Speaking in tongues is the ability to speak in a foreign language the person never learned. Tongues are mentioned in the bible only twice: in Acts and Pauls description of the chaos in Corinth.

As it is written, at the Tower of Babel, God confused the languages of men.

There is a true gift of languages for the early church, God gave this miraculous gift to the apostles and some who worked with them, so they could speak a language they did not know, under divine inspiration.

This was useful when Jewish visitors from other nations came to the Feasts in Jerusalem.

 

“Everybody understood in their own language” (Acts 2).

 

Tongues were designed to be signs that authenticated the validity of the message of the new age. The new age started with Jesus Christ.

In Christianity, the true gift of languages was used only when someone who spoke the language was present in order that it might be a sign that God was there, and that God’s people were speaking God’s truth.

 

But as always, whenever God does something, Satan counterfeits it.

And so Satan’s smokescreen to cloud the true revelatory work of the Holy Spirit in the early church were phony revelations and phony visions and phony tongues.

 

The only other biblical incident that can rival the confusion of language at Babel is the confusion of tongues at Corinth. They had so confused this issue of languages that God had given as a gift, they had so counterfeited it, they had so substituted the reality for the satanic counterfeit that Paul had to write an entire chapter just to deal with that issue.

 

At the time of the Corinthian church, they had various priests and priestesses; and people who were devotees of the gods would go to these great temples, and they would worship these priests and priestesses. And it was very common for a devotee would go into an ecstasy. An ecstasy means to go out of yourself. That’s the literal meaning of the word, to go out of yourself. They would literally flip out, and they would go into an unconscious state, in which they would have all kinds of phenomena occur, a psychic kind of phenomena. They would believe that when they went out of themselves, they literally left the body, and they ascended into space, and they connected to deity, whatever deity they were worshiping, and they began to commune with the deity; and once they began to commune with that deity, they would begin to speak the language of the gods.

 

The Greeks even had a word for this ecstatic religious experience. It was the word eros. The word eros simply means the desire for the sensual, or the desire for the erotic, or the desire for the ecstasy, or the desire for the ultimate experience or the feeling.

When they went to those temples and to those priestesses they actually entered into orgies. And that whole idea of erotic and sexual and sensual and ecstatic and the gibberish that went on with divine utterances, all was rolled into one big ball under the mystery religions that had spawned in Babylon

and had come into the Corinthian society.

 

The Corinthians had allowed the entire world system in which they existed to infiltrate their assembly.

 

They were all hung up with human philosophies, they had a hero worship cult just like their society did, they were involved in terrible, gross, sexual immorality. They were suing each other in the court. They had fouled up the home and marriage and misevaluated that whole thing.

The church, because of a deadness, and because of years of ignorance of the true work of the Holy Spirit, and because of a lack of really fine Bible teaching in many places, and because of just the dearth of anything really significant going on, people in the church began to reach out, and to want to feel God, and to sense reality, and Satan’s counterfeit came flooding in the door.

 

All kinds of feeling experiences, all kinds of emotionalism, all kinds of sensual things in the broadest term of sensual, that is, apprehended by the senses rather than the mind. This was very common to pagan religion. Plato (429 to 347 B.C.) in his dialogues, he has page, after page, after page describing these pagan ecstasies of speech.

 

God does something, Satan counterfeits it, then it’s easy to fall prey to the phony. And the Corinthians, because they had decided to marry the spirit of the age, were victims. Not anything of their behaviour belonged to Christianity.

 

The mystery religions of Babylon that had dominated the time of the Corinthian culture, they had developed all kinds of rites, and rituals, and vows, and baptisms, and animal sacrifices, and feasts, and fasts, and ablutions for sin, like dunking in a frozen river, or crawling on your knees for miles. They had all kinds of things that were phony religious things, and ecstatic speeches and visions and prophecies were all a part of it.

 

 

The situation today (21st century):

 

Tongues is a mayor issue today.

The Charismatic movement is very similar to that old Corinthian Church.

