The gifts of the Holy Spirit << | >> The Holy Spirit Sealing

Tongue Speakers and Prophets

1 Corinthians 13:1-3 “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.”

This famous thirteenth chapter on the theme of love is sandwiched between one chapter that ends with the words, “Eagerly desire the greater gifts” and one that begins with the words, “eagerly desire spiritual gifts.” This chapter describes to us the only way in which spiritual gifts can be pursued and used. They are all to be exercised in love. That is the purpose of this chapter, with thought for others, carefully, honourably and respectfully with the aim of building up others in the body. The absence of this seems to have been the great weakness in the Corinthian congregation.

THE HOLY SPIRIT’S SUPREME GRACE OF LOVE.

Love is crucial because it is the supreme grace that is given to every single believer. If the church is ‘the fellowship of the Spirit’ it is also ‘the love of God,’ the community whose delight is to keep the greatest commandments, to love God with all our hearts and to love our neighbours as ourselves. To fall here would be to fall at the first hurdle of the Christian race; to fail in loving is to be breaking the greatest commandment.

You will notice that Paul begins the chapter with the gift that was especially loved by the Corinthians, the gift of tongues, and then he progresses in the second verse to the gifts which he himself most esteemed, the gifts of prophecy and faith, and thirdly he moves on to write of the gifts which the pagan culture of Corinth valued highly, “A man plunges himself into poverty for the sake of helping the poor – what a giant! A man destroys himself for conscience sake – what a man!” Then Paul tells us that love transcends all of that. Here is a little Christian lady who is illiterate, a servant in a household, nobody in the eyes of the world, and yet she is full of Christian love. She is more important in God’s sight than a Paul McCartney or Nelson Mandela. So the apostle is leaving no-one to feel unconvicted or untouched in pressing upon his readers the mega-significance of love.

Paul begins with a reference to the tongues of men and of angels, and I believe that that latter phrase, the ‘tongues of angels’ is a superlative, in other words Paul is saying that if you wonderfully developed your gift of tongues to heavenly heights speaking like an angel but you were lacking love then the whole exercise is as empty as the banging of a pagan gong to wake the gods up, or driving away evil spirits by clashing cymbals together.

Then Paul deals with an outstanding gift of prophetic powers – possessing an A* in that endowment - so that the possessor is able grasp the secret things that belong to God alone. He could explain where sin came from in the beginning; he could announce the date of the second coming; he could explain the Trinity – “all mysteries and all knowledge” were really his. Then on top of that he had a second A* in faith so that he could address a mountain and the mountain jumped, the impossible actually happened. He had all that – prophetic powers and mountain-moving faith – surely he must be a spiritual giant! “Not necessarily,” says Paul. Without love, even with gifts as flamboyant as those gifts, a man’s not an A* he’s a Z-. No, he is worse than that. He’s a nothing.

Then in the third verse Paul deals with giving away all you have so that the poor may benefit. Surely you’d erect a statue of that man in the city square. Or the man who’d accept martyrdom for what he believes, surely you’d attach a blue plaque to the house where he lived? Paul says that without love you have gained absolutely nothing by those actions. You can give away everything, even selling yourself into slavery that others may be given the money (people did that in the ancient world), but your motive in doing that might be to gain merit, or attract attention, and then it would all be vanity. Our world is plagued by suicide bombers who kill themselves and others for what they believe. Without loving you are nothing, and you may be considerably less than nothing. You can be a menace and a murderer. There is an interesting textual footnote in the N.I.V. to verse three referring to an old manuscript reading which says, “surrender my body that I may boast.” That may be the original reading. Love excludes boasting.

Then Paul defines what love is in the next four verses; “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” (vv.4-7). So love is not so much emotional, and passionate, and fiery but someone being patient. Are you disappointed that that grace is given pride of place? “Love is patient.” What is love? “Love is kind.” What is love? It is not doing certain things, like envying, boasting, being proud and not being rude or easily getting angry. That is love. It means you’ve tamed your emotions, stretching out, making broad and lengthening the time before you retaliate, ‘longsuffering.’ Love is not self-seeking but it seeks the common good. Love is not essentially a feeling of affection; it is a way of behaving. It probably starts as feelings but it quickly develops into actions. Love does things; it gives to others. For example, the Samaritan had the scorn of every Jew heaped upon him throughout his life. He lived his entire life knowing that the Jews hated the Samaritans, but what were all the memories of that contempt when one day a particular Samaritan came across a wounded, robbed, beaten-up Jew lying on the ground half-dead and left to die by his fellow-countrymen who passed by on the other side? Love stops; love acts. Love is the love of I Corinthians chapter 13; it is kind; it is not self-seeking; it keeps no record of wrongs; it does not delight in evil; it always protects; it always perseveres. The Samaritan loved this Jew not emotionally, not with infatuation, but in his actions, he bound up his wounds and took him to a place of safety and recuperation, all by his own efforts and at his own expense.

