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Wednesday, June 30, 2010

The Holy Spirit and the gift of tongues (pt. 2)

In Acts 2 when Luke speaks of the apostles receiving tongues, it is clearly the miraculous ability to speak in other languages: “each one heard them speaking in his own language” (v. 6); “We hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues” (v. 11). This is not “private prayer language” tongues.
The next time Luke talks about tongues (glōssa in the original Greek) is in Acts 10, when Peter is in Caesarea. Luke reports that “they heard them [the Gentiles in Cornelius’ household] speaking in tongues and praising God” (v. 46). Peter’s response was: “They have received the Holy Spirit just as we have” (v. 47, emphasis added). What the Jewish believers had received from the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost was the ability to speak in other languages of men. Since Luke clearly stated that in Acts 2 and does not describe anything different here in Caesarea, we must assume his intent was for his readers to understand that this was the same glōssa that had been received on the day of Pentecost in Jerusalem. Any other interpretation is reading something in to the text that is not there – a very dangerous undertaking in biblical interpretation.
We see the same use of tongues in Acts 19, in Ephesus when Paul found men who had been baptized into “John’s baptism” and had not received the Holy Spirit. In Acts 19, they were baptized into “the name of the Lord Jesus” (v. 5) then “Paul placed his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied” (v. 6). Again, Luke does not report that this is something different from the glōssa he spoke of in Acts 2. Proper contextual interpretation insists that we must understand this “tongues” as “languages of men,” just like in Acts 2.
The only other books of the New Testament that use glōssa as anything other than the tongue or words that come off our tongue in our known languages, are 1 Corinthians and Revelation. I’ll explore 1 Corinthians in more depth later, but it is important to note that glōssa, which contemporary Christians usually use as “a private prayer language” is not used that way most of the time in the New Testament. In Revelation, just like in Acts, it is always used to refer to the languages of men: “...and with your blood you purchased men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation” (v. 5:9); “After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb.” (7:9). (See also 10:11; 11:9; 13:7; 14:6; 17:15.)
So we see that in the first century church, glōssa was commonly understood as “foreign languages.” The only place in the New Testament where it was referred to as a private prayer language was in 1 Corinthians. We will explore what Paul says about glōssa, but before that, let’s carefully consider the four cases of what we call “the baptism of the Holy Spirit” in Acts – in my next blog.

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