Pagan Gibberish is Unproductive
14: 13-19
Pagan gibberish is unproductive DIG: What part does the mind play in worship? What were the values and limits of tongues? How does Paul illustrate his point? Since Paul was specifically gifted with the true gift of tongues, why didn’t he talk about it more? Why wasn’t Paul giving instructions for governing the use of tongues in the Church today?
REFLECT: What experience, if any, have you had with someone supposedly speaking in tongues? Were you built up by what you heard? Was there an interpretation? Things that were flashy, exciting, and powerful attracted the Corinthians. They knew the “love of power” more than the “power of love.” In what ways do you see that tendency in your congregation?
Spirituality involves more than the mind, but it never excludes the mind.
The charismatic tendency to suspend the intellect and let emotion run amok is the essence of what Paul wrote against in this chapter. In condemning the Corinthians’ misuse of ecstatic utterance in the church (to see link click Ce – The Pagan Background of Counterfeit Spiritual Gifts), the apostle argued that all ministry of the spiritual gifts in the congregation should be aimed at people’s minds. For God is not a God of confusion (14:33).453
Dear Heavenly Father, Praise You for being a God of perfect order, down to the exact number of protons, neutrons and electrons in each atom. Our planet is exactly the precise distance from the sun and the precise tilt for life to occur. Praise You that though You are a God with emotions, great love and wrath, Your emotions do not rule over Your wisdom. He who trusts in the Son has eternal life. He who does not obey the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him (John 3:36). Your wrath is in control and will play out in the exact timing of punishment. Sin is entirely awful, yet You patiently wait till the sin is complete before punishing (Genesis 15:16c).
There is never any confusion or rushing in anything that You do. Every word You speak is precise and exact. Each and every action You take is wisely planned and done in an orderly manner. Even when you come from heaven riding on a white horse to conquer with the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God (Ephesians 6:17). You are in complete control (Revelation 19:15). How emotional is a wedding, yet You do not rush events, even when the next event on the calendar is the wedding of the Lamb, and His bride has made herself ready (Revelation 19:7c). You know that the wedding supper of the Lamb is coming, yet You never miss a beat in orchestrating the events of history exactly in the precise and planned order. I thank You for being such a reliable Father with strong emotions of love for good and hatred of evil, yet You rule not by Your emotions but it is Your wisdom that guides Your heart. You are wonderful in Your love, wrath and orderliness and I worship You! In Your holy Son’s name and power of His resurrection. Amen
Nowhere does the Bible teach that the true gift of tongues is anything other than human languages. Nor is there any suggestion that the true gift (see Dk – The Priority of God’s Word over Tongues) was any different than the miraculous languages described in Acts 2 (see the commentary on Acts Al – The Ruach Ha’Kodesh Comes at Shavu’ot). The Greek word in both places is glossa. In Acts, it is clear that the disciples were speaking in known languages. Unbelieving Jews who were in Jerusalem for the festival were confused, because each one heard the believers speaking in their own language (Acts 2:6b). Then Luke went on to name some fifteen different countries and areas whose languages were being spoken (Acts 2:8-11). This point cannot be overlooked or minimized.454
Regarding a private prayer, or “heavenly” language in one’s prayer closet, this violates the solid, bedrock principle, that spiritual gifts are for others, not for self-gratification. Neither Luke nor Paul refer to any heavenly language. In fact, tongues are plural for many languages, not singular. And if tongues are for unbelievers, when one is in their prayer closet speaking in tongues, alone with God, where is the unbeliever?
Some believe that Mark 16:18 indicates “a heavenly language” where it says: they will speak with new tongues (Greek:kainos glossai). There are a couple of problems with this interpretation. First, it is doubtful that Mark 16:9-20 was an original part of the Greek text and there are several reasons for omitting these verses. The Greek text does not appear in the oldest and most reliable manuscripts of the gospel (It does appear, however, in some early manuscripts), many of the Greek words in this section are different from the vocabulary Mark uses throughout the rest of his gospel, and the Greek style is much different from that used elsewhere in Mark. Secondly, kainos never means “new” in the sense of “unheard of,” and is never applied to the gift of tongues. Kainos always means “new” compared with what is “old,” as differing from the “old.” The Corinthians had their own language, which was “old” to them; and when they heard their members speak in the true gift of tongues, they were “new” to them because they were foreign languages, other than the one they were accustomed to hearing. Instead of proving that Paul has in mind “the language of heaven” when he uses kainos, the term, in fact, proves just the opposite.455
Therefore, someone who speaks in a tongue should pray for the power to interpret (4:13). In this section Paul continues to teach about counterfeit tongues, and therefore continues to speak sarcastically (4:8-10). This is indicated in the first place by the fact that he uses the singular tongue (see Dl – The Word that Builds Up: the interpretive key to this chapter), which refers to pagan gibberish. In the second place, what he says here cannot apply to the true gift of tongues. If Paul were not speaking sarcastically of ecstatic utterance, he would be asking the Corinthians to interpret pagan gibberish, which would be impossible. Paul sarcastically rebukes the carnal Corinthian believers for their immaturity (14:20). It’s as if Paul were saying, “While you are jabbering away in your unintelligible gibberish, you could at least ask God to give you some way of making it beneficial to the church. Because as you now play around with ecstatic utterance, you need to realize that it’s both pagan and pointless.”
