Does God Care about Sports?

Tim Dalrymple, who recently wrote a book on Jeremy Lin, reflects on whether or not God cares about sports, and if God does, how.

Isn’t it degrading to suggest that God cares about sports?  Isn’t that anthropomorphizing?  Are we, like the ancient Greeks with their stories of gods who did all sorts of silly and petty and naughty things, really supposed to imagine that God dons a cheese-wedge upon his head and roots for the Packers?

With war and famine, death and disease, doesn’t God have better things to do?  Aren’t sports beneath his dignity, unworthy of his time and station?…

Jeremy’s spiritual mentors and teachers have generally been Reformed.  The books he cites as favorites are from John Piper and C.J. Mahaney, and Jeremy’s reflections on his life and career consistently refer to a close and careful divine sovereignty.  It’s what theologians have called providentia specialissima, God’s most fine-grained care in the minutiae of our lives.

When people protest the notion that God should care about sports, they tend to be (1) atheists or agnostics who doubt God’s existence in the first place and find the notion of God caring about sports particularly ridiculous, (2) de facto Deists who believe that God created the order of things and then sits back to watch it all unwind, (3) people of faith who believe that God guides history (through natural or supernatural means) in the broadest sense but does not get involved in the sordid details, or (4) just people of faith who really haven’t thought it through.

Of course God cares about sports.  The Christian God is not a God who refuses to get in the trenches, not a God whose dignity prohibits him from getting involved in the sordid details of human life.  The single most distinctive doctrine in all of Christianity is the doctrine of the Incarnation….

God cares about the details, if for no other reason, because God cares about us.  We should affirm common grace: that just as God ordains the sun to shine upon the righteous and the wicked alike, God ordains victory for believers and unbelievers.  God does not simply give the victory to the most righteous individual or team upon the field.  We should make clear that we cannot manipulate the outcome, as though the right formula of prayers and genuflections and “aw shucks” humility can compel God to grant victory.  But we should also affirm, whether or not we’re Reformed, that God cares about the details and working through sports is not beneath God’s dignity.

Perhaps we can be a bit more precise.  God does not care about sports in themselves.  God cares about the people who play them.  God cares about the people who watch and enjoy sports and whose lives are affected by sports.  And God works through sports, as God works through all things, for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose.  Training the body is, or can be, a profound and necessary school for the spirit.  And in today’s age, when so many Christians live lives of comfortable complacency, when the rigor and striving of faith have been so terribly deemphasized, sports can serve an important role in reminding us of the importance of discipline and collective sacrifice in the pursuit of a greater goal.

So if sports can help us grow closer to God and more mature in our faith — and they can — then yes, God cares about sports for what can be accomplished through them.

What, then, can be accomplished through them?  How do sports help us, as athletes and as spectators, to understand God, to witness God, to love and live with God better?