THE FALL OF THE OLYMPIC GAMES  
By Mark Grindell

This is an inside look at the Olympic games in a Bible believer's perspective.
Thanks to Mark for the article.

Dear Steve,

Being a Christian, you kind of get used to the idea that justice doesn’t come in this life – you often have to wait until the end of this one and the beginning of the next to see such a thing. But it’s funny that in these times, sometimes judgment is falling now – glory to God!

The Australia Olympics are a case in point. Right now, all manner of issues are finally emerging about payments to IOC committee members. Whether these payments are to be used as bribes or not, whether they are for the IOC funds, or individuals, etc, etc is now all being discussed, debated, and the hair splitting and wrangling is a mighty work for the press to jump into with all its might. It’s been headline news here for just about a week. It knocked everything else off the front page… Chances are that eventually the question of re-assessing Sydney’s award for the 2000 games will have to be taken. This is to the horror of Canberra and especially the government of New South Wales – at the very least because an enormous amount of cash has already been spent on the preparations for this pagan extravaganza.

And pagan it is – we are daily bombarded with images of the “sacred Olympic flame”, and associated ridiculous imagery. The most absurd is the question of the Olympic torch itself. There is to be a succession of people running with the torch throughout the whole country - and for a small fee you can get to hold the sacred Olympic flame yourself and run a distance, which presumably is a function of how far you can run and how much dosh has been “donated” to the great cause. And there is, of course, an endless stream of corporate sponsorship for what is increasingly looking like a highly religious and emotional event - religious only in the sense of mythological – which is going to be the great focus on the nonsense planned for the next year.

What is a wee bit embarrassing and out of order was the publication recently of the actual cost of one olympic gold medal to the country – it turns out that this (when all the investment from so many sources is added up) amounts to literally millions of dollars.

And here is the marvellous irony - this is all happening at a time when Australian kids are at an all time low on general fitness. Obesity in teenage kids is now a real problem in many schools – (this is often attributed to excessive time with computers and not enough with people and / or studies). The Olympics is of course, the ultimate vicarious event. You can be a sporting type and vegetate on your couch and waste God’s wonderful gift to you – your ability to actually play with a ball, or go for a run, or lift some weights. Even these petty and small things, which Paul describes as “profiting little”, can be fun, but naturally the Olympics is nothing to do with any of this.

More chilling is the massive increase in suicide among the young over here. This has jumped a whopping 50% in one 12 month period. That’s right, you didn’t misread that one.

So the massive idolatrous expenditure on the games - which only benefits a tiny, tiny pampered minority of athletes, who are treated like race horses while they are viable and then promptly discarded when the usual post training injuries and other ailments take their inevitable toll – continues. It is quite indistinguishable from all the rubbish throughout the centuries of self-deification and man forgetting God.

The foundations, as are now being discovered, are probably rotten. And the fruit is rotten too.

Yours in Jesus

Mark

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