Casting Lots
How God anciently guided His people through the sacred lot — and why it was never chance, never divination, but a decision submitted in faith to the disposing of the Lord.
The Outcome Is the Lord’s
To modern ears the phrase “casting lots” sounds like rolling dice or drawing straws — a surrender of judgment to blind chance. But in the hands of covenant Israel it was the very opposite. The lot was a deliberate means of asking God a question and receiving His answer, and the entire practice rested upon one governing conviction: that nothing falls out by accident, and that the Lord Himself directs what appears to men as a random result.
Solomon states the principle with perfect economy:
“The lot is cast into the lap; but the whole disposing thereof is of the Lord.”
Man casts the lot; God disposes the result. The act of throwing was the human part — small, simple, and visibly impartial. The outcome was wholly in the hands of Heaven. So understood, the lot was not a gamble offered to chance but a question laid humbly before an all-governing God.
When God Directed by Lot
Throughout scripture, when His people needed to know a matter beyond their own discernment — whom to choose, where to settle, who had sinned — God again and again answered through the lot. The land of Canaan was divided among the tribes this way, and the text is careful to say where the deciding took place: not in the camp of men, but in the presence of God.
“Ye shall therefore describe the land into seven parts, and bring the description hither to me, that I may cast lots for you here before the Lord our God. … And Joshua cast lots for them in Shiloh before the Lord: and there Joshua divided the land unto the children of Israel according to their divisions.”
The inheritance of every tribe — the very ground their children would farm for centuries — was settled “before the Lord” by lot, so that no tribe could charge Joshua with favoritism. The decision came from God, and all Israel knew it.
On the most sacred day of the year, the Day of Atonement, the high priest set two goats before the Lord and let the lot decide their destiny — one for sacrifice, one to bear away the sins of the people: “And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the Lord, and the other lot for the scapegoat” (Leviticus 16:8). The lot stood at the heart of Israel’s holiest ordinance.
When sin was hidden in the camp and Israel fell before Ai, the Lord uncovered the guilty man not by accusation but by lot, narrowing tribe by family until Achan alone was taken: “In the morning therefore ye shall be brought according to your tribes … and the tribe which the Lord taketh shall come according to the families thereof” (Joshua 7:14–18). The lot exposed what no man had seen, because the Lord guided it. So too the sailors fleeing the storm: “And they said every one to his fellow, Come, and let us cast lots, that we may know for whose cause this evil is upon us. So they cast lots, and the lot fell upon Jonah” (Jonah 1:7).
Even the orderly service of the temple was arranged this way. David organized the priests into their courses “by lot, one sort with another” so that no house could claim precedence over another, and the duties of the sanctuary — ward against ward — were assigned the same impartial way (1 Chronicles 24:5, 31). From the dividing of a nation’s land to the daily rotation of its priests, Israel trusted the Lord to dispose the lot.
The Choosing of Matthias
After the Lord’s ascension, the eleven Apostles faced a vacancy: Judas had fallen, and the quorum of the Twelve had to be made whole. Two faithful men were proposed, Joseph called Barsabas and Matthias. But the Apostles did not simply vote their preference. They first prayed, asking the Lord — who alone reads the heart — to make the choice known, and then they cast the lot.
“And they prayed, and said, Thou, Lord, which knowest the hearts of all men, shew whether of these two thou hast chosen, that he may take part of this ministry and apostleship, from which Judas by transgression fell, that he might go to his own place. And they gave forth their lots; and the lot fell upon Matthias; and he was numbered with the eleven apostles.”
Notice the pattern. Prayer came first; the lot came after. The Apostles did not treat the lot as magic that compelled an answer — they treated it as the means by which the Lord, already petitioned, would point to the man He had chosen. The choosing of an Apostle was too weighty to leave to human reckoning, so they laid it before God and trusted Him to dispose the result.
Not Divination — Its Opposite
It is vital to see that the sacred lot is not a religious version of fortune-telling. The very same scriptures that record God answering by lot also pronounce the sternest condemnation upon divination, sorcery, and enchantment.
“There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, … or a wizard, or a necromancer. For all that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord.”
How can God forbid divination yet answer by lot? Because the two are moral opposites. Divination, sorcery, and enchantment are attempts to seize hidden knowledge or bend events by tapping powers other than God — to manipulate the unseen and force an outcome. The diviner approaches the dark as a master, demanding answers on his own terms.
The sacred lot is the reverse posture entirely. It seizes nothing and manipulates nothing. It submits a decision to the true and living God and waits upon His disposing. The diviner says, “I will compel the answer”; the faithful Israelite says, with bowed head, “Thou, Lord, which knowest the hearts of all men, shew whom thou hast chosen.” One reaches for forbidden power; the other surrenders to rightful authority. The difference is not the mechanics of the act but the God — or the no-god — behind it.
Surpassed by the Spirit
There is a quiet and striking fact about the choosing of Matthias: it is the last recorded use of casting lots in all of scripture. After it, the practice simply disappears from the record of God’s people. The reason is found in the very next chapter.
Matthias was chosen in Acts 1. In Acts 2, at Pentecost, the Holy Ghost was poured out upon the Apostles in power. From that hour the Church was led no longer by the lot but by the direct voice of the Spirit. When the gospel was to go to the Gentiles, the Spirit said to Peter, “Behold, three men seek thee”; when Barnabas and Saul were to be set apart, “the Holy Ghost said, Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them”; when Paul sought to enter Asia, the Spirit forbade him. The decisions once entrusted to the lot were now made plain by revelation through the Holy Ghost.
This is not a contradiction but a progression. The lot was a means suited to an earlier time, when the gift of the Holy Ghost had not yet been poured out upon the whole body of the Church. It gave a true answer, for God disposed it — but it gave only an answer, never a relationship. The voice of the Spirit gives both. The lesser means yielded to the fuller; the silent fall of the lot gave way to the living voice of God in the heart.
God Has Always Had a Means
From beginning to end, the witness of scripture is that God never leaves His covenant people to grope in the dark. He has always had a means by which to make His will known. To Israel before Pentecost, one of those means was the sacred lot — cast in faith, submitted in prayer, and disposed by the hand of the Lord, so that “the whole disposing thereof” was His and not chance’s.
It was never divination, for divination grasps at hidden powers, while the lot kneels before the only true Power and waits. And when the time was full, the lot was not abolished as an error but fulfilled and surpassed by something greater — the gift of the Holy Ghost, the constant companion who guides into all truth.
The lesson of the lot, then, is not that we should cast lots today, but that we should trust the God who once disposed them. The same Lord who guided a falling lot to Matthias now guides His Saints by His Spirit — a surer, nearer, and more glorious means — for the disposing of all things, then and now, is of the Lord.