Baptism HS & Tongues: Selected Verses
We began to look at the
question: Is there a connection between the baptism of the Holy Spirit and the
spiritual gift of tongues? We saw that the spiritual gift of tongues was
prophesied in the Old Testament in Isaiah 28:11, and referred to in 1
Corinthians 14:21 by the apostle Paul that it was prophesied as a warning sign
of impending divine judgment on the nation Israel. So the purpose underlying
the spiritual gift of tongues has to do with God’s plan and purpose for Israel.
It is not related to something that would be normative in the church age. There
are three occasions in the Acts narrative that relate to speaking in tongues.
One happens on the day of Pentecost, the second at the Gentile Pentecost in
Acts 10 & 11, the third in Acts 19 when Paul gives the gospel to some
disciples of John the Baptist. They represent Old Testament saints. They speak
in tongues and are filled with the Holy Spirit as a sign that Old Testament
saints are brought into the body of Christ on the same basis as Gentiles and
Jews, therefore to show the unity of the body of Christ. 1 Corinthians 12:13 NASB
“For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one
body, whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free, and we were all made to
drink of one Spirit.”
Is the gift of tongues for
today? Unfortunately when we come to this subject it is usually very emotional
with people. They immediately react and say that because we don’t believe in
the gift of tongues we are missing out and we can’t really know what the
Scripture says because we don’t have the Holy Spirit. All of that is easy to
say for people who do not want to grapple with what the Word of God actually
means. Unfortunately, in the charismatic movement it is dominated by a lot of
mystical thought which is based on irrationalism and emotionalism, and what
really matters is not all this slavery to the literal Word of the Bible, let’s
just let God speak directly to us. If God is going to speak directly to us,
though, it will not contradict what God spoke directly through the apostles in
the Word of God. Therefore if the Bible is the Word of God and is infallible,
and is our absolute guide to faith and practice, then we must look at what the
Scripture says about the subject.
To understand the answer to
this question we must begin with a little background to the epistle to the
Corinthians. We must understand something about this area called Corinth. For
centuries before the coming of Christ itinerate sailors and retired soldiers
had flocked to Corinth as a retirement location. They brought with them all of
their various gods and goddesses which created a religious melting pot in
Corinth. There you could find temples to the gods of Egypt, the gods of Persia,
and the gods of Anatolea, along with all of the
degenerate rites of the phallic cult. All of these religious ideas were
assimilated into the Greek religions of Mount Olympus. In fact, Corinth was
known for its temples to Athena where over a thousand temple prostitutes
enticed the religious devotees and immorality as a basis for having a
relationship with the goddess. Over the years prior to the New Testament
respect for the traditional gods of Greece deteriorated.
Just a
historical note here. There is
always a the following trend in history. There
develops a strong basis for rationalism. Rationalism always emphasizes human
reason as a basis for interpreting everything, and usually with rationalism
comes a lot of religious scepticism. So rationalism is usually followed by
religious scepticism and on the basis of scepticism there is very little hope
left. Rationalism debunks the gods and goddesses of the culture, as a result
there is no scepticism, there is no hope, there is no eternal life, there is no
basis for that, and since rationalism can’t provide ultimate answers scepticism
is hollow and empty and is always followed by mysticism. This happened in the
ancient world. Rationalism came with the great philosophers. From Socrates
through Plato and Aristotle there was the rise of Greek rationalism. That
produced scepticism which dominated in the following centuries so that by the
second century and into then first century BC and the first century AD. There was the rise of
oriental mysticism and the popularity of the oriental mystery religions in
Greece. The same thing has happened in our history. Rationalism arose in the 16th-17th
centuries and by the 19th century there was the development of
religious scepticism which played itself out in the 19th century
religious liberalism, the rise of Darwinistic
evolution. Now, starting really in the 60s was the development of mysticism,
religious mysticism and the rise of the New Age movement, postmodernist
philosophy, and all of this is ultimately based on mysticism. Wee see the same
trends.
