Acts 1:26

Acts 1:26. And the lot fell on Matthias. ‘The lots alluded to here were probably tablets with the names of the persons written upon them, and shaken in a vessel or in the lap of a robe (Proverbs 16:33), he whose lot first leaped out being the person designated' (Alford, Com. on Acts). This asking God directly to interfere in the choice of an apostle by guiding the chance of a lot, was not unfrequent in the history of the chosen people, especially before the invisible but direct sovereignty of Jehovah was partially superseded by the election of an earthly king. The lot we find used for the division of land, Numbers 26:55; Joshua 18:10; in war, Judges 20:20; for the royal office, in the case of the first King Saul, 1 Samuel 10:20-21.

In this solitary instance in the New Testament, to complete the number of the ‘Twelve,' broken by such a strange and awful crime, the hand of God was thus directly invoked, but never again. The ‘Acts of the Apostles,' a book to which in future ages the Church would often refer for guidance, contains no repetition of such an election, either in the Holy Land or in the Gentile countries. No church, from the days of the apostles to our own times (with the exception of the Moravian Church, Gloag, Com. on Acts), has ever attempted, in its election and choice of pastors, to follow the example of that first election in Jerusalem. The Church Catholic, while reverencing the unquestioned legality of the procedure in the choice of Matthias, has silently agreed to consider it as standing by itself in the history of the world, and as such never to be imitated.