In the pagan rites with which the Corinthians were so familiar, speaking in ecstatic utterances was considered to be communing with the gods spirit-to-spirit. The experience tended to bypass the mind and normal understanding. For if I pray in ecstatic utterance, my [breath] does pray, but my mind is unproductive (14:14). Here, Paul uses the Greek word pneuma, which can be translated spirit, wind, or breath, in the sense of [breath]. It is impossible that pneuma here refers to the Holy Spirit, as most charismatics believe – His Spirit being revealed through our spirits. All believers are indwelt by the Holy Spirit, but if Paul was speaking of the Holy Spirit in relation to “my spirit,” then grammatically and theologically he would also be speaking of the Holy Spirit in relation to my mind. The Holy Spirit cannot be praying through a person while bypassing his or her mind. What the carnal Corinthians were praying was as empty and mindless as the ecstasies they used in their pagan temples. They were merely talking to the air (14:9)!456
From the earliest days of Pentecostalism, the quest for ever more unusual and spectacular manifestations of spiritual gifts has sabotaged rationality in the movement. Reports of inexplicable, even implausible, mystical phenomena are rife in the charismatic and Pentecostal tradition. No tale, it seems, is too fantastic to gain an eager following. Many appear to believe that God’s power can be displayed only in ways that are unearthly, eerie, or preposterous. As a result, some charismatics disdain logic, reason, and common sense in their eagerness to embrace such reports.
Worse, the entire movement has absorbed the erroneous notion that whatever is truly spiritual must transcend or bypass people’s rational senses. Spiritual gifts supposedly operate by suspending the faculties of human reason. One might think that the strongest evidence of the Spirit’s power is when someone lapses into a stupor. As a result, the folklore of the charismatic movement is filled with outrageous accounts of behavior that resembles trances, seizures, subliminal messaging, hypnosis, suspended animation, frenzy, and hysteria. These are often cited as proof that God is at work in the movement.457
So, what about it? The answer is that there is no place for mindless, ecstatic prayer. Paul declares that praying and singing with his spirit must be accompanied by praying and singing with his mind also (14:15). It is obvious that building the church up cannot exist apart from the mind. Spirituality involves more than the mind, but it never excludes the mind (Romans 12:1-2; Ephesians 4:23; Colossians 3:10). In Scripture, and certainly in the writings of Paul, no premium is placed on ignorance. Quoting Deuteronomy 6:5, Yeshua reinforced the command in the TaNaKh that we should love ADONAI with all [our] heart and with all [our] soul and with all [our] mind (Matthew 22:37).
Praying or singing in pagan gibberish would serve no purpose, and Paul would have none of it. Otherwise, if you are giving thanks with your spirit, how will someone who is ignorant of what was being spoken possibly understand what he hears. In the worship service, for example, he would not know when to say, “Amen,” when you have finished giving thanks, since he doesn’t know what you are saying? The person uttering mysteries in the spirit would undoubtedly think that he was giving thanks very nicely, but no one else would be able to understand him. It would merely be noise to them. No one would be built up as they should have been when the true gift was used properly (14:16-17). In other words, the believers speaking in ecstatic utterance was being selfish, ignoring the rest of the people in the congregation, muddying the message the gift was designed to communicate, and doing it all just to gratify their own egos, to show off, and to supposedly demonstrate their spiritual superiority over others.458
In case the Corinthians would think he no longer recognized the true gift of tongues after reading this, Paul said: I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you (14:18). He made it clear that he was not condemning the genuine gift of tongues, or enviously criticizing a gift that he himself did not possess. Here, Paul uses the plural tongues. He is no longer speaking hypothetically; he had had more experience than any of the Corinthians in speaking in tongues. He knew what the proper use of the true gift involved and did not involve. We can be sure that he didn’t use the gift in any perverted way for personal gratification. He used it the same way it was used at Shavu’ot, to bring a supernatural message to those ADONAI wanted to reach, and as a miraculous sign (see Do – Tongues are a Sign) verifying the gospel and his apostolic authority. Yet, he considered that gift so low in value as compared to his other gifts and ministries that he never mentioned a specific use of it in all his writings.459
The gift of languages (glossa) had a proper place for a fixed time as a miraculous confirming sign to unbelievers (14:22a), with the accompanying purpose of building up the church through interpretation. But Paul continues to say that in a congregation meeting he would rather say five words with my mind in order to instruct others than ten thousand words in a counterfeit tongue (14:19)! Using the singular (tongue) again to refer to pagan gibberish, he emphasizes that an uncountable number of sounds in unintelligible tones has no place in the church because it’s useless. To speak a very short sentence of five words with his mind, giving a message that would instruct or encourage his hearers, was far more valuable to Paul than a limitless number of words in ecstatic utterances that was incomprehensible.
Because Paul knew that the true gift of tongues would cease in a few years, he was not giving instructions for governing tongues in the Church today. He was not even giving such instruction to the Corinthians, because he was speaking of the counterfeit use of the genuine gift, which was based in self-centered emotionalism that did not originate with the Ruach Ha’Kodesh. Paul was giving them, as well as believers of all ages, a warning against using self-serving, worldly, ineffective, and God dishonoring substitutes for the true spiritual gifts that God has ordained to be ministered in the power and in the fruit of the Spirit, and for the blessing and the building up of His Church.460
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