1 Corinthians 14:2 Commentary and Bible Study

Why should prophecy be preferred over the gift of speaking in a language which you had never learned? Because the great aim of the gifts is the edification of the church. What is an unknown tongue? We know what a tongue was, a language, because it's described for us in Acts chapter 2 by Luke on the day of Pentecost. It was the miraculous God-given ability, to speak fluently in a language you had never learned. Now the typical unit of society in those days was the village, and you grew up in a village. As and you grew up in a small town or village, everyone knew each other. Maybe you went to school and you knew that certain people had never learned those languages: ‘We didn’t learn these languages, and look, this man is fluent in this language, and people who come from that country can understand him clearly.’ The tongues of the New Testament were literal languages miraculously given, and attested because people who spoke those languages recognised them. The KJV has added the adjective ‘unknown’ which is not in the original, not because this was not a real language, but because in the situation Paul has in mind no one apart from the tongues speaker could understand it: there was no interpreter present. Here in Corinth, if somebody was given a miraculous language, what a wonderful thing! What a staggering and amazing thing! It could be that people would say, ‘I wonder if that language is real. I wonder if he is making sense.’ And lo and behold another person would be gifted to speak the same language and would attest that it was true and the meaning he assigned to it was absolutely correct. Well, you would stand back and say, ‘God is with us; that is a miracle.’ That was the intention of tongues, originally, but that's not what anybody practices today. What is practised today, mistakenly and often by very earnest Christians – I am not taking away for a moment the conversion and the Christian walk of many people who are Pentecostalists, and Charismatics; there are some very earnest people who do these things, even though there are also a lot of the phoneys – is a mistake. Their teachers have foisted it on them. Their teachers have said, ‘If you’ve really received the Holy Spirit; if you really love God; if you really want to follow him, you will speak in tongues. Look, this is how you do it’, and they give them some encouragement and some start-offs, and soon people are doing it. But it’s not a language; it doesn't have a meaning; nobody knows what is being said. The person who is speaking in the tongue doesn't understand it himself or herself. It is nothing whatever like what happened in the New Testament, which is an unmistakable miracle. Now to justify this, people say, ‘Oh but what you're reading about in Corinthians is different. It's an ecstatic language.’ Some go as far as to say, ‘It's an angelic language.’ But look at it even humanly. The author of Acts was Luke; the author of 1 Corinthians was Paul. There were fellow travellers. There were the closest of colleagues and friends. You read through the Book of Acts: they were together much of the time. For much of Paul's journeys, and missionary journeys, Luke, who records them, will say, ‘We … we … we’ – he was with him. When the ‘we’ disappears, it is because Luke is stationed somewhere else, but for much of the time they are together. Is it conceivable they meant totally different things by the word, languages? Of course not. When Luke describes literal languages so does Paul. Paul hasn't turned the word on its head and started describing something utterly different. These are literal languages. It was a wonderful miracle. We are going to see a little later in the chapter, that the chief purpose of this ability to speak miraculously in another language, was actually a sign for Jews. Presumably, if there were no Jews present, the gift wasn't given. Jews had had it drilled into them that Moses is everything; Moses and the law which he gave, the ceremonial law, and the method of worship, is unchangeable. They were wrong in thinking that, and God in his kindness, when the New Testament church was brought about, gave them a significant sign to release the Jewish conscience from this idea. It was predicted by the prophet Isaiah in Isaiah 28, that the time would come, the time of Messiah, when they would be addressed by people in other languages, and it happened in a miraculous way. It was designed to strike Jewish doubters: ‘These people really do have the Spirit of God. This is authentic.’ Sometimes it succeeded, and sometimes it didn’t. But anyway, ‘He that speaketh in a [foreign language] speaketh not unto men, but unto God.’ Now it's fairly evident that if a person received a gift of a foreign language, the gift stayed largely with them; it didn't come and go as if he could say, ‘I'm capable of speaking this language on Monday, but not on Wednesday.’ It was his constant gift, and therefore the person who possessed the gift could be mistaken about whether he was receiving a fresh message from God to pass on to the people – which was the objective of the gift. In receiving the tongue he would understand it, and he would speak it forth. But as he got the gift of the foreign language, he may in his excitement think, ‘Well, I’ve got a message today’, but he might not have. So he needed to be authenticated by another person being given the same gift, who would act as an interpreter, and the two witnesses both had the message: it was authentic. ‘He that speaketh in an unknown tongue’ without interpretation, he speaks only to God, and the significance of that is that there is no point in doing it; it is meaningless. God has given him that message, but if he just speaks it back to God, what is gained by that? If he's not able to clearly announce it to the church, and if there isn’t corroboration from another gifted tongues speaker, he is to be quiet that day. That is what the passage will go on to tell us. Today, people speak in ecstatic languages which have no meaning, and there's no message for the church. It is wrong, from every point of view.