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Wednesday, July 28, 2010

The Holy Spirit and the gift of tongues (pt. 11)

So, after sending Peter to preach to the God-fearing gentiles in Caesarea, the Holy Spirit falls on the new believers suddenly and unexpectedly. As in Acts 19, one of the signs that shows he has infilled the gentiles is the tongues. As we already saw, the Greek word used here is the same word used in all other places in the New Testament where tongues refer to languages. There is no separate word for foreign languages and for ecstatic utterances (e.g. private prayer language; ‘tongues of angels’). Some theorize that here in Acts 10 these tongues must be ecstatic utterances because foreign languages would fall on ‘deaf’ ears (meaning there would be no one to understand them), but the text does not tell us that. This is a difficult argument since the very nature of ecstatic utterances means that it also falls on ‘deaf’ ears unless there is an interpreter present, another gift of the Holy Spirit. When the Holy Spirit gives tongues, it must always be interpreted for anyone to understand it, whether it is tongues of men or angels. (We’ll look more in depth into this when we get to 1 Corinthians.)
The reality is that if Luke had thought it was important for his readers to know whether the tongues here or in Act 19 was of men or of angels, he would have clearly stated it. Thus we see the same thing we saw in Acts 19 – the tongues is not the important part of this story. It is simply a small piece of the larger story of the Holy Spirit moving and creating a new people of God.
In my next blog, we will consider the similarities and differences between the episodes in Caesarea and in Ephesus.

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