As mysticism dominated in the
ancient world in Corinth and provided the ideological and religious context as
a backdrop to understanding the problems in Corinth and the problems they had
with tongues, it is also the backdrop for understanding what is going on in the
20th century as a backdrop to the rise of Pentecostalism. Why is it
that among all of the epistles that Paul wrote to various cities in the ancient
world that it was only the Corinthians that had a problem with tongues? It is
never mentioned in any other epistle. It must have something to do with the
matrix of culture and ideas in Corinth. Why is it that the tongues movement
that we see today around us—the Pentecostal movement, the charismatic movement,
etc.—that it did not develop until the end of the 19th century and
literally the first day of the 20th century. It arose out of a
cultural context and it is within that cultural context of 19th
century scepticism that we see people starting to react to this rationalistic
scepticism to emotion and experience. So there are a lot of parallels in our
world to what happened in the ancient world.
At that time in Corinth when
the apostle Paul arrived in the autumn of 49 AD to proclaim the gospel he
began by going to the Jewish synagogue. He got a few converts, created some
dissention, was kicked out, and then he went to the Gentiles. In Acts 18:8 we
are told, “Crispus, the leader of the synagogue,
believed in the Lord with all his household, and many
of the Corinthians when they heard were believing and being baptized.”
So we can say safely that the emerging congregation, this new spiritually
infant congregation was the product of this Greek culture. That is their
backdrop, their frame of reference for understanding spirituality and religion.
So they came from a background of extreme immorality, humanistic philosophies
and heathen mythologies. That had formed the context of their thinking. So of
we are going to understand these passages in Corinthians we must understand a
little bit about their culture.
The mystery religions were
called such because they said there was some kind of mystery knowledge, unrevealed knowledge, not mystery in the sense of a who-dunnit, but mystery in the
sense of unrevealed knowledge; that there was some
secret knowledge that you had to learn about if you were going to have a
relationship with the gods. Usually they would go to various religious centres
up in the hills and in the temples and they would have an ecstatic experience,
and emotional high, and something would happen when the god’s spoke to them and
they gave them this key. So this was their initiation into this religious
system.
There were three major cults
that dominated the thinking in Greece. The first had to do with the worship of
Apollo, the second had to do with the worship of Dionysus, and the third
revolved around the Sibiline
cult. Apollo had a major shrine at Delphi, just across the isthmus from
Corinth. At that shrine was a high priestess who was
called the Oracle at
The point is that
the Corinthians made the same conclusion. Coming out of this background, when
they heard about the spiritual gift of tongues they interpreted it within the
framework of their mystery religions, and so instead of understanding it as
speaking in legitimate human languages they interpreted it as this emotional,
mystical experience as the sign of the god indwelling them. Any Gentile
initiate of the Dionysian cult would believe that emotional excitement and
speaking in a ecstatic utterances which were “used by
the gods and spirits in heaven” was evidence of a special relationship with the
gods. In other words, emotion became their criterion for evaluating the
spiritual life. The other point to make is that when they spoke in ecstatic
utterances the benefit was personal. It was only personal. If you were in a
mystery religion the only person who go any benefit out of it was the
individual who was performing the action. No one else understood what was being
said so it was just the fact that you had this sort of emotional experience
that got you jazzed up so that you could go out and live on the basis of this
experience. The third mystery religion at this time was came from the Sibile cult which in Anatolea
(Turkey) was intimately connected with the worship of Dionysus. As part of
their practice they would try would try to invoke the gods with clashing
symbols, banging drums and loud gongs.
What does Paul
say in 1 Corinthians 13:1? “If I speak
with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a
noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” He is making a direct reference to these
religious practices that dominated in Corinth.
In their emotional excitement
they would dance in a frenzy. Their goal was to
achieve the status of emotional ecstasy so that they could speak in a
mysterious gibberish. So all three of these mystery religions encouraged their
pupils to get emotionally excited and speak in this gibberish in order to give
evidence that they had a relationship with God. So emotion was confused with
spirituality. But this wasn’t unique to this particular time in the first
century. A hundred years later there was a man by the
name of Montanus arise in the same area. Before he
was saved he was a priest of Sibile, so he had been a
part of that cult. He began a Christian sect which espoused these same
heretical views emphasising irrational ecstatic prophecy about the return of
Christ, miracles and emotional experience as a criterion for spirituality.
Since these later Montanists one hundred years later
con fused emotion, frenzy and ecstatics with
spirituality, it is really clear that the 1st century Corinthians
were making same error. And it is the same error that underlies the
Pentecostal-charismatic movement today.