Finally verse eight opens up the theme of the last part of chapter thirteen, “Love never fails.” Some of the gifts like prophecy, tongues and knowledge will cease. Perfection is going to come, and then the imperfect will disappear (v.10). There are those who strongly argue that the reference here to perfection coming is actually the time of the removal of all the apostles and their signs. At that time the fulness of revelation which is the apostles’ eternal legacy to the church will be in the possession of every congregation. Don’t dismiss that viewpoint too readily though I acknowledge it is the minority view. Do you appreciate that this letter to the Corinthians was probably the first piece of New Testament Scripture that they actually had? There were no gospels written yet, and no epistles to the Romans or the Ephesians. There were probably letters to James and the Thessalonians and Galatians, but they may not have reached Corinth, or only latterly. Yet God was compassionate to the fledgling church and gave them a host of revelatory gifts, of revelation, wisdom and knowledge, tongues and prophecies and interpretations, but that was a temporary compensation for having no New Testament. Until then they were impoverished. So some have argued cogently that the ‘maturity’ (teleios) of verse ten refers to possessing the entire 27 books of the New Testament to complement the 39 of the Old Testament. That was going to be the Spirit Word for the church until the end of the age - the Holy Bible which enables the Christian to be perfect, that is, complete, and fully furnished for all the good works God will give him to do. However, there are many others who don’t accept that view but believe that the ‘perfect’ or the ‘mature’ is referring to the end of the age when God will be seen “face to face” (v.12).

Paul’s concern in these verses is to educate those in Corinth who were thinking they had really arrived and were super-Christians because they had certain gifts of the Spirit. “No. You have to grow in love,” Paul is telling them. He is saying that however much we mature in the stage where we are now, it is at best, that is, when we are at our holiest and most zealous and godly, only a childhood. We are all children. For us full maturity is in the future – when we get to heaven. With all your gifts, you Corinthian Christians are looking in a mirror dimly; you don’t even have the privilege of the whole revelation of Christ in the gospels and letters, and you are not yet in the presence of the Lord Jesus in glory. While prophecy, knowledge and tongues will cease faith, hope and love are never transient graces, they endure, and the greatest of them all, Paul insists, is love.

THE HOLY SPIRIT’S GREAT GIFT OF PROPHECY.

Chapter fourteen begins with the exhortation, “Follow!’ and soon by another, “Eagerly desire!” He wants to see their ardour channeled into what he has been describing, and then that it should be focused in the gift of prophecy. The effects of a man exercising the gift of prophesy are described for us in the third verse, “Everyone who prophesies speaks to men for their strengthening, encouraging and comfort.” That defines what prophecy achieves, especially the first word “strengthening”. You find this word a number of times in this chapter, in verse four where it is translated “edifies”, and verse twelve where the same word is translated “build up”, and verse seventeen where it is translated again “edifies” and in verse twenty-six where it is translated “strengthening.” This word describes the essence of what prophesying does, it edifies; it builds up; it strengthens. Men and women must be helped by such a gift, Paul says in verse three, and that’s how you judge the importance of a gift, that it is wonderfully useful in serving others. That is why Paul exhorts us to eagerly desire this gift. The word “prophesy” is not very suitable for translating it into English, but what can be used instead of it? ‘Speak thoughtfully’? Or ‘counsel’? Or ‘express the will of God’. I’m not in favour of replacing it with the word ‘preach’ because this gift is certainly exercised more outside the pulpit than from it. We have an officers’ meeting and the men there are called upon to address an issue and speak to the rest of us for our strengthening and encouraging and comfort, and they do. Again, there were ‘experience meetings’ so-called in Wales after the great awakening of the 18th century, and in them there would be prophesyings, in other words, Christians speaking in thoughtful speech to one another. There were that group of spiritual leaders in the Highlands of Scotland called ‘the men’ and they had this gift of speaking the will of God into a certain situation so that Christians were built up, strengthened and comforted it. Seek to speak like that, to prophesy.

THE HOLY SPIRIT’S LESSER GIFT OF TONGUES.

