5-Day Commentary Challenge - 1 Corinthians 13-14 Sample

Be Mature: Tongues Are for Judgment, 14:20–25

Call for mature thinking (14:20). These verses bring a change of tone introduced by the direct address (“brethren”) concerning being mature. The clear implication was that the Corinthians’ present way of thinking about tongues was considered childish by Paul, and that he was presenting the mature perspective.

The standard of mature thinking (14:21–25). Verse 21 presented the mature view of tongues by quoting from Isaiah 28:11–12. In that passage, unintelligible tongues were a divine message of correction that was frustrated by a disobedient response. The final phrase in Paul’s text (“even so they will not listen to me’’) implied that the dullness of hearing was in the face of the foreign tongues. But the phrase in Isaiah was a retrospective look to the days when God had spoken through His prophets before He had to bring the judgment of Assyria. Thus, the quotation as used by Paul took up two strands of the Isaiah passage, foreign tongues and disobedience, but followed the Greek Old Testament version by directly linking hardness of hearing with the tongues. In the Old Testament context, Isaiah 28:16 must not be overlooked. That was the cornerstone text so often used to refer to God’s great act of salvation through Jesus. Tongues were, therefore, the sign of judgment that surrounded the cornerstone. In the Old Testament context, the prophet gave warning to the inhabitants of Jerusalem that, for all their efforts to save themselves, they would be broken for their offenses against God. The foreign tongue was the language of the Assyrians soon to be heard at the downfall of Jerusalem. Paul gave his explanation of the Old Testament passage in 14:22. Tongues were for a sign, a sign of God’s delayed but righteous judgment. The people had been offered rest but did not listen. Therefore, the next message they would receive from God would be unavoidable judgment. Paul saw a correspondence between the speaking of God through the Assyrians and His speaking through the Corinthian Christians. That correspondence centered on the concept of sign for both Israel and the church. The Assyrian tongue was a sign of divine judgment and impending destruction for Jerusalem. As God had spoken a message to Israel through the sign of the Assyrian tongue, so also He was speaking a message to Israel through Christian glossolalia. Some say that Paul used a passage having nothing to do with the ecstatic utterances he was discussing. But that assumes that the utterances were ecstatic rather than the foreign languages seen, for example, in the book of Acts. If the utterances were human languages, then Paul’s use of Isaiah 28:11–12 would be within the bounds of the Old Testament context. That, combined with Paul’s shared sense of a divine, but rejected, message, serves to further his harmony with the Old Testament.

Tongues were for a sign to “unbelievers,” and prophecy was for believers. That latter point had already been stressed several times in this chapter. The tongues of the Isaiah quotation gained a bad response—the people would “not listen.” Paul concluded that the tongues in Corinth would produce the same negative response; therefore, tongues had only a negative response of unbelief to offer. In that sense, tongues were a sign for unbelievers; that is, for those who were so hardened in their unbelief that they would not respond to God. The sign for such a group was one of judgment. In Isaiah, the sign of tongues was certain Assyrian destruction of Jerusalem. In Corinth, tongues would bring unbelief; prophecy would bring belief. Who would want, then, to exercise a gift that was designed as a sign to those too hardhearted to repent? Unbelief would only be aggravated by the phenomenon.

The quotation asserted that tongues were not a final effort to gain repentance before destruction, but rather a sign that talking was at an end and irrevocable judgment was at hand. Such was the bald intention of the phenomenon of tongues. The Corinthians lacked that mature perspective about their tongues speaking. Verses 23–25 developed the functions of tongues and prophecy from that perspective.

Paul linked the derisive response of the unbeliever, or unskilled, to the presence of uninterpreted tongues (14:23). The result, similar to the Isaiah context, was negative. And in contrast to the mocking response to tongues by the unbeliever is his response to prophecy (14:24–25). His opinion moved from madness to a conviction and sense that God was present. Paul embraced both the conviction unto salvation of an unbeliever and the conviction within salvation of an ungifted (in the gift of tongues) Christian. That described edification and evangelism, a burden of all Paul’s actions (9:19–22). Now we see why Paul desired that all would prophesy (14:5), because all would then be involved in the wonderful ministry of conviction and worship described in 14:14–25. If all spoke in tongues (14:23), that great ministry would never be realized.

Paul would soon (14:26–27) modify that basic view of tongues by the addition of an interpreter. That addition moved the effect of tongues from unintelligibility to intelligibility, from judgment to prophecy and edification. Only that way could the gift of tongues gain acceptability for public use in the church.

The concept of tongues was approached in chapter 14 from one perspective only, its relation to edification. In showing the primary ideas surrounding the original use of tongues (irreversible judgment directed to Israel), Paul showed how incompatible that was with the work of the assembled church. The unbeliever, when given the sign, would be hardened in his unbelief: he not listen. Paul called that understanding of tongues “mature” (14:20).