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.

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Here’s the latest of my ridiculous parody shorts. It crossed my mind Tuesday to wonder what a slick and fast-talking car dealer might do right now to try to turn the high price of gasoline to his advantage. So I conceived of a fat and lovable character who tried to sell cars that don’t use any fuel — and then I started wondering if it would be funnier if all the characters were felines. Designing the King Cashpaw character took about four hours, but the rest took only another four hours, so this was a relatively quick piece that virtually wrote itself. I know it’s almost impossible for these parody videos to find a larger audience, but at least they amuse me — and there are 19 of them on my YouTube page now. The first few were very limited, but they’re getting more complex.

The Republican Party is dead. It still exists in name, of course, but it’s nothing but a shell. All that’s left are idiots and stooges and con men of the MAGA party. When Donald Trump is gone — which won’t be long — those populist idiots and pragmatic fools will have no one to follow. Democrats will thrive. They will take more power than ever and they will push the federal government further to the radical far left than ever. When that happens, don’t just blame Trump if you’re a conservative. Blame every person who has claimed to be a conservative and has given up on principles, character and everything else that Republicans once claimed to stand for. As someone who worked as a GOP political consultant for many years, this is disgusting and disturbing to me. Those who have enabled Trump to have almost unchecked power are going to be shocked when they see what they will unleash in the long run. It’s been plain all along what this narcissistic con man is. It’s your fault that you chose to pretend not to see what he really is.

We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

I’ve been making some changes to the site lately and there are more changes coming in the days ahead, so don’t be surprised if you some small differences. This is not a wholesale redesign, but rather the addition of some features. Since they’re smarter than I am, I’ve put Oliver and Alex in charge of the technical work, which you can see in this action photo from the control room of our media complex. I recently added a series of landing pages for readers who randomly discover the site from an Internet search. I’ve also changed the YouTube link at the top of the page to go to the new YouTube channel for video essays that reflect things I’ve already published here. (Here’s a little bit about both of the YouTube channels I’m working on.) In addition, I’m trying to move away from using Instagram, so I’m experimenting with photo plug-ins that will eventually allow me to host the pictures — cats, dogs, sunsets, whatever — that I often take. So don’t be surprised to see more changes. Thanks for your patience. Let’s hope Alex and Oliver know what they’re doing.

I have no use for the theocratic and repressive government of Iran. The people who run the country are cruel at best and evil at worst. The Iranian people deserve freedom. But I have no personal quarrel with anybody in Iran. While I’m not thrilled about a future Iranian government having nuclear weapons, I’m just as concerned about nukes in the hands of politicians in Israel, Pakistan, India, China and Russia. I’m not even thrilled with the U.S., Britain and France having them, either, because I don’t trust any politicians to be responsible with such terrible weapons. All I can say with certainty is that American taxpayers have no business attacking Iran, especially since we’re being forced to pay for this attack in order to benefit the politicians of Israel — and nobody else. If Middle Eastern countries want to fight among themselves, that’s none of my business. It’s not the business of the U.S. government, either. I have no quarrel with anybody in Iran — and having the government which claims to represent me launch an unprovoked attack against a sovereign country will only make all Americans less safe in the near future. This attack is poorly conceived and morally unjustified. Remember that when the Iranians launch attacks that we will then condemn as “terrorism.” What the U.S. is doing right now looks like terrorism to me. And let’s not forget that the attack is the latest in a long line of unconstitutional wars by various U.S. presidents — who have no legal power to declare war on their own, according to the U.S. Constitution.

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