Temporary Spiritual Gifts;
Baptism of the Holy Spirit
There are a
couple of things we need to observe in this section when we get into verses
8-11. First is the emphasis that these are from the Holy Spirit. In the
function of the Trinity, while all three members are involved in almost
everything, all three are part of the operation and yet usually one or another
has primary responsibility for a particular aspect or task. Here, even though
God the Father is involved in overseeing who gets a spiritual gift, and Jesus
Christ distributes gifts, it is the Holy Spirit in this passage who is the one
who is to distribute these gifts at salvation. It is His sovereign will, not
the will of individual believers. There is no place for any believer to pray
for any spiritual gift.
Each gift is
given for the purpose of service to the local church. Your spiritual gift is
not designed—with the one exception of evangelism—for working outside of a
local church ministry. Even an evangelist, as per Ephesians 4:8-12, is given
for the purpose of equipping the saints, believers in a local church, for the
work of ministry. That is one reason, if at all possible, for believers to be
involved in a local church.
1 Corinthians 12:9 NASB
“to another faith by the same Spirit, and to another gifts of healing by the
one Spirit.” When we get to the word “faith” there are some people who want to
understand this in terms of saving faith, but that is completely erroneous.
That is not the subject here; this is something that is given to a believer
subsequent to salvation. It is simultaneous with salvation but it is still
logically subsequent to expressing faith alone in Christ alone. This was a
temporary gift that was utilized in the early church due to a lack of having a
complete canon of Scripture. So it is a special ability to trust God in the
midst of extremely difficult circumstances, and it is thought to be linked in
this passage with miracles, all of which are supernatural situations. So this
is not the kind of faith that is found at saving faith; neither is this faith
that is found in the process of spiritual growth or the faith-rest drill. This
was a supernatural kind of faith related to miracles, healing, and other
supernatural gifts that were temporary and restricted to the early church age.
The second in this grouping
is the gift of healings [pl.]. There were different
kinds of healings, and these healings were designed as calling cards, giving
accreditation to the Messiah as well as to His apostles. This was their
function, to call attention to the prophet, to the apostle, so that they might
gain a hearing for the gospel. It validated what they were saying but it wasn’t
the only thing that validated what they were saying. This was a temporary gift.
The healing gift functioned in the same was a teaching gift or an evangelism
gift functioned. It wasn’t the sort of thing that just came on the recipient, it was something that a person gifted with
healing could go some place and heal somebody. The mission of Jesus Christ
wasn’t to heal everybody; the mission of the apostles wasn’t to heal people. In
terms of all the people they could have possibly healed in
1
Corinthians
Then the fourth in the group
is prophecy. There is trouble seeing how the last two gifts connect with the
first three in this group. There is prophecy and discerning of spirits.
Actually, discerning of spirits is a gift that was given for discerning of
whether or not the prophet was a true prophet or a false prophet. It is not
someone who comes into a church and says, for example: “I discern a spirit of
bitterness here.” That is just typical emotive, subjective, Charismatic
nonsense. The gift of discerning of spirits had to do with discerning whether
or not the person who claimed to be a prophet was a true prophet, based on the
content of their prophecy. 1 Corinthians
There is another error that
people get into with regard to the New Testament gift of prophecy,
that is an illegitimate breakdown of the gift into two categories. The
way this usually operates is that they will say prophecy has two aspects, a
foretelling [prediction] and a forth-telling. What they say is that the
foretelling died out with the completion of the canon but you still have is the
forth-telling, i.e. the challenge, the application, the mandates to the listener
to live life a certain way. There was a lot of predictive prophecy in Daniel
but the purpose of the prophecy wasn’t simply to satisfy the curiosity of the
Jews as to what was going to happen in the future, it was to encourage them
that God was still in control, that even though they had been taken out of the
land under divine discipline, the message was that God has a plan for Israel in
history and that God is in control no matter how chaotic the events may be. That
is the idea that we would put under forth-telling.
What happens in this kind of
flaky reasoning is that since foretelling in predictive prophecy ended and we
are left with forth-telling, and this is basically the function of preaching. So
then the conclusion is that prophecy in the New Testament age is really
preaching. That is just absurd. It does tremendous disservice to any kind of
word study on propheteuo [profhteuw], the verb prohetes
[profhthj], for prophet, and it does disservice to kerusso [khrussw], the verb for preaching, or kerugma [khrugma],
the word for proclamation. Today we do something funny. We take kerugma, the noun which means
proclamation, and the verb form kerusso,
which means to proclaim, and the person who did this was called the kerux [khruc], the proclaimer or the announcer. In almost all the
cases in the New Testament where there is this word group the content of the
proclamation is the gospel. In secular context a kerux was a herald. He announced the message or proclamation
for the king. His
job was to walk through the streets and make the announcement, and he was to be
distracted by people saying: “When is this going to take place? How are we
going to do it?” And so on. He just went through the streets and announced the
message. So it is an emphasis on the proclamation of the gospel that, Christ
has died on the cross as a substitute for mankind and that is the basis for
salvation. This is in distinction from the Greek verb didasko [didaskw]
which has the idea of instruction or teaching, or even another word katecheo [kathxew], from which we get our word catechism, which
emphasizes more or less a categorical type of instruction. But preaching as we
have it in our modern society is more of a literary or rhetorical format. It is
a certain kind of a structure of an oratorical message. Whereas teaching has more
to do with instruction, preaching has to do with a certain type of oratory. Sometimes you can teach and preach at the same
time; other times there is no teaching whatsoever, in what is called preaching,
it is more hortatory or exhortational and sometimes
more entertaining than it is informing. But this idea that preaching versus
teaching is a biblical category as we see it in our culture is a complete
misunderstanding of Scripture. And preaching is not the same thing as prophecy.
We can go back to different
messages in the Old Testament prophets and a particular message from Isaiah or
Jeremiah or Ezekiel might really be directed to challenging the people right
here today without a predictive element. Most of the time there was a predictive
element with the gift of prophecy. So prophecy had that predictive element to
it and we can’t reduce it to something else. So it had to do with the giving of
special revelation in some sense, whether or not that special revelation ended
up being in Scripture.
The difference between an apostle and a
prophet
1)
They’re both
foundational to the church, the body of Christ. Ephesians
2)
Both the apostle and
the prophet received special revelation and predicted the future. They are
distinguished in Ephesians 2:20.
3)
The ministry of
the apostle was to the church at large, whereas the prophet had a ministry that
was mostly to local congregations. He was geographically restricted.
4)
The specific job
description of the apostle and the prophet was to provide edification to the
body of Christ by exhorting and comforting the saints through special
revelation given to them. So there is a similarity. 1 Corinthians 14:3; 29, 30;
Ephesians 4:8-12.
5)
These predictions
included local specific time-bound revelations that were not included in
Scripture. Even in the Old Testament not everything a prophet said had
universal application and needed to be put down for subsequent generations.
6)
A key element in
prophecy was that it predicted future happenings. Acts
As a result of this there
were many false prophets coming along in the early church. 1 John 4:1 warns
that many false prophets have gone out into the world. There is so much
confusion related to this spiritual gift of prophecy that it is related to
preaching, but it is not; it has to do with special revelation and prediction.
Then we have the last two
gifts mention, and that is heteros,
so we have a shift in category again to another. It doesn’t say “kinds of tongues.”
It should be translated “varieties of languages.” Tongues is
such an archaic term today that we miss the point. It was languages, known
human languages. They were legitimate languages, not ecstatic utterances, not
gibberish. The interpretation of tongues has to do with translation.
1 Corinthians
1 Corinthians