The Chapel Light - February 2010

I was going to include a sermon or two in my series on the Holy Spirit about Pentecostalism and speaking in tongues, but I’ve decided that it is better written about than preached.     That the Holy Spirit filled the apostles on the day of Pentecost and that they spoke in “tongues” is perfectly clear. Acts 2 states it straightforwardly. But what exactly was this “speaking in tongues”? And what was the significance of it? And what does it mean for us today? These things don’t necessarily lie right on the surface of the biblical text. So let’s dig a little bit…     That people speak of the “gift of tongues” or “tongue-speaking” gives the phenomenon a sort of mysterious aura, of the “tongue” doing something mysterious. But the word “tongue” simply means “language.” We still use “tongue” that way today when we talk of speaking in a “foreign tongue” or of English being our “mother tongue.” So the “gift of tongues” is really the “gift of languages”;  and “speaking in tongues” simply talking means “speaking in languages.” (The New Living Translation correctly translates Acts 2.4 this way: “And everyone present was filled with the Holy Spirit and began speaking in other languages, as the Holy Spirit gave them this ability.”)     That the Holy Spirit was enabling the disciples to speak in human languages on the day of Pentecost is abundantly clear from the context. The feast of Pentecost was one of three Jewish feasts that required a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. There were Jews from all over the Roman Empire present on the day of Pentecost, and they all spoke different languages and dialects. When the apostles received the “gift of languages” and began speaking about God in the public square, all of the pilgrims in town who heard them began asking, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans??? Then how is it that each of us hears them in his own native language? Parthians, Medes and Elamites, residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene, visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism), Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own languages!!!”     Some have argued that the real miracle on this day was a miracle of hearing—that the apostles were just speaking gibberish but the Holy Spirit worked on the hearers so that each hearer would hear the gibberish as though it were his own language. If that is the case, then the Spirit is coming upon the hearers, not the speakers! But the text clearly says that the Spirit filled the disciples and gave them the ability to speak in other languages (Acts 2.4). The gift is the gift of languages—not the gift of hearing; it empowers the speaker, not the listener. So the 120 or so disciples (cf. Acts 1.15) were, each of them, speaking different dialects and languages on the day of Pentecost. If you’ve ever been in a crowd in a foreign country, and all of a sudden someone starts speaking your mother tongue, the language you are most familiar with, you hear it right away. It is not gibberish; the language of the foreign country sounds like meaningless gibberish to you—background noise. Your own tongue being spoken makes immediate sense to your understanding—and your attention is drawn immediately to the speaker. That was certainly what the pilgrims in Jerusalem on that first Pentecost observed. Hearing their own dialects captured their attention immediately.     The foreign visitors in Jerusalem who understood the speech marveled that Galileans were doing the speaking (Acts 2.7). How did the visitors know the disciples were Galilean?  Perhaps by their dress, perhaps by their accents—the same way we can pick out a southerner or a hardcore Yankee! But Galileans weren’t expected to be able to speak in other languages! Like everyone in the Roman Empire the Galileans most likely spoke Greek. But they were apparently not educated beyond that, and so the pilgrims find it shocking that these country bumpkins are speaking the visitors’ home languages and dialects from all around the empire—with no apparent exposure to those languages!     Others concluded that these Galileans were just drunk (Acts 2.13). The babbling surely sounded unintelligible to those who didn’t know the languages being spoken—perhaps untraveled and inexperienced natives of Jerusalem. What would your first thought be if the neighbor you’d known all your life, who only ever spoke English, suddenly came running out of his house babbling over and over in Chinese at you, smiling and being terribly expressive, perhaps overly so, and acting like you surely understood what he was saying??? I might just conclude that he’d lost it, or that he was drunk or on drugs. Wouldn’t you?     But what would you think if your neighbor, upon hearing your explanation of drunkenness, stopped “babbling” and said in perfect English “I’m not drunk. I’ve been filled with the Holy Spirit”? This is precisely what Peter did. He stopped speaking whatever “tongue” he was speaking, and raised his voice—most likely in Greek—and preached to the whole astonished crowd about Jesus (Acts 2.14ff).     I offer these simple observations on the text for your consideration, and I would point out that right here, at the very beginning of the discussion—the basic definitions of the gift of tongues—we find modern “tongues-speakers” to be at odds with the biblical text. Linguists who have observed  “tongues-speaking” in great detail have noted that “tongues-speaking” is not a foreign language, nor is it like any foreign language. It shows no sign of the tell-tale linguistic forms of earthly language and grammar, but tends to be a hodge-podge of mixed-up sounds from the tongues-speakers own language. But modern tongues-speakers generally claim they are not speaking an earthly language at all. Rather they claim to be speaking angelic and heavenly languages that only God can understand!     Maybe that is the case. But if it is, that is not the gift of tongues as Acts describes it!  It may not be politically correct to challenge the personal religious experience of another—and I don’t doubt that tongues-speakers have their experiences—but I think it is correct to weigh all of our experiences against the definitions and descriptions given us in the Word of God, and when we do that, I think it ought to raise suspicions about the claims of modern tongues-speakers. More next month...