Gather unto me seventy men,whom thou knowest to be elders and officers of the people":where,thou knowest is the same with thou appointest,or hast appointed to be such.For we are told before that Moses,following the counsel of Jethro his father-in-law,did appoint judges and officers over the people such as feared God;and of these were those seventy whom God,by putting upon them Moses'spirit,inclined to aid Moses in the administration of the kingdom:and in this sense the spirit of God is said presently upon the anointing of David to have come upon David,and left Saul;God giving His graces to him He chose to govern His people,and taking them away from him He rejected.So that by the spirit is meant inclination to God's service,and not any supernatural revelation.
God spake also many times by the event of lots,which were ordered by such as He had put in authority over His people.So we read that God manifested by the lots which Saul caused to be drawn the fault that Jonathan had committed in eating a honeycomb,contrary to the oath taken by the people.And God divided the land of Canaan amongst the Israelites by the "lots that Joshua did cast before the Lord in Shiloh."In the same manner it seemeth to be that God discovered the crime of Achan.And these are the ways whereby God declared His will in the Old Testament.
All which ways He used also in the New Testament.To the Virgin Mary,by a vision of an angel;to Joseph,in a dream;again to Paul,in the way to Damascus in a vision of our Saviour;and to Peter in the vision of a sheet let down from heaven with diverse sorts of flesh of clean and unclean beasts;and in prison,by vision of an angel;and to all the Apostles and writers of the New Testament,by the graces of His Spirit;and to the Apostles again,at the choosing of Matthias in the place of Judas Iscariot,by lot.
