1 Sam. 5:  6-10, “ The Lord's hand was heavy upon the people of Ashdod and its vicinity; he brought devastation upon them and afflicted them with tumors. When the men of Ashdod saw what was happening, they said, ‘The ark of the god of Israel must not stay here with us, because his hand is heavy upon us and upon Dagon our god.’ So they called together all the rulers of the Philistines and asked them, ‘What shall we do with the ark of the god of Israel?’ They answered, ‘Have the ark of the god of Israel moved to Gath.’ So they moved the ark of the God of Israel.  But after they had moved it, the Lord's hand was against that city, throwing it into a great panic. He afflicted the people of the city, both young and old, with an outbreak of tumors. So they sent the ark of God to Ekron. As the ark of God was entering Ekron, the people of Ekron cried out, ‘They have brought the ark of the god of Israel around to us to kill us and our people.’”…. 1 Sam. 6:7-10, “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 and that it happened to us by chance.’ So they did this. They took two such cows and hitched them to the cart and penned up their calves.’”

This passage is classic for illustrating the nonsense of attributing events in this life to “chance.” Chance is nothing. It is only the mathematical probability of something occurring, and it has no causative power. Only God has ultimate causative power, as we have seen. Thus when a person says that something happened “by chance,” or “by coincidence,” Christians who understand the Bible and its teaching on the sovereignty of God may feel sorrow. Obviously, that person needs to know the true God!

What happened in the rest of the story? Well, the two milk cows were obviously taken away from their calves and hitched to the cart. The Philistines were trying to orchestrate this scenario to allow for the least opportunity for the cows to pull the cart with the ark to Beth Shemesh and thus disprove their pagan religion and substantiate that God is real. But these cows, deprived of their calves and never before yoked, went directly to Beth Shemesh, lowing all the way for doing something entirely unnatural for their cow hearts to do. So much for chance!