It was a lesser gift wasn’t it, because Paul says, “He who prophesies is greater than one who speaks in tongues” (v.5)? It always needed the additional gift of interpretation. It could not stand alone, while prophesy could. So Paul turns to speaking in a tongue (v.2).

i] Now what was this gift in Corinth? The only place the gift of tongues is described for us in the New Testament is Acts chapter two on the day of Pentecost. It was the ability, under the direct influence of the Holy Spirit, to speak in a living human language not previously learned. It came in the form of a prayer of thanksgiving, or singing, and the content of what was said was the great works of God in the gospel. The same Greek word ‘tongue’ is used in this chapter as is also found in Acts chapter two, and where the word is used elsewhere in the New Testament it refers to an extant language. You remember how it was at Pentecost in Jerusalem, when the people from many Gentile nations heard the tongues being spoken by these 120 Christians and they said in wonder, “We hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues” (Acts 2:11). Furthermore, Luke who wrote the Acts, was familiar with the church in Corinth; he describes Paul and Apollos going there and starting the work. So from this I can only conclude that the tongues of Corinth were the same as the tongues of Pentecost. Of the three great signs at Pentecost, the rushing mighty wind, the appearance of flames resting on them, and the tongues the most readily mobile and useful of them in the gatherings of the expanding church was tongues. You find the sign in Samaria, and in Cornelius’ household, and in Ephesus. Their presence says, “The Spirit working here is the same Spirit as was poured out on Pentecost. We are one in the Spirit.”

Paul gives no indication that when the gospel reached Corinth another kind of tongues, ‘ecstatic utterances,’ were common in that church. There is, in fact, no reference to anything ecstatic in this chapter in the letter. Rather we are told that the tongues in the church would need to be ‘interpreted’ and where this word is used in the New Testament it refers to articulate verbal communication. From the beginning of creation both God and angels have spoken to men by means of a human language, the language of the hearers. God speaks to most of us in English, to some he speaks in Welsh - that is the version of the Word of God you read, but whatever language God speaks to men it is always a true living language. If this phenomenon in Corinth were something different from the tongues of Ephesus, or Samaria, or Cornelius’ household or Jerusalem surely there would have been some description or explanation of that fact in the chapter, but there is none. It is called a language. Phil Roberts has wisely observed, “Ecstatic utterances are the product of altered states of consciousness or of mindlessness. As God is a supremely rational being and constantly lays stress upon the place of our rational faculty in spiritual activity, it would seem contrary to all we know to believe he would employ mindless communication, that is, that which has no rational basis and indistinguishable from gibberish” (Phil Roberts, The Gift of Tongues, Tentmaker Publications, 1991, p.5).

Consider how the gifts are to be exercised in Christian worship - which is quite unlike pagan worship, when people were carried away by the spectacle and sound (I Cor. 12:2). In gospel worship the gifts are exercised with this acknowledgment that “The spirits of the prophets are subject to the control of prophets” (I Cor. 14:32), and in obedience to the exhortation, “Everything should be done in a fitting and orderly manner” (I Cor. 14:40). So there was a gift of speaking in an unknown language, and then there was an additional optional gift given to the tongues speaker himself to be able to understand and interpret what he has said to the church; “For this reason anyone who speaks in a tongue should pray that he may interpret what he says. For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays, but my mind is unfruitful. So what shall I do? I will pray with my spirit, but I will also pray with my mind; I will sing with my spirit, but I will also sing with my mind. If you are praising God with your spirit, how can one who finds himself among those who do not understand say ‘Amen’ to your thanksgiving, since he does not know what you are saying? You may be giving thanks well enough, but the other man is not edified” (vv.13-17). “Translate and interpret it to benefit others,” Paul tells them. There was also a gift to other Christian men who had no acquaintance with that language but who found when they heard the tongue that they could deliver the correct interpretation of that language to the worshippers.

ii] To whom was this tongue speaking directed? It was directed to God (v.2) declaring how great God was in creation and redemption, while prophecy had a different focus, it spoke to men (v.3). So the one speaking in this foreign language was limited in his usefulness in that he alone was edified; no one else could understand him. However, the strength of prophecy was that all the church could hear, understand and be edified (v.4). Of course, Paul recognized tongues in Corinth to be a real gift from God; he never said that it was undesirable to have it, rather he said that he wished that all the Corinthians enjoyed this gift (as he longed from them to enjoy every spiritual gift), but he never directed any Christians in any congregation to seek the gift of tongues, even though he said that the tongue-speaker did edify himself. “I would rather have you prophesy. He who prophesies is greater than one who speaks in tongues, unless he interprets, so that the church may be edified” (v.5). Edifying and strengthening the congregation is the greatest service you can give to them. This was Paul’s own conviction; he said, “I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you. But in the church I would rather speak five intelligible words to instruct other than ten thousand words in a tongue” (v.18). You say, “Christ died for our sins,” and those five words could mean salvation and comfort to a hearer, while speaking in a language they didn’t understand was of no profit at all. In the scale of the usefulness of those gifts number one would be the gift that most edified and strengthened the people, whereas at the bottom was the gift that the congregation couldn’t understand.

