Full disclosure: I’m a list maker.

As my wife reminds me on occasion, if she’d known about my penchant for list-making in advance of our wedding, we may never have seen the altar.

As I like to remind her far more frequently, her listphobia places her firmly on the wrong side of history, particularly in a sports loving house in a sports loving culture.

Rio has already produced a list-makers paradise of juicy comparisons: Is Michael Phelps the greatest Olympian or just the greatest swimmer? Where to place the women’s gymnastic team after their dominance? Simone Biles just got started but can anyone possibly be placed ahead of her at the top of all time Olympic gymnast greats? Does the lack of real competition make it almost impossible to grade our basketball teams against history? Usain Bolt or Carl Lewis?

It goes on and on.

Why Do We Make Top-10 Lists?

As already admitted, I don’t have a problem with these lists and enjoy the discussion that surrounds them. But the immediacy and speed of their generation during these Olympics prompts another question: Why?

Why do we need to immediately—compulsively?—take an event or a person and frame their moment against history? Why can’t we allow a moment to breathe on its own as a narrative without forcing it against the backdrop of history before the medal ceremony even takes place?

Frankly, it’s hard to find another discipline that takes its fresh stories and immediately rates them against similar previous events the way sports does. Think about it. Singers, bands, politicians, religious leaders, educators, innovators, brands, criminals—they are generally appreciated for their contribution with minimal need to compare them with others in their field, at least while they are still in popular circulation.

At the very least, other disciplines allow for time to generate perspective, to see how things play out after the moment leaves public consciousness and returns again to be evaluated afresh.

But athletes and athletic events are constantly and immediately thrown against the backdrop of their own history.

What prompts our incessant comparison with the past? Why the compulsion to make lists of athletes and teams and to measure them against each other? And how does God approach the idea of lists?

We feel compelled to judge ourselves against other humans

Humans don’t compare themselves to animals. We don’t usually judge ourselves against fictional characters from novels or movies. Inanimate objects are lousy comparison standards.

This truth is obvious but still worth pointing out: We compare ourselves to other humans and their lives to find perspective on our own. We attempt to situate ourselves on the timeline of history by looking around the neighborhood and evaluating what’s happening in other yards.

We answer the question, “Should I feel good or bad about myself?” by looking to see what someone else is doing or has done.

Comparison can be the thief of joy, and we need be careful not to rob ourselves of fully appreciating the moment before us, but we’ll always find ourselves looking to other people and other situations in history to make sense of ourselves. It’s practically inevitable.

We derive a slice of our identity from sports and its history

As both players and fans, sports provide a vehicle for constructing our identity, a constantly shifting work that changes almost daily. Sports performance contributes to how we feel about our place in the world, how we measure against others attempting to perform the same task.

Whether real or perceived, sports give us an indication of our standing in the world, both as a performer and as a fan closely identifying with the performer. It’s easy to think our moment in history is superior to others, which only adds to our desire to compare with events of the past.

We have limited and distorted historical perspective

We love lists because we truly think the person or team we are talking about IS the best ever and a list will affirm this conclusion! As humans, we tend to be prisoners of the moment, afflicted with what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery.”

This attitude plays itself out something like this: “Of course this moment we just watched sits in the top five of all others—we just watched it! And we all know that whatever happens today is better than what happened yesterday, with its grainy technology and throwback unis and whatnot.”

If we are actually a fan of the person/team we are watching for one reason or another, our lack of perspective gets further distorted since we usually have a pretty biased view of the things or people we value. We tend to see them as better than they actually are, as sitting at any youth event and listening to parents talking about their own kids or team will confirm.

How Does God Approach Lists?

Admittedly, a question like this can get weird pretty quick. I don’t think the God revealed in the Bible has a problem with the human desire to make Top-10 sport lists, but I do think it’s interesting to consider lists through the lens of scripture.

On the one hand, Jehovah is obviously a list lover Himself, as a quick look in Leviticus or Chronicles will reveal. We don’t turn many pages in the Bible without bumping into a genealogy or scrolls of names confronting us. And you have to be a list-lover to make it through the book of Numbers.

Matthew begins the New Testament with the genealogy of Jesus, and both Luke in Acts and Paul in his letters were favorable toward lists of names, instructions, and travel itineraries. In Revelation, a high point in history will be the opening of the book of life, a list everyone will be glad to see their own name on.

But God confronts our need for and use of lists at certain key points. At the end of time, humans won’t be compared against each other but against the cross of Christ and their relationship to it. Identity will be fully realized in Christ and not derived from any other source. Satisfaction will be entirely a function of knowing God and enjoying Him forever, and all of history will be seen from God’s perspective, with no more gaps or distortions or half truths. Good and bad will be redefined entirely within the scope of God and His enemies.

So in our humanly fallen state, Top Ten lists will continue to reflect something of our brokenness until the end of time when God will produce the only list that really matters—the book of life, within which are written the names of those who will spend eternity with Him and each other.

The End of This List

In the meantime, this concludes an article with a list on sports lists.

What would you add (on Facebook or Twitter) to reasons we love sports lists?

How else do lists show up in the Bible?