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without the gift of tongues? Pentecostals should honestly face up to this. They are often
exhorted to "tarry before the Lord" in order to receive this special baptism of the Spirit,
the outward evidence of which, they teach, is speaking in tongues.
Luke 24: 49 is adduced as Scriptural ground for this, but this is a misuse of this
verse. The eleven were not kept waiting to prove them or to encourage them to ask for
the gift of the Holy Spirit accompanied by tongues. They had to wait because the feast of
Pentecost was Divinely dated, being 50 days after Passover (Calvary, Lev. 23: 15, 16).
What Scriptural backing has the Pentecostal view that the baptism of the Spirit should
follow salvation? Some turn to Eph. 1: 13:
". . . . . Christ, in Who ye also trusted, after that ye heard the word of Truth, the gospel
of your salvation: in Whom also after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that holy
Spirit of promise."
On the surface, this looks as though there is some ground for such teaching but the
A.V. is not accurate. Here we have a verb in the aorist tense (esphragisthete), preceded
by an aorist participle (pisteusantes). Professor F. F. Bruce writes:
"The words `having also believed' mean when you Gentiles believed in your turn, as
we Jewish Christians had already done. The participle `having believed' is identical with
that occurring in Paul's question to the disciples at Ephesus in Acts 19:2 `Did ye receive
the Holy Ghost when ye believed?' it is called by grammarians the coincident aorist
participle because it denotes an action coincident in time with that of the main verb"
(The Epistle to the Ephesians, p.36).
In other words the believing and the sealing occurred at the same time, not at some
future date. This is made clear by the R.V. and many modern versions. If Pentecostalists
would carefully read Acts 10: 46 they would see that the bestowal of the Spirit's gift of
tongues was simultaneous with the coming to faith both of Cornelius and his group. It
was an extension of Pentecost, as was the experience of the disciples at Ephesus in
chapter 19:, who had only heard of John the Baptist's ministry.
There is no clear Scriptural teaching for the idea that the Spirit's baptism, evidenced
by tongues, is something to be sought for after salvation. Nor in the Scriptural record do
we find glossalia always following the work or filling of the Holy Spirit. If the reader
will consult the following passages in the Acts which refer to the filling of the Holy
Spirit, he will not find one occurrence that is accompanied by tongues--Acts 4: 8, 31;
6: 3, 5; 7: 55; 9: 17; 11: 24; 13: 9, 52, and he certainly will not find any occurrence
in Scripture of tongue speaking after the Acts period.
It should be quite clear for every unbiased student of the Word that the Holy Spirit, far
from aiming to give the gift of tongues to all believers as a special experience after
salvation, did not intend all the saved to have this gift. As we have seen, the seven
questions of the Apostle in I Cor. 12: 29, 30 demand, in the Greek, a negative answer.
"Do all speak with tongues?" The answer is "no", and God never intended that all should
do so, but distributed tongues with other gifts, some more important, like prophecy,
"severally as He willed" (I Cor. 12: 11).