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

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.

A child having a tantrum understands only one thing: Did I get my way or not? He doesn’t understand the issues involved. He doesn’t understand the reasons that went into a decision. He doesn’t understand any of the things that mature and reasonable adults have to understand in order to live healthy lives. By his reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to strike down his disastrous tariff scheme, Donald Trump shows himself to be — once more — a screaming child having a tantrum. Outside the world of mob bosses who expect to get their way every time, normal adults don’t act this way, but Trump isn’t normal. He’s an angry and vengeful man who has narcissistic personality disorder. And we are in danger as a result. Trump doesn’t understand the legal issues involved in this ruling. He doesn’t understand economics. He doesn’t understand rule of law. He doesn’t understand that he can ever be wrong. All he understands is that he didn’t get his way. And he is now a narcissistic and raging little boy who also happens to hold life-and-death power over most humans on this planet. He’s dangerous — and the system which gives him that power is even more dangerous.

Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

Related Posts