What has happened today in the Charismatic movement is just a reproduction of exactly what happened in Corinth.

The church has married the system of pagan religion again, and they have developed a sensual, feeling, experiential, erotic kind of approach to religion, only they call it the work of the Holy Spirit, when in fact it is the counterfeit of Satan.

 

Worship looks more like a pop concert, church members shouting gibberish from the stage even when singing, people falling down on their back, obviously having no control over their bodies. Is that what Jesus taught us about his church?

 

There are no ecstasies, no sensualities, no eroticisms, no going out of yourself ever associated in the New Testament with the true work of the Holy Spirit – never, never.

Nobody ever gives up his spirit. Nobody ever loses control. Nobody ever goes out of himself in terms of that which God has designed.

This is not the Holy Spirit’s way. It is not the Holy Spirit’s way to have everybody jumping up, and everybody has a psalm and everybody a doctrine, and everybody a revelation, and everybody an interpretation, and everybody wanting to speak in ecstasy, and everybody wanting to have a vision, and so forth. That’s the confusion of paganism that has engulfed the church.

 

Today what we see in the Charismatic Movement is the same kind of engulfing of the church in pagan religion. A counterfeit has been accepted, because it impacts the emotions of people who, for a long time, have sat in a church where they never got anything that changed their lives.

 

It’s amazing that the modern Charismatic Movement falls short at this very point. They repeat the Corinthian error, and they teach that the essential use of tongues is as a private prayer language to God. That is just what Paul is condemning.

He is saying, “You have missed the point. The point is that gifts are to speak to men. But yours are some kind of communion with a god, and nobody knows what you’re saying, and you’re speaking in pagan mysteries.”

 

Those people who think they have some great thing going in their private prayer language with a god, that doesn’t do anything good for them either, because there’s no knowledge of what their saying; consequently, there’s no learning in the mind; consequently, all it is is sensual ecstasy. It’s a feeling, it’s an emotion; and Christianity has never been predicated on a feeling, never.

 

 

What the Apostel Paul tells us about tongues: (1Corinthians14)

 

 

The fourteenth chapter can be divided into three parts:

Number one, the position of the gift of tongues, the position of the gift.

Number two, the purpose of the gift.

Number three, the procedure for the gift.

 

The position is secondary, the purpose is sign, the procedure is systematic – and those are the three great things that this chapter says.

 

The gift of tongues is secondary in comparison with prophecy.

Prophecy edifies the whole congregation, Tongues is useless to edify.

Prophecy is superior to tongues because prophecy edifies and tongues does not.

 

The purpose of the church when it meets together is edification.

 

All spiritual gifts are given for the purpose of ministering or speaking to men. No spiritual gift was ever given for God, but for men. All gifts are given to build the body of Christ; they are to minister to each other. God doesn’t need us to minister some gift to Him.

 

Tongues is not the kind of communication that God is interested in, that is what the pagans do. In other words, even in Jesus’ time, Jesus recognized a sort of stammering, stuttering gibberish being offered by pagans to their gods, and He says

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“That is exactly what I do not wish you to do when you pray to the Father.”

 

“When you come together, instead of the chaos, and the confusion, and the gibberish of tongues, should be the clarity of prophecy.”

 

Prophecy simply means to speak before somebody. And he says, “Instead of everybody shouting at the same time in ecstatic gibberish, somebody ought to stand up before everybody else and speak the word of God. That’s what ought to be going on. Not the chaos and confusion of tongues, but the speaking of those who speak the voice of God.

 

The obvious reason for the inferiority of tongues is nobody could understandwhat was being said. The only time that gift was ever to be used was when somebody would understand what was being said, like in Acts; or when there was a connection to be made to Pentecost, such as in the repeated occasions in Acts. That was a sign gift, never intended for edification; in fact, totally useless to edify.

 

The purpose of tongues was as a sign to show that God was speaking, and that the prophets of the New Testament and the apostles of the New Testament were truly representatives of the voice of God

 

Now the Charismatics today realize that there is a difference – and this is important – between Acts 2 and 1 Corinthians 14. They recognize that there is a difference. And the way they explain the difference is usually this: they say there are two kinds of tongues.

