Question about the Spirit and Tongues

This is your MO when it comes to spiritual gifts. One 'evidence' you offer for gifts ceasing is the idea that they don't occur. Then when people give you eye witness testimony of gifts taking place, you dismiss them out of hand.

If you see enough of this in operation, it is obvious that something supernatural is going on. There are just too many times believers with gifts know the secrets of other men's hearts, things that come to pass, or other things to be described away by mere chance. There are also the cases when interpreters of tongues get the same interpretation. Of course, you have to be the interpreter of tongue to know this for a fact, but I've heard testimonies of this from those who interpret tongues and prophesying that I knew fairly well.

First you eisegete the idea that the gifts have ceased into a passage where it does not fit, and then claim there are no cases of gifts of the Spirit. When perfection comes, partial knowledge and partial prophecy will cease. But you can't tell me all the kinds of things the New Testaments could know through prophecy and gifts of knowledge, even though you claim that complete knowledge has come. You reject what the book actually teaches...that you come behind in no spiritual gift waiting for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. You ignore the fact that Paul is leading up to an argument on the resurrection. Instead, you pick a topic Paul does not even address in this epistle, and try to squeeze it into I Corinthians 14. Based on this, you think you justify yourself in disobeying direct commands of scripture like 'covet to prophesy and forbid not to speak with tongues' and 'despise not prophesyings.'

You also take scripture out of context in regard to someone working in a bar. The whole verse says, ""Woe to him who gives drink to his neighbors, pouring it from the wineskin till they are drunk, so that he can gaze on their naked bodies." I'm not too comfortable with the idea of a believer working in a bar, and most Pentecostal believers I grew up with would be appalled if they heard your story, but Christ Himself drunk in moderation.

 

First of all, of course it is possible for Satan or demons to 'reveal' things to people. There were diviners in Biblical times, just as there are today. In the Bible, we see that demons can tell people things, and that the Spirit can tell them things or people can make things up out of their own hearts. That is the way things work in the Bible, and this is the way things work in the real world. It is part of having a Biblical world view.

The cessationists world view is not Biblical in this regard. When someone knows something supernatural that he could not know naturally as a man, he is not concerned with determining whether it is from God or something demonic. Instead, he jumps directly to the conclusion that it is from the devil.

Secondly, are you implying that Satan knows the future?

Thirdly, your line of reasoning here could be potentially dangerous. Jesus warned the Pharisees that speaking against the Holy Spirit was the unforgivable sin. What were they doing? They were saying that Jesus was casting out demons by Beelzebub, when He was really doing it by the Spirit of God. They were saying that the Holy Spirit was a demon. If someone is prophesying by the Spirit of God, and if you say that he is prophesying by a demon, aren't you doing more or less the same thing as the Pharisees? We need to test the spirits, but not blaspheme the Holy Spirit.

On False Prophecies and Revelations
There are many false prophecies, just as there were in the first century. In the Bible, we see that there are true prophets and prophecies, false prophets and prophecies, and carnal people who think they know something when they really don't. We still live in that same universe. We did not suddenly get transported to some universe which began to function the way the liberals or atheists think the world functions just because John died. The universe still operates now like it did in the first century. We need to stick with a Biblical world view and let go of carnal philosophies that disregard the possibility of the supernatural.

In some circles, there may be many more false prophecies that true ones. That is very sad. But it is no reason for saying the true gift of prophecy doesn't exist. There was false prophecy in the first century, and that did not make the true any less true.

There are people who imagine something and think that it is God. But there are plenty of people who prophesy and hit the nail on the head. They get revelations about other people's thoughts, direction from the Lord, or even the future, things that cannot be guessed accurately by mere chance alone. God even communicates to some people that they are called to preach or minister in some other function in the body of Christ.

 

Btw, DHK.

Did God call you to preach?

 

The main point being - none of that is "exegesis" of 1Cor 12.

It is "interpreting what God must mean by editing His Word according to the success in Christianity I see every day".


This is exactly what the Jews did with God's Word. Re-inventing it to fit their own nation views and expectations during the time of Christ and it is what they have done with the promise of the Messiah today.

"We don't see the Messiah so it must be Messianic AGE not a real person" kind of "Bible editing" to fit what they accept and see today.

in Christ,

Bob