R.C. Sproul

Take the ark of the Lord and put it on the cart, and in the chest beside it put the gold objects you are sending back to him as a guilt offering, and send it on its way, but keep watching it.

goes up to its own territory towards Beth Shemesh, then the Lord has brought this great disaster upon us.

But if it does not, then we will know that it was not his hand that struck us and that it happened to us by chance.

And you get the picture.

What is going on here is a kind of primitive form of a scientific experiment.

The priests and the leaders of the Philistine nation are undergoing this unspeakable calamity and they don't know what's causing it.

Remember I said earlier in this course that the question of providence boils down ultimately to questions of cause, questions of causality.

These people said, we're having rats and we're having tumors and we're not exactly sure what's causing it.

We want to know if this is the hand of God in judgment upon us or if all this stuff has taken place by chance.

So we're going to have a scientific experiment.

We're going to take two cows, milk cows, that have just calved and have never been yoked, and we're going to attach this cart to these cows that has this trespass offering and just let it go and see what happens.

You see how they've sort of stacked the deck here.

They're taking cows that have just calved.

What's the natural inclination for a mother cow that's just given birth?

If you take that mother cow away from that calf and then you let her go free, where's she going to go?

You're going to make a beeline to that calf.

Or if you take the cow that's never been yoked and you put a yoke around them, they're going to be struggling against that encumbrance.

to heaven before you.

We're going to stack the deck here, and if this is really God, we're going to find out if it's God, because if it's really God, then those cows will know what their destination should be, and the hand of providence will guide them to Beshemesh to deliver the Ark of the Covenant back to the Jewish people.

If they don't do that, then we'll know the whole thing has happened by chance.