Now we have to
understand something about the Corinthians believers themselves. Remember, in
the original Pentecostal understanding of the gift of tongues you had to have a
second work of grace after salvation in order to have everything that God has
for you. That second work of grace would sort of elevate you to a higher level
of spirituality. They called that second work of grace the baptism of the Holy
Spirit and it was evidenced by speaking in tongues, and you had to have that if
you were really going to be spiritual because the baptism of the Holy Spirit is
what would make you spiritual. The issue here is, is that what happened in
Corinth?
Let’s see what
Paul says about the Corinthians in his epistle. The Corinthians were perhaps
the most carnal, screwed up, out-of-fellowship bunch in the entire New
Testament. Paul confronts them with the fact that they are operating on hum
viewpoint rather than Bible doctrine in 1 Corinthians chapters one through
three. Positionally they had become new creatures in
Christ, they were believers, nevertheless they are the
same old sinners with the same old human viewpoint dominating the mentality of
their souls. Their sin list is appalling. They are accused of pride, envy, jealousy,
childishness, pettiness, gossip, maligning, adultery, incest and drunkenness.
As a result it is the most fragmented congregation in the New Testament era.
Yet, because of the abundance of God’s grace the church was filled with
spiritual gifts, according to 1 Corinthians 1:7. But because they were in
carnality, according to 1 Corinthians 3:1-3, they couldn’t use their spiritual
gifts, they were operating out of the sin nature. So we have to understand the
carnal background of the Corinthians. They were divided; they were confused;
they were carnal. There was little if anything to
commend this group of believers. Paul nailed them for their competition over
baptism in 1 Corinthians 1:11-17, he rebuked them for their excessive carnality
and lack of spiritual growth in 1 Corinthians 3:3. They rejected Bible doctrine
and those who communicated doctrine in 1 Corinthians 3:18-22. They were
arrogant in a variety of areas, including dragging fellow believers before
unbelieving judges to resolve their disputes, and contentious women in 1
Corinthians 11:2-16. They were split according to the various trends in the sin
natures, towards legalism and asceticism. Those who were involved legalism and
asceticism were confused and self-righteous concerning marriage, divorce and
sexuality in 1 Corinthians chapter seven. These legalists created discord over
eating meat sacrificed to idols in chapter eight. They accused Paul of money
lust because he was remunerated for his teaching ministry, in 1 Corinthians
chapter nine. Those who followed the trend toward antinomianism returned to the
licentious patterns of their Greek culture. They tolerated incest in 1
Corinthians 5:1, fornication in 1 Corinthians 6, participated in the phallic
cult in 1 Corinthians 6:15, and they exploited the Lord’s table as an excuse
for gluttony and drunkenness in 1 Corinthians 11:17. So we are not talking
about a group of people here who are really excited about their relationship
with the Lord and walking by means of the Holy Spirit, are we? This is as screwed
up bunch of Christians that can be found at any time in church history. Just
because they spoke in tongues had nothing to do with their spirituality. In
fact, what we can guess from our background study is what they were doing in
calling speaking in tongues wasn’t the biblical gift of tongues at all. What
they were doing in their carnality was imitating the pagan practices of the
mystery religions that they had grown up with. They were taking those ideas
over into their experience in Christianity and trying to identify it. The
result was division and emotionalism and nobody knew what was going on at all
in Corinth.
One thing we want
to emphasize here is 1 Corinthians 14:4 NASB “One who speaks in a tongue edifies himself; but one
who prophesies edifies the church.” Paul is simply making the point that if you
go out here and have this ecstatic utterance the only Paul is simply making the
point that if you go out here and have this ecstatic utterance the only person
who is benefiting from it is you. The biblical gift of tongues is a spiritual gift. A spiritual gift by definition is
given to the believer to edify others in the body of Christ, not himself. If he
uses his spiritual gift for personal benefit then he is in arrogance and
self-absorption and is distorting the spiritual gift. So therefore, what is our
conclusion? The spiritual gift was never designed for devotions,
the spiritual gift of tongues was never designed as a prayer language, because
all of that violates its fundamental definition as a spiritual gift. So
whatever else the apostle Paul is saying in chapter 14 he concludes later on
that he would rather speak five words with his mind than ten thousand words in
a tongue. Because when these people got involved in ecstatic utterance the mind
was disengaged, and it is the mind, the mentality of the soul, that is the
basis for much of spiritual life. Remember, the Christian life is a life based
on thought. It is based on thinking the thoughts of Christ, having in us the
mind of Christ.