iii] How did unbelieving strangers respond to these gifts? If outsiders came to a hypothetical service in Corinth in which “everyone speaks in tongues” (v.23) (one after another I believe, cp. v.31), then you can guess the response of those outsiders. “Will they not say that you are out of your mind?” (v.23). They’ll think that you are all crazy. The suspicion of their doubts about Christianity would be confirmed by what they saw and heard. How different would be the response if a stranger wandered in when everybody was prophesying (one after another again I believe, cp. v.31), “he will be convinced by all that he is a sinner and will be judged by all, and the secrets of his heart will be laid bare. So he will fall down and worship God, exclaiming, ‘God is really among you’” (vv. 24&25). The testimony and the teaching of one Christian after another saying what a salvation they had received by the grace of God would have a devastating impact on unbelievers. So we are told that tongues and unbelievers can no more be mixed than oil and water. Tongues actually hardened an unbeliever. It was a sign of God hardening unbelief, and it was like that during the Old Testament period, in fact Paul here quotes from Isaiah 28:11 and 12, “In the Law it is written: ‘Through men of strange tongues and through the lips of foreigners I will speak to this people but even then they will not listen to me’ says the Lord” (v. 21).

I think it is salutary to see what Paul judged to be the marks of true conversion, that a person comes into a meeting and understands the message of the gospel and is convinced by all that he is a sinner, and judged by everyone to be a sinner just like them, and the secrets of his past life locked up in his heart seem to be known to all who speak. All strength is taken from his body; he falls to the ground and he is overwhelmed with this reality, “God is amongst you.” He is not so much fascinated by the gifts as the great Giver. He falls at the feet of the living God as one dead. That is a mark of successful evangelism.

iv] What part did tongues have in a worship service? Paul begins the next section with a description of a typical worship service in Corinth. It was pretty chaotic; “When you come together, everyone has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation” (v.26). Everyone was sitting on the edge of their seats waiting to get up to make their contribution; they were long meetings and lots of words. So Paul turns to this great theme again that everyone must judge what is the best in gifts and worship by this standard, how people were helped. “All of these must be done for the strengthening of the church” (v.27). Let nobody think that congregational worship is a platform for onr or another to ‘share’ with the whole church. The end of worship is people being strengthened.

So Paul introduces guidelines into the exercise of spiritual gifts. Two people were to speak in tongues, well, maybe three at the most, and that is it. No more. Then the one with the gift of interpretation spoke and if such a person with that gift was not there then the tongue speaker was silent. So too with those with a gift of prophecy; two prophets or preachers were enough for any congregation to hear and digest (maybe three on special occasions), and everyone else was weighing carefully what they heard. The people were to wait patiently their turn to speak or prophesy. “The spirits of the prophets are subject to the control of prophets. For God is not a God of disorder but of peace” (vv.32&33). His great conclusion to this chapter was, “Everything should be done in a fitting and orderly way” (v40). Women should remain silent; they do not have the authority to exhort, and so taking on a role of headship within the church. It can be is different for women on many other occasions, both organised and informal, when people gather together to study and pray, around the hearth or on the church premises or elsewhere. A family or a group can encourage women and novices to pray. In the midweek meeting there would still be the preserving of the biblical order so that men should have the leadership in intercession, and the women wait before they pray for the men to lead the congregation in prayer. That is what every godly woman desires, interceding men.

So in this chapter we read these comments on acceptable worship given to us by the apostle of Christ, as inspired by the Spirit of God, in this part of the Bible that speaks most clearly of the exercise of spiritual gifts in a congregational context. It is one of the most difficult chapters in the Bible to exegete. The great preacher Chrysostom was born in 344 and he wrote about this chapter, “This whole place is very obscure, but the obscurity is produced by our ignorance of the facts referred to and by their cessation, being such as then used to occur but now no longer takes place.”