There are the tongues of Acts 2, which are real languages; and there are the tongues of 1 Corinthians 14, which is the ecstatic, private, devotional speech by which one speaks in an unknown tongue to God personally and privately for self-edification. They recognize a difference, and they resolve the difference by saying there are two gifts of tongues.

There was the true use of it in Acts 2, and there was the false use of it in 1 Corinthians 14, so that what you have in 14 is not another gift, but a perversion of the intended gift and a mixture with the heathen counterfeit.

The Scriptures nowhere teach that there are two kinds of tongues speaking: one a language and one an ecstasy.

 

A believer either walks in the flesh or he walks in the Spirit. There is no argument about what the Corinthians were doing; they were walking in the flesh.

 

Paul says, “When you come together, instead of wanting all this kind of ecstatic manifestations and seeking this gift, seek that you may see prophesying manifested that God may speak to you from His Word.”

 

When you have the term “tongue” in the singular, Paul may well be referring to the ecstatic gift. And then when he uses it in the plural, he is referring to the true gift.

 

The reason is because there can only be a plural in “languages.” There cannot be a plural in “gibberish.” There aren’t many kinds of gibberish, there’s only one kind: gibberish.

You don’t say, “What kind of gibberish do you speak?” There aren’t any kinds, there’s just one.

And that may well be why the King James translators put the word “unknown" in when it is used in the singular. Perhaps they recognized this nuance in Paul’s writing.

 

The true gift is all right if it’s used in the right context, and somebody who speaks that language is there, and then it’s truly interpreted for the church to understand. But apart from that situation, it has no purpose. So prophesying edifies the whole church; consequently, tongues take a secondary

place, even the true gift. And the false gift has no place at all.

 

Paul compares it with instruments:

“And even things without life giving sound, whether a flute or a harp, except they give a distinction in the sounds, how shall it be known what is piped or harped?”

 

The pipe here would be a flute, and the harp would be any kind of a stringed instrument. These were the most common instruments of that day. They were used at banquets and funerals and religious ceremonies, so the people would understand what he was referring to.

 

There has to be variation in sound to make sense. There has to be a studied, calculated variation. A flute or a harp make sense only when there is meaningful variation in the sound.

 

Paul goes further in verse 8:

“For if the bugle” – or trumpet – “give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?”

Can you imagine if everybody gets ready for the war, and the guy just gets up and blows any old thing he wants; and everybody goes, “See?” They don’t know whether to get out of bed, or go back to bed, or put on their armor, or what.

It’s very obvious that the bugle has to have significant variation to have meaning. A military trumpet was the clearest and the loudest of all instruments; but no soldier would have any idea what to do if it didn’t blow something with significance.

 

Learn to exalt the proclamation and teaching of the Word of God, to come together to hear God’s Word so that we can understand it, to do whatever we do with whatever gift we have to build up somebody else, to never seek a selfish spiritual experience, to never relish the emotional but knowledge, to watch out for Satan’s counterfeits, to do all things with a clear mind open to God’s truth. And the greatest tragedy arising from the modern tongues movement is that they miss the true work of the Holy Spirit.

Remember the dog in the ancient fable who, while crossing a bridge with a bone in his mouth, looked

over the edge and saw in the water the reflection? And the bone in the reflection looked so good,

better than the one in his mouth, that he dropped the substance for the shadow, and went hungry.

 

Many in this movement have dropped the substance and the reality of Ephesians 5:18 for the shadow of a Charismatic experience, and they’re going to go hungry.

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The fourteenth chapter, it’s a very urgent chapter for us today, because Charismatics are telling us all the time that it’s necessary for us to have this experience in order to realize the full manifestation of the Holy Spirit, the full expression of His power in our lives.

They’re crying out to us loudly to experience it, and we need to understand what Paul is saying here.

