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Casino gambling, lotteries, gambling on just about everything under the sun have become epidemic in this country.  Even some professing Christians call it entertainment and just another form of recreation.  The following quotes from Dr. Ligon Duncan, The Westminster Confession of Faith, Holy Scripture, C.H. Spurgeon, and Jonathan Edwards shed a different light on the subject:  
Scripture and Picture on gambling   

Quote from sermon of Dr. Ligon Duncan senior pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, MS.........................
Gambling is a violation of this commandment. Gambling always, not sometimes, gambling always hurts ourselves and hurts our neighbors. It hurts ourselves if we lose. It hurts our neighbors if we win. For gambling is not built on a principle of ‘win-win.’ It's ‘win-lose.’ And it's not only ‘win-lose,’ it's thousands must lose for one to win. It always hurts ourselves and hurts our neighbors. The principle of gambling is totally different from the stock market. Some people often say that the stock market is nothing more than gambling. Wrong! Totally different principles. Not that everything in the stock market is perfect, but listen, gambling is pure redistribution. It takes from others and gives to one or a few. The stock market is wealth-creation, but everybody usually benefits together. Your doing well oftentimes helps others do better in the market. Wealth-creation is totally different from redistribution. Conservatives hate redistribution when the government does it. But they'll often defend redistribution under the rubric of gambling. In gambling, for one person to do well, thousands must lose. In gambling, those who are least able to afford it are most injured. Gambling preys on the poor and harms those who are least able to afford it.

I'll never forget standing in a local hospital and listening to one of the orderlies talk to another orderly. His plan was to pick up his paycheck from the the cashier window, cash it, head straight to the boats, and hope that his wife didn't find out. And I thought, "Now there's a family that's going to go hungry this week, if that guy is heading to the boats." Gambling stokes an inordinate desire for wealth without work. And it breaks the nexus of work, providence, and need which are set forth in the bible, and replaces it with an unholy trinity. Look, in the Bible, here's the principle: You work, God provides, your needs are met. Gambling replaces work, providence, needs, with risks, fate or chance and riches. You risk something depending totally on fate or chance and odds that the thickest numbskull in the world would not. And you risk it for needs to be met? No. For riches. You see, it stokes an inordinate desire and it replaces the work, providence, needs nexus with risk, fate, and riches.

From the Westminster Confession Chapter 1 article 6:

The whole counsel of God, concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man’s salvation, faith, and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men (Gal 1:8, 9; 2 Thes 2:2; 2 Tim 3:15-17).  

From The Holy Bible:

1 Timothy 6:9,10  People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction. ¹⁰For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.

James 1:27  Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

James 4:4  You adulterous people, don't you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.

1 Peter 4:3  For you have spent enough time in the past doing what pagans choose to do--living in debauchery, lust, drunkenness, orgies, carousing and detestable idolatry.

From Charles Spurgeon:

You cannot become a great Christian--you may be a babe in grace, but you never can be a perfect man in Christ Jesus while you yield yourself to the worldly maxims and modes of business of men of the world. It is ill for an heir of heaven to be a great friend with the heirs of hell.  

Beloved reader, be it your aim in heart, in word, in dress, in action to maintain the broad wall, remembering that the friendship of this world is enmity against God.  

From “A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections”  by Jonathan Edwards:

We find that true saints, or those persons who are sanctified by the Spirit of God, are in the New Testament called spiritual persons. And their being spiritual is spoken of as their peculiar character, and that wherein they are distinguished from those who are not sanctified. This is evident, because those who are spiritual are set in opposition to natural men, and carnal men. Thus the spiritual man and the natural man are set in opposition one to another, 1 Cor. 2:14, 15: “The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness unto him; neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.