1 Corinthians 12:4 Commentary and Bible Study

In verse 4 we have the Spirit; in verse 5 the Lord, and in verse 6 God: these verses are Trinitarian. Verse 5 is a most important statement: the same Spirit. In other words, if there is a true prophet – of course there were in those days – he will speak things which agree perfectly with what all other true prophets say, because there is only one Spirit. That is the meaning of this statement. There are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. If one says one thing and another says something else, then that isn't the Spirit of God at work. The Spirit will never contradict himself. He agrees with himself, however many different prophets he speaks through. What happens today? This famous Charismatic teacher, says such and such; another says something different. They are all having their private revelations, and since the early 1980s there has been a kind of competition among them: Who can bring out the most strikingly original things? But all these things are distinctive and different. Well straightaway – and we are hardly into the chapter – they cannot be authentic. The people who follow them: many may be true Christians, but this is a great mistake. There are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. In the days when there were prophets and apostles, there was only one message. Everything agreed. That is why a little later on the apostle will say that on the platform, in a service there should only be two or three prophets at most. It is clear that if something was revealed to one prophet, he shared it with his fellows, and if the others didn’t agree, if they haven't had a similar light, then he must hold his peace, because there must be agreement between them, since there is only one Spirit. But today there is so much that differs, and people are almost proud of it in Charismatic circles, and call it their different levels of giftedness. ‘Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit.’ There was a problem in Corinth. The problem was that some people liked the more ‘showy’ gifts – the gift of prophecy by which people could speak as from God. ‘I would like to be a prophet.’ It was the same with tongue speakers. There were people in those days, who could speak in languages that they had never learned. Probably not many in each church; in fact, they are not mentioned in any of the epistles accept this one, 1 Corinthians. There were still tongue speakers in the church at Corinth at the time that the apostle wrote this particular epistle, about A.D. 57, but they were a dying breed. What were they for? They were given specifically as an amazing provision of God for Jewish people. Jewish people would hear that people who had never learned these languages could speak the message of God in different languages. This was a miraculous thing, which would impress upon Jews who were slow to believe that there was a new order, a New Testament; that now they must leave the synagogues and the temple, and come to Christian churches, and worship Christ. The old order had now been set aside, and now the New Testament Jewish Gentile church of Christ was in being. Tongues speakers spoke real languages. They don’t today. It is a great mistake. They may be genuine people who speak in tongues, but they are not real languages; it is not a miraculous thing as it was in New Testament times. At the same time there were always gifted interpreters, who also hadn’t learned the language. The message of God was given, in this rather cumbersome way; but the objective was to impress upon Jews that Christ had come and the new order had arrived.We don’t know how many prophets there were in the church at Corinth; probably not many. In Acts we read about Antioch, where there was a very small handful of prophets in the church. Probably there were not many in any single church. What was the function of the prophets? Why did God give prophets in the early church? We understand why they had apostles: they were witnesses of the resurrection, and they spoke the Word of God. There were two kinds of apostles, just as there were two kinds of prophets in the Old Testament. There were the non-writing prophets (such as Elijah and Elisha) and there were the writing prophets (like Isaiah and Jeremiah), those whose words were written down. In the New Testament you had the same with apostles – non-writing apostles who were inspired and spoke from God (which was the majority of them), and then the writing apostles who contributed to the New Testament. But while the New Testament was coming about – and it took some years from the Day of Pentecost to the closing words of the Bible given by the aged apostle John in the Book of Revelation, there was some considerable period of years. During that time the churches and didn’t have the whole Scripture, and so there was a temporary arrangement. There were prophets in New Testament times. They spoke by inspiration while the word was yet incomplete, and they would speak under inspiration precisely the same things that were being compiled in the word of God. Once the Word of God was complete, the canon of Scripture was complete, the prophets passed from the scene, just as the apostles passed from the scene. They were a temporary arrangement just for the foundation stage of the church.