so much that they eat it up. What’s worse is that many people outside the church have picked up on the same strange belief. (We found out earlier this week that 43 percent of Americans believe that God has been causing Tebow and Denver to win.) Because of this, I don’t know that most modern Americans understand what the Gospel really is.

One of the most egregious examples I’ve ever seen of this came in a Christian-themed sports movie called “Facing the Giants” that was very popular in churches about four or five years ago. (You can now watch it spread over 11 segments of 10 minutes each on YouTube, if you have the stomach for it.) I happened to be in a test screening for that movie before it came out, and I was disgusted. It was artistic garbage and bad theology.

The producers of the movie meant well. That’s the sum total of the nice things that I can say about it. Other than that, it’s an absolute disaster. It’s horribly written, horribly acted and directed by someone who might be appropriate to direct commercials for small-market late-night cable. Theologically, it presents a false gospel that pretends that if people just start acting religious, they’ll get all the desires of their hearts. The words never say this, but that’s what is shown happening.

Real faith has costs. The kind of religion shown in this movie has no cost. You just start acting the part and everything around you becomes rainbows and butterflies. A football team that can’t win a game can become a state championship team. (God even changes the direction of the wind so a luckless boy can make a winning field goal.) This is the kind of schlock that gets people emotional and ready to sign up for baptism and church membership, but it produces empty people who don’t have real relationships with God.

I don’t believe God really cares whether your team wins a football game. To think so, you have to assume that He doesn’t like the people on the other side. In the movie, the other side is seen as the equivalent of a bunch of cartoon cutouts, especially their coach. We’re apparently supposed to loathe them, not love them.

In sum, it’s quite simply blasphemous to call this a presentation of the Gospel. This is not the Gospel as presented in the Bible. It doesn’t reflect God changing people’s hearts and having them pay a price for following Him. It’s a “me-centered” gospel which is a perfect reflection of our selfish age and our selfish modern church. Almost as bad, the movie is very, very horrible art.

I think it’s silly to pretend that God directs the fortunes of football teams (or any sports teams) based on whether certain players are good Christians. It’s absurd on the face of it.

I admire Tebow. I like it when people whose lives and faith I admire do well and when their success can reflect well on the faith we share. But I see no reasonable way to assert that God “fixes” football games. He didn’t rig the games of the previous weeks for Tebow and the Broncos to win. He didn’t rig Saturday night’s game for the Patriots to win. As far as I can tell, God generally lets us play our own games, for better or worse.

Following God has real costs. The idea that He arranges for you to win football games strikes me as a strange perversion of the important things Jesus spent His ministry teaching us.

Share on Social Networks

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

Related Posts