Many believe that there has been a modern revival of tongues but
there is a serious problem with such claims. Paul declares that
tongues “shall cease” (1 Cor. 13: 8, my emphasis) and
it is a matter of historical record that tongues died away after the
departure of the apostles, thus fulfilling this Scripture. The
difficulty for advocates of a revival is that the Bible never refers
to tongues starting up again! Making the “latter rain”
of Joel 2: 23 to refer to modern ‘tongue-speaking’ is a ‘convenient’
spiritualization without a shred of evidence to support it.
Others have said (without any proof) that the modern phenomenon of
tongue–speaking is identical with “the tongues … of angels” (1 Cor.
13: 1). So when will such tongues cease? The gifts of
prophecy and knowledge will be “done away” (v8) when “that which is
perfect has come” (v10). “Cease” is a different Greek word to “done
away”, and implies what will die out rather than what is put out,
but neither word allows for continuance. We therefore have a
so–called ‘heavenly language’ that will be lost to us before we
reach heaven! If angels have tongues (and Paul may have been using
hyperbole), then this is much is clear: they are proper languages.
The ungrammatical babblings uttered by some today (both Christian
and non–Christian) are not tongues in the way that Scripture
uses the word.
Nor do we have
to travel outside of Scripture for evidence that tongues did indeed
cease. Tongues are mentioned three times in Luke’s history of the
early Church (Acts 2, 10, 19), each successive occurrence having
diminishing significance and detail. Apart from 1 Cor. 14, tongues
are not mentioned at all in the epistles. When Paul wrote the first
epistle to the Corinthians he was at Ephesus (1 Cor. 16: 8), a city
he left forever before the close of the book of Acts
(Acts 20: 25). Apart from Mark 16, the references to tongues in the
NT are therefore contained within the first twenty chapters of Acts
after which the Word of God falls silent. In the light of 1 Cor. 13:
8, this is exactly what we would expect. Indeed, even
the more general word signs
is not found in any of the
epistles written after the period of the Acts.
So why did
tongues cease? Scripture tells us that “tongues are for a sign” (1
Cor. 14: 22) but few appear to stop and ask what this means. The
sign of tongues was given to “unbelievers” and to illustrate what he
means Paul quotes from Isaiah 28. 11–12: “By people of other
tongues, and by strange lips, will I speak to this people; and
neither thus will they hear me, saith the Lord” (1 Cor. 14: 21). If
we examine the context of the prophecy, “this people” are the
children of Israel away from God—morally the same class as the
unbelieving “Men of Judaea” (Acts 2: 14) who had crucified Christ.
On the day of Pentecost, these home–born Jews dismissed the apostles
as drunks—while other Jews from outside Judea reacted
in amazement on hearing them “speaking in our own tongues the great
things of God” (v11). So how were tongues a sign? The sign in
Isaiah’s day was that God was going to judge His people using
foreign armies—nations whose language would be unfamiliar to the
average Israelite (see Deut. 28: 49; Jer. 5: 15). The message to the
later Jews was similar in character—God was going to judge His
people for rejecting their Messiah. How were they to know this?
By hearing strange tongues. Hence Peter’s plea to his
fellow country–men: “Repent, and be baptised … Be saved from this
perverse generation” (Acts 2: 38, 40).
The Lord had
foretold the consequences of His rejection: “What therefore shall
the lord of the vineyard do to them? He will come and destroy those
husbandmen, and will give the vineyard to others” (Luke 20: 15,16).
He wept over Jerusalem because “thou knewest not the season of thy
visitation” prophesying “that thine enemies … shall lay thee even
with the ground, and thy children in thee” (Luke 19:
43, 44). Later, he told His disciples that “when ye see
Jerusalem encompassed with armies, then know that its desolation is
drawn nigh” (Luke 21: 20). This refers to the sacking of the city by
Titus in AD 70, since when it has been “trodden down of [the]
nations” (v24)—even today the modern Jewish state does not
completely control the old city. This judgment was preceded by a
sign—the sign of tongues. When the judgment fell,
then there
would be no longer any point in the sign. It is quite clear
that tongues had ceased when (if not before) Jerusalem was flattened
by the Romans. So where does this leave modern ‘tongue–speakers’?
Let them answer that question in whatever way they
will, but the witness of Scripture is against them.
