AP

1 Samuel 6:7-9  Now then, get a new cart ready, with two cows that have calved and have never been yoked.  Hitch the cows to the cart, but take their calves away and pen them up.  Take the ark of the LORD and put it on the cart, and in a chest beside it put the gold objects you are sending back to him as a guilt offering.  Send it on its way, but keep watching it.  If it goes up to its own territory, toward Beth Shemesh, then the LORD has brought this great disaster on us.  But if it does not, then we will know that it was not his hand that struck us but that it happened to us by chance.

The powerful Philistines had proven their superioriority over Israel by capturing their sacred Ark – or, more to the point, the superiority of their god, ‘Dagon’, over Israel’s ‘Yahweh’, ‘the LORD’.  But even while they were celebrating this spectacular victory, many things started to go pear-shaped wherever they took the Ark in their territory.  Were all these disasters just unfortunate coincidences, just ‘bad luck’, or were they proof that their ‘victory’ was in fact defeat?

They needed to know for certain!  They needed a foolproof ‘sign’ – something as ‘miraculous’ and watertight as Gideon’s ‘fleeces’ in Judges 6:36-40.

Until several years ago, having never had any experience of rural life, I had no idea just how effectively the scheme devised by the Philistine priests was in serving this purpose. My wife and I (on holidays on the South Coast) were camping adjacent to a dairy farm.  We were wakened early one morning by the loud, persistent, mournful lowing of cows in a small enclosure where they were waiting to be trucked away.  It turned out these cows had just been separated from their calves as part of the farmer’s husbandry process.

I will never forget how distressful this was for these animals, and us.  What we were witnessing was a very powerful, natural, in-built bovine reaction, which to over-ride would require nothing short of a divinely inspired miracle!  So the Philistines received their answer loud and clear: Yahweh was more powerful than Dagon and they were suffering under his powerful judgement! 

There is the added irony that when the little contingent reached Beth Shemesh, the brand new cart and the ‘mothers’ who had been separated from their dependant ‘children’, under some external compulsion rather than according to instinct, actually became the resource material for the sacrifice of thanksgiving to the LORD (verse 14)!  It is good and helpful for us to have in Scripture such encouraging evidence that our God is absolutely sovereign in human affairs and rules over every detail of his Creation so effectively and comprehensively that we have no excuse for failing to trust him unconditionally with every aspect of our lives.  Lord, please forgive me for all the times I have failed miserably to trust you!

– Bruce Christian