Everybody is
given a spiritual gift at the point of salvation and no spiritual gift is more
important than any other spiritual gift to the body of Christ. Some have greater
significance in one area or another but all are of value. Paul uses the analogy
in 1 Corinthians 12:14-22 of the foot and the hand, etc. In other words, if
your spiritual gift is one of the less seen of the spiritual gifts, and not as
obvious as the gift of evangelism or pastor-teacher which are
more overt gifts, you don’t have any right to say your gift isn’t relevant. Every
gift is important.
When we look at
the issue of spiritual gifts we realize that the present conception of
spiritual gifts in the charismatic-Pentecostal movement is in direct
contradiction to what is taught in 1 Corinthians chapter twelve. The highest
priority gifts were related to the communication of doctrine, because that is
the only way that we can grow in the spiritual life. We need to remind
ourselves that the spiritual life is based on thinking doctrine,
it is not based on emotion. Emotion should never be the basis for making
decisions or evaluating the Christian life. Emotions can never learn, cannot
analyse, solve problems, cannot produce spiritual growth. It is easier for
people to rely on emotion, though, than invest their energy in concentrating on
doctrine and in having the self-discipline to think and to go to Bible class
and listen to somebody teach for 45 minutes or an hour, or even longer. God
designed emotion to be the responder to the mentality in the soul, not to be
the initiator. When emotion overruns the mentality in the soul the result is
subjectivity, irrationality and self-absorption. Emotion was a rampant problem
in the Corinthians church. So let us remind ourselves of what the Bible says:
Proverbs
23:7 NASB “For as he thinks
within himself, so he is.”
Colossians 3:2 NASB
“Set your mind [not emotions] on the things above, not on the things that are
on earth.”
Ephesians
Philippians 2:5 NASB
“Have this attitude [phroneo: objective
thinking] in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus.”
How do we learn to think like
Christ? By learning doctrine. The Word of God is
called the mind/thinking of Christ in 1 Corinthians 2:16. Therefore we conclude
that what God says is more important than how we feel. What God says is the
only thing that matters in terms of our spiritual life, not how we feel. When
God’s Word becomes more real to the believer than any emotion, any circumstance
or any experience, then he is beginning to move forward in the spiritual life. Only
by learning Bible doctrine can we come to know God; only by learning doctrine
can we know God and then love God. We cannot love who we do not know, and we
cannot know what we haven’t taken the time and the discipline to learn. We have
to renovate our thinking through Bible doctrine. Romans 12:2 NASB “And
do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your
mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and
acceptable and perfect.” So the spiritual life is a life based on thought, on
thinking Bible doctrine.
The key verse that we want to
look at in 1 Corinthians 13 to ask the question, is the gift of tongues for
today, is verse 10: “but when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away.”
This is the whole issue. What does it mean when it says “when the perfect comes”?
The Greek word for “perfect” here is teleios
[teleioj], a neuter adjective. In the ancient world there were
two categories of meaning to this word. One had to do with the quality of a thing, the other had to do with quantity. It can’t mean
both, it is either/or. Quality has to do with something that has no
imperfections in it, so in terms of a qualitative idea we would translate it as
“perfect.” A quantity idea has to do with how much there is of something, a
little or a lot. If something is partial then when it is teleios
it is made complete, brought to completion. So these are the two different
ideas: moral perfection or completion. A perfect state indicates a quality
situation; incomplete or complete indicates a quantity or how much. So we have
to use the context to determine whether what is translated “perfect” here has a
quality idea or a quantity idea. “When the perfect comes the
partial will be done away.” So it is obvious that partial is a quantity
idea. If this is going to have any meaning then the word must be translated “complete”
to be consistent with the context.
Applying
this in terms of interpretation.
When the word is understood as having a quantity idea it is interpreted to
refer to the second coming of Christ, or when the believer dies and is face to
face with the Lord. They try to derive that out of verse 12 and we will see
that is the wrong idea; it won’t fit. The context is comparing knowledge and prophecy
which are partial to teleios which
is “complete”; the idea of perfection doesn’t enter in. The context here is talking
about partial and complete rather than partial and perfect. Obviously this
category of interpretation—the second coming or being face to face with the
Lord, the Millennial kingdom or any of the ideas there—just don’t fit the
context, they totally violate the basic meaning of the word.