 

A Charismatic Lutheran says, “One speaks in tongues, for the most part, in his private devotions. This is by far its most important use and value.”

So they are saying that this is a new way to have your devotions, a new way to edify yourself, a new way to build yourself up, a new way for you to have communion with God and experience something deeper and more meaningful than you could in any other manner. And Satan can do with them what he wants.

 

Now Paul in the first nineteen verses has really shown that this is not true. In fact, he chides them for this.

 

And he says, “You are actually speaking in this gibberish for the purpose of building yourself up. But the truth of the matter is your understanding is unfruitful, totally fruitless.”

“Nobody who hears you can even say, ‘Amen.’ You are totally ignoring the people around you. You are selfish. Your own mind is unfruitful. The people around you can’t say, ‘Amen.’ And as a result, I’d rather speak five words than ten thousand.”

 

So it isn’t possible that we can conclude that this is a self-edifying prayer language to God. In fact, if you study prayer in the New Testament, you will never find any place in the entire New Testament where you are told to pray to God in an unknown language.

In fact, when Jesus laid out the model for prayer in Matthew chapter 6, verses 9 to 13, He said, “Pray this way,” and then He told them how to pray. And there wasn’t any gibberish; there wasn’t any ecstasy.

 

We can't come up with a better model than that of our Lord Himself.

 

First Corinthians 12:13 says, “For by one Spirit, were we all baptized.”

 

Verse 30 is a form in the Greek which implies a negative answer.

“Have all the gifts of healing? Do all speak with tongues?” And what’s the implied answer? No.

 

Verse 21: “In the law it is written,‘With men of other tongues and other lips will I speak unto this people; and yet for all that will they not hear me,’ says the Lord. Wherefore, tongues are for a sign, not to them that believe, but to them that believe not.

But prophesying serves not for them that believe not, but for them who believe.”

 

In Acts 2:38, Peter preached. He said, “Repent, be baptized because of the

remission of sins, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” Three thousand people did that, and how many of them spoke in tongues? The Bible doesn’t say that any of them did.

 

In Acts chapter 4, verse 31, “The place was shaken; they were filled with the Holy Spirit,” – and they spoke in tongues? No. “They simply preached the word with boldness.”

 

In Acts 2 and Acts 4, people filled, people receiving the Spirit, no tongues. You can’t equate those two, it just doesn’t fit.

 

In the 14th chapter of I Corinthians, Paul is trying to call a halt to the perversions, to call a halt to the counterfeit, to call a halt to the confusion and bring the Corinthians back to a system of order that would grant them edification.

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The Holy Spirit never does anything through somebody who is out of control, who is flipped out, slain in the Spirit, bowled over, rolling on the floor, spaced out or whatever. The Spirit of God ministers the gifts of the Spirit, even in apostolic times, in a time of controlled behavior, not out of control, like the pagans.

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God is a God of order and God is a God of dignity and God is a God who functions systematically for results, not chaotically for feelings. And God is to be made manifest in the worship of His church.

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Verse 33, 34, 35:

"But God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints. Let your women keep silence in the churches, for it is not permitted unto them to speak, but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home, for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.”

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The Lord just has to reemphasize this. And in the Corinthian assembly it needed it because the women were leading the parade in this seeking for the showy gifts. And women were usurping the place of the men. And
women were not being silent and submissive in the church. They were bursting out and trying to take over.

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Here are these women speaking in tongues and interpreting and singing their songs and prophesying and usurping the authority, and Paul singles them out. Not that men were not equally guilty. Men were guilty of all these things. But he reminds the women that they are to take the place of submission and silence in the public service of the church.

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The law of God, the Pentateuch, Genesis 3:16, which says, “he shall rule over thee.” From the very beginning the man was given the authority over the woman.

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Conclusion:

 

The gift of tongues has ceased in our times. Tongues can be seen as a demonic (satanic) power, that confuses and destroyes. The use today is a misuse , a selfish behaviour and supports feminist takeover in the church. Prophecy edifies the church, tongues (gibberish) is good for nothing.

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End