in which case I Corinthians should be interpreted by the Acts of the Apostles, which is

the historical book dealing with this church from its beginning.

Paul's and Luke's terminology agree, for both use the word glossa, "tongue", and

Luke further defines it as being a dialektos (Acts 1: 19; 2: 6, 8; 21: 40; 22: 2;

26: 14), which in every case refers to a language of a nation or region, and it is most

unlikely that the experience of tongue speaking, described by the two writers in identical

terms, would be dissimilar.

Moreover, the Divine intention was that this gift should be a sign to Israel

(I Cor. 14: 21, 22) as prophesied in Isa. 28: 11, and took its place with the other

Kingdom signs of the Acts period. In what way could unintelligible ecstatic speech be

such a sign? Such speech occurred in the excitable worship in the pagan temples around

and therefore would not speak with Divine conviction to any Jew.

When one sees glossalia, or speaking in tongues in its Scriptural setting, it makes

sense and falls in line with the evidential miracles of the Acts period, when Israel was

being tested after the Lord's earthly ministry to them, giving them a further opportunity

of repenting and becoming useable, in order that they might take the knowledge of the

Lord as Saviour and King to the ends of the earth. To take the gift of tongues out of the

place that God put it originally is misleading and dangerous, and this is just what

Pentecostals and non-Pentecostals have done. We shall look at some of their arguments

in the next article in this series.

We have been dealing with the Divine setting of the gift of tongues in our exposition

of the fourteenth chapter of I Corinthians.  We found that it was one of the evidential

sign gifts of the Acts period accrediting the earthly Kingdom message, and speaking in a

special way to the unbelieving among Israel. Today, however, we see it being revived

without the other gifts which accompanied it, and at a time when the nation of Israel, the

centre of the earthly Kingdom, is spiritually blinded and hardened and declared by God to

be Lo-Ammi, not my people.

Not only does speaking in tongues occupy an important place in the present day

Pentecostal movement, we see it now occurring in other denominations and certain

evangelicals are doing their best to promote it in every Christian quarter.

Pentecostals, for the most part, teach that one may be saved apart from the baptism of

the Spirit, but without this experience which they claim is subsequent to salvation, one

does not have full consecration or power for service, so that one's Christian life is

incomplete and one's ministry hampered. If this is true, one has a right to ask why such