1 Corinthians 13:8 NASB
“Love never fails; but if {there are gifts of} prophecy, they will be done
away; if {there are} tongues, they will cease; if {there is} knowledge, it will
be done away.” Love is going to continue, it is never going to be abrogated, “but”
(contrast), three things are going to be abrogated. If
there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away. If there are tongues, they
will cease. Knowledge will be done away. So he is talking about three spiritual
gifts here: prophecy, tongues, knowledge. Prophecy and
knowledge are revelatory gifts. They were used by God to reveal doctrine to
people. Tongues was a sign gift, a sign of judgment to
the Jews. Prophecy and knowledge are said to be abolished—katargeo [katargew], passive voice. Something is going to happen which
will knock these two completely, they will be acted upon. But tongues is not
abolished, a different word is used. Paul uses the word pauo [pauw], middle
voice, and it is a dynamic middle which indicates that tongues is just going to
die out. Tongues is not mentioned again in this
passage, which indicates that tongues probably would die out before the other
two gifts were abolished. We know from history that it did. In 70 AD when
Then it goes on in verse 9 to
talk about these two subjects, prophecy and knowledge: “For we know in part and
we prophesy in part.” So what characterizes prophecy and knowledge is that they
are both partial. The Greek word here is ek
merous [e)k merouj]. Knowledge and prophecy are partial because no
prophet, no apostle, no one with the gift of knowledge was given all of the information
in the New Testament at one time. Even the apostle Paul didn’t understand
everything. Prophecy and knowledge are talking about revelation. So if we are
talking about revelation then that which is partial is going to be completed. Verse
10: “but when the perfect [that which completes] comes, the partial [partial
revelatory gifts] will be done away [abolished].” There we have the word katargeo again. What completes partial
revelation is complete revelation. And it is only when we have the complete revelation
of God that we are able to complete our spiritual life and grow to spiritual
maturity. If we only have incomplete revelation we don’t have everything we
need to know to pursue spiritual maturity, bit once revelation is complete we
have everything we need in order to grow to spiritual maturity.
Paul is talking about
knowledge and prophecy. Now he illustrates, and illustration # 1 relates to
knowledge, moving from partial to complete. Verse 11 NASB “When I
was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a
child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things.” The difference
between a child and an adult is incomplete versus complete. Verse 12 NASB
“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part,
but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known.” “Now” is a
critical word, arti [a)rti]. There
are two different Greek words that can be used to express the concept of present
time, arti and numi [numi], and we find both of them in this passage. In verse
13: NASB “But now [numi]
faith, hope, love, abide these three…” Why does the apostle shift from arti to numi
in these two verses? Is there some difference? In about 95 per cent of cases these
two words are synonymous and can be used interchangeably. But when they are
used within the same context then the writer emphasizes different aspects of “now.”
The arti is used to indicate the
exact present time; the numi is a
little broader and would indicate more the present age. So what we find in
verse 13 is: “But now in the church age
continues faith, hope and love.” Remember, it is faith, hope and love that continues. Love never fails, v. 8. And what Paul is saying
in v. 12 is, “But now—right now in this present time in this present pre-canon
period—we see in a mirror dimly.” The mirror we look at is the mirror of the
Word of God, the perfect law of liberty James calls it. God’s Word reflects who
we are. We look in the mirror to see what we are truly like. That is the Word of
God.
1 Corinthians 13:12 NASB
“ For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part,
but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known.” What does
this refer to? Most of the time when we read something written on this passage
we are going to read that the face to face here is face to face with the Lord,
but that doesn’t fit the analogy. When we look into the mirror we are looking
face to face with the mirror, not with some other person; there is a reflection
going on. When I am face to face with the Lord He is not reflecting anything. When
I am face to face with the Word of God it is reflecting me. What is important
here is to understand that analogy. It is based on Numbers 12:6 NASB
“He said, “Hear now My words: If there is a prophet
among you, I, the LORD, shall make Myself known to him in a vision. I shall
speak with him in a dream. [7] Not so, with My servant Moses, He is faithful in
all My household;
1 Corinthians