There are opportunities every week in the midweek service at a time of sharing the church’s needs and blessings and in corporate prayer for people who are members in good standing in the congregation to address the people, but very rarely does anyone have any message to contribute to the whole gathering even in the most spiritual of churches. It is highly unusual for someone to speak up and say, “Let me say this to you all.” The situation today is different from this time in redemptive history in Corinth. Today we all have the entire Bible, and the climactic aspect of our worship centres on the person gifted and appointed by the Lord to open God’s book and find the place and declare the word in all its implications to all the congregation with the Holy Spirit sent down from heaven just as Christ did in the synagogue of Nazareth. We are all helped by words that we read in Scripture in the discipline of private devotion, but there is a difference between that ministry of the Spirit by the truth to us in the quiet place, and later to try to express publicly what we have read to the whole congregation. It usually seems quaint or obvious. It had not been given to us for them but for ourselves, and we are to be thankful for that.

THE HOLY SPIRIT’S LORDSHIP OVER THE WHOLE CHURCH IS BY THE WORD.

As Paul brings this chapter to a close he asks a couple of questions. “Did the word of God originate with you?” (v.36). Of course the answer is that it did not. The word of God originated in heaven and came to the church via called, gifted and equipped apostles. It did not come from 19th century Germany where modern higher criticism originated. It did not come from Rome where Roman Catholic traditions originated. It did not come from Geneva and the fertile preaching and writing of John Calvin. It did not come from Utah and the Mormon church. It did not come from Welsh Calvinistic Methodism. The word of God originated in heaven and stands over every denomination and cult and church and insists that every Christian hide it all in their hearts that they do not sin against God.

“Are you the only people it has reached?” (v.36), is the second question. If you stood in the Vatican and experienced the confidence and authority of the papacy then you would sense their conviction that “we are the only true church of God in the world, and this is what you must believe and this is the way you must do things. We are the only ones the full word of God has reached” Again, if you went to Salt Lake City and walked around the temple of the Church of the Latter Day Saints then you would pick up the same self-conscious confidence that it is the true church, the only people reached with the final revelation of God written on gold tablets. There are people in ten thousand tiny independent congregations who have the same attitude. They are the ones preserving the truth which has not reached any other group in quite the same accuracy and fulness as they have it. That is why they broke away from other churches; “we are the only people the word of God has reached.” It is quite pathetic.

The answer to both questions is a resounding no. The word of God came to you, it did not originate with you. It came from God. You are not the only people it has reached. The tongues you know have also been spoken in Ephesus, Cornelius’ household, Samaria, Jerusalem and many other places in Greece and Asia of which it was not necessary to make a record. Paul could address this Corinthian congregation and tell them, “The gospel had spread to the whole eastern Mediterranean basin, but if you are going to continue to be a part of the people of God then you had better maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bonds of peace, and that comes about by knowing and doing what God says in his word.” The Scriptures are the foundation for the whole church, only the Scriptures, not the Bible plus the sacred traditions of Rome; not the Bible plus the Book of Mormon; not the Bible plus ‘the assured results of modern criticism;’ just the Bible written by the prophets and apostles. Let the most gifted man affirm that. “If anybody thinks he is a prophet or spiritually gifted, let him acknowledge that what I am writing to you is the Lord’s command. If he ignores this, he himself will be ignored” (vv.36-38).

It is a striking statement, “what I am writing to you is the Lord’s command” (v.38). What he is writing to us in this chapter, and what he is writing to us in this entire letter, and what he is writing to us in all his writings is the Lord’s command, and not the apostle Paul alone, but the other apostles who either wrote directly the other books of the New Testament or stood behind Mark (as Peter did) or Luke (as Paul did) and had the Spirit’s assistance and they all wrote at the Lord’s command. Every single church is to acknowledge this, and if there are practices or beliefs that are not in agreement with what is written, then they must change their beliefs and change their practices until what they do matches what is written. The preachers Jesus Christ sends into the world do not have the option to choose the practices they like, the vestments they want to wear, the ideas they agree with ignoring those they don’t. The Lord does not give anyone that option. The church is not theirs; the word did not originate with them and they are not the only ones it has reached. For two thousand years it has gone out into the whole world. Both the world and the church belong to the Lord, and the church has the right to insist that its preachers bring to it God’s word, and that every other idea (whether it comes from learned academics or intense individuals who claim to be prophets) must be set alongside Scripture and if it can find no biblical support it binds no one’s conscience to be believed.

Do not ignore this warning. You see what happens if you do? You will be ignored. In the great day when the whole of mankind will be gathered before the judgment seat of Christ all who stood and spoke in the name of Christ will be under special scrutiny because of the influence and responsibility they have had. They will be tested at many levels, and one will be whether they acknowledged that what the apostle Paul wrote was the Lord’s command. If they did they will welcomed to the joy of their Lord, but if they did not they will be ignored. That is what this chapter says. Christ will ignore him, greeting many others, but ignoring him, “Depart from me.”

7th September 2008 GEOFF THOMAS