Tuesday 21 August 2012

Tongues - Prayer Language or Jibberish?

Some people believe speaking with tongues can be a "personal prayer language" - others call this mere gibberish, insisting that Biblical tongues were always understood by unbelievers in the audience. Let's look at what Paul and Jesus said.

Paul wrote that a person may "...speak with an [unknown] tongue (not with gibberish, but with an [unknown] tongue) to himself and to God (unknown at least by himself and by his immediate audience)..." - and Paul called this praying "with my spirit" (in contrast to praying "with my understanding").

It evidently often happened then in the early church that a tongue was unknown (unknown at least by the speaker and by his immediate audience) - and in such cases, rather than decry such a tongue as being mere gibberish, Paul instead exhorted that such a tongue either be interpreted (which required the supernatural gift of "the interpretation of tongues" seeing no-one present was naturally able to understand the tongue) or else Paul exhorted that the speaker of such a tongue was best to refrain from addressing the congregation in the tongue and instead speak (in the [unknown] tongue) "to himself and to God".

The fact that "no man understandeth him" did not, in Paul's estimation, make the tongue illegitimate, but meant rather that the speaker of such an [unknown] tongue "speaketh not unto men but unto God"; and then Paul added that "howbeit (meaning, nonetheless legitimately) in the spirit he speaketh mysteries (despite being an [unknown] tongue, Paul called it not gibberish but mysteries)".

This is not to assert of course that no-one today can potentially hear some gibberish, but just to add to the truth of your Post, the additional truth that even in Biblical times, a tongue didn't have to be a known tongue (at least not by the speaker or by his immediate audience) in order to be considered legitimate. (It was the manner of use of the tongue and not the tongue itself that Paul wrote to correct). It wasn't gibberish that was being spoken at Corinth - they were real languages - but the language often was not understood by the speaker nor by anyone in the immediate audience.

Interestingly, God Himself condoned that a tongue would often be unknown (unknown at least by the speaker or his immediate audience) - or else God would never have needed to "set in the church", by His own Spirit, the supernatural gift of "the interpretation of tongues".

After all, Jesus had said that the sign of speaking "with new tongues" (new at least to the speaker or to the speaker's immediate audience) would "follow them that believe".

Of course the Lord Jesus meant real languages though, not mere jibberish. But "new" and ("[unknown]") doesn't necessarily equal gibberish!

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