@Maria Billingsley
Hi Maria.
It can be a big topic. As you noted, love is the great qualifier of the genuine gifts, and it is not self seeking. Without love the gifts are from the flesh and useless. Paul specifically said more than once that we are not gifted to edify ourselves, but rather to edify the Body. That was the goal when using our gifts. Added to that the implied answer to the question 'Do all speak in tongues?' is no (Per Paul), so it cannot be a sign of salvation.
The Judgment that was coming to Israel came at A.D. 70. This is what the Pentecost signs pointed to. Pentecost was about AD 33. In 1 Corinthians (AD 53-55), Paul, who was dealing with a very worldly Corinthian church that had absorbed all the pagan mystery religion stuff, including what is now call tongues today, was gently correcting them. If you understand this, you will see exactly what Paul was saying in those three chapters. They didn't understand, so he told them. first, Paul quotes Isaiah, to show them what the real gift was, and what is was for. It wasn't ecstatic speech that spoke to or from the gods, it was a foreign language that symbolized that judgment was coming to Israel. Then Paul expressed the importance of everyone understanding in the assembly, of which prophecy did perfectly. But the final judgment on Israel didn't come down yet, so Paul also showed that if anyone spoke in a foreign language while in the assembly of believers, which was still a sign of Judgment on unbelieving Israel, that it must be interpreted so that everyone was edified and their was no confusion, because God is not the author of confusion.
It was a miracle at Pentecost for obvious reasons. It's not a miracle today, in fact, there is not one person, of any religion, or even an atheist, who cannot emulate what we see in Pentecostal and Charismatic churches and is called tongues today. So how could it be considered proof of anything?
What todays Pentecostal and Charismatic churches have does is taken Paul's what not to do's in 1 Corinthians 12-14 , and turned them into commands, and thus recreating the early Corinthian church with all its mystery religion stuff before Paul corrected them.
Here's a quote from Macarthur to show some history from that time and what was infiltrating and influencing the church of Corinth at that time.
"a. The Ecstasy of the Greco-Roman World
At the time of the Corinthian church, the Greco-Roman world had a multitude of gods. In their worship of these gods, it was very common for a person to go into ecstasy, which literally means "to go out of oneself." They would go into an unconscious state where all kinds of psychic phenomena would occur. They believed that when they were in an ecstatic trance, they actually left their body, ascended into space, connected up to whatever deity they were worshiping, and would begin to commune with that deity. Once they began to commune with that deity, they would begin to speak the language of the gods. This was a very common practice in their culture. In fact, the term used in 1 Corinthians to refer to speaking in tongues (glossais lalein) was not invented by Bible writers. It was a term used commonly in the Greco-Roman culture to speak of the pagan language of the gods which occurred while the speaker was in an ecstatic trance. By the way, this language of the gods was always gibberish.
b. The Eros of the Greek World
The Greeks had a word for this ecstatic religious experience. It was the word eros. Sometimes translated as sensual love, the word eros had a broader meaning. It meant "the desire for the sensual," or "the desire for the erotic," or "the desire for ecstasy," or "the desire for the ultimate experience or feeling." Their religion, then, was an erotic, sensual, ecstatic religion-- designed to be felt. In fact, when people went to their various temples to worship, they would actually enter into orgies with the temple priestesses. So the erotic, sexual, sensual, ecstatic religion was all rolled into one big ball along with the gibberish of divine utterances. And these mystery religions, which had been spawned in Babylon, had found their way into the Corinthian society...and the church.
THE INFILTRATION OF CORINTH INTO THE CHURCH
The Corinthian church had allowed the entire world system in which they existed to infiltrate their assembly. For example, they were emphasizing human philosophies (chapters 1-4), they had a hero worship cult (chapter 3), they were involved in terrible, gross, sexual immorality (chapters 5-6), they were suing each other in court (chapter 6), they had misevaluated their home and marriage relationships (chapter 7), they were confused about pagan feasts, idolatry, and things offered to idols (chapters 8-10), they had relinquished the proper place of women in the church (chapter 11), they had misunderstood the whole dimension of spiritual gifts (chapter 12), and they had lost hold of the one great thing--love (chapter 13).
You see, they had let the satanic system that existed in their society infiltrate the church. And with it came the pagan religious practices--with all of the ecstasies, eroticisms, and sensualities. The Corinthians accepted it all, creating a confused amalgamation of truth and error."
Macarthur"
Dave
