Lottery is a booming business, with Americans spending an estimated $100 billion each year on tickets. But it wasn’t always that way, and there are several reasons why you should be wary of playing the lottery.

The history of the lottery can be traced back to the Low Countries in the 15th century, where towns held public lotteries to raise money for town fortifications and poor people’s assistance. In the 1640s, Puritans began to frown on gambling as a sin and viewed it as a doorway to worse vices, but by the time the Virginia Company of London ran a lottery in order to fund ships to the new colony of Jamestown, lotteries were already a well-established part—and a source of resentment—of American life.

When you buy a lottery ticket, the money you hand the retailer gets added to a pot that’s drawn bi-weekly to see if there is a winner. The more tickets sold, the higher the jackpot. And the retailer, who is paid a commission on each ticket sold, also makes money from overhead costs like advertising and keeping track of all of the tickets bought.

But the real issue is that players are lured into the lottery with promises that if they can just get lucky with the numbers, their lives will improve. That’s a form of covetousness, which the Bible forbids. Covetousness often leads to debt, broken relationships, and bankruptcy. That’s why we suggest avoiding playing the lottery and instead saving that money to build an emergency fund or pay off credit card debt.