Tongues Have Ceased (07/07/2002) | NOTE: Incomplete tape

I want to read to you a quote this afternoon from the life of William Carey, the father of modern missions, written by Basil Miller. Several interesting things that I quoted out of this book. It is interesting that Carey was part of the particular Baptist denomination and they were the people who believed in the sovereignty of God and they believed in election.

And nowadays people will tell you if you believe in that, you're not evangelistic, that you don't believe in witnessing. And yet this was the father of modern missions and he was a particular Baptist, which means he believed that Jesus died only for the elect, just like we believe.

And these are the ones who sent the gospel out into the whole world. It's amazing to read the story of this man, but that is one point of interest, that he was a particular Baptist. The first modern missionary society came into being, it was called the Missionary Society on October the 2nd, 1792.

William Carey, Particular Baptists, and the First Missionary Society

But I have this, on whether Carey thought the, quote, gift of tongues was available. Dr. Ryland, who baptized Carey, wrote this about the man. On October 5th, 1783, I baptized in the river of Ninh a poor journeyman shoemaker, little thinking that before nine years had elapsed, he would prove the first instrument of forming a society for sending missionaries from England to preach the gospel to the heathen, and that later he would become the professor of languages in an oriental college and a translator of the scriptures in 11 different tongues.

While still a cobbler, as he sat at his workbench by the window where he could see his loved garden, he was always a gardener and a botanist, Carey continued his studies of Latin and Greek, dipped into Hebrew, and as the time went by, added other languages.

Carey stands forth alone, however, as the first great modern missionary upon whom the beneficent outpourings of God were showered. Henceforth, not Carey, but the cross of Christ was elevated. He labored not in his own powers, but in the strength and endowment of the Holy Spirit.

But did Carey and his fellow ministers believe the, quote, gift of tongues was operational in their day? This was in the late 1700s. Once when Carey suggested that the foreign mission field as a topic for discussion at a minister's association, he was soundly rebuked by the chairman who exclaimed, young man, sit down.

You are an enthusiast. When God pleases to converse with heathen, he'll do it without consulting you or me. Besides, there must be another Pentecostal gift of tongues for this to happen. Well, that reveals several things.

First of all, it reveals that the young Carey had to endure some of the older folks that were not as enthused as he was at taking the gospel to the heathen. And the older men didn't believe it should be done, and they said, you know, when God gets ready to do that, he'll do it without you or me.

In order to do it, they felt, there would have to be another Pentecostal gift of tongues. That implies that they did not currently have one among them. They were not aware of anyone who had this gift in the late 1700s, but they felt that God would have to restore this gift in order to reach the heathen.

So that was their viewpoint. We see from this statement then, in general, the men of God in the 1700s did not believe the, quote, Pentecostal gift of tongues was in operation in their day, but that it would have to come back before people of other languages would be reached with the gospel.

This does not prove tongues didn't exist because we do not know the spiritual state of these particular religious leaders. They certainly didn't seem to have much zeal for missions. However, before more telling is the fact that the father of modern missions himself did not claim to have the gift of tongues.

Basil Miller said of Cary, quote, Cary felt that his knowledge of languages was his gift of tongues. It is generally accepted that the tongues gift virtually passed off the scene in the church about the same time that the book of Revelation was completed.

A study of church history indicates this. First of all, if we go back to about 1918, this is a very interesting time period because it's the same generation is living that brought the modern tongues movement into our country.

It happened about the year 1901 on a certain college campus where certain people had begun to pray for the, quote, baptism of the Holy Spirit, which, of course, was a doctrinal error because the baptism of the Holy Spirit occurs at salvation and it is a baptism into the body of Christ.

It has nothing to do with a gift appearing and showing. In particular, it has to do with the indwelling Holy Spirit coming into the life of the believer. Even their terminology was wrong. But this movement began about 1901, so it was really fired up about the time a man named James Hastings wrote a book and it's called Hastings' Dictionary of the Apostolic Church.

And he wrote this book in 1918. And he says the following about the sign gifts indicating that those church fathers who lived in early times show no knowledge of their continuation. I'll quote Dr. Hastings from his book written in the year 1918.

Moreover, most of the ecclesiastical miracles are mere prodigies and can in no sense be called signs. In many cases, they are demonstrably the invention of later biographers and contemporary writers show no knowledge of them.

What he's saying there is if you go back and you read the early church fathers, we have writings from some of the pastors that pastored churches right after Jesus and the apostles went on to heaven. In the first 200 years of the church, we have writings from pastors of these early churches.

None of them mention tongues or the sign gifts being in operation any longer after the apostles died, after John died on the Isle of Patmos in about the year 90 A .D. There's no mention of those ever happening again.

B .B. Warfield lived in the same day and he wrote a book called Counterfeit Miracles in the year 1918. And it was about the same time of the modern Pentecostal movement was gathering steam after Amy Semple McPherson popularized it, who happened to be a proven adulteress, by the way.

But he wrote this book in answer, in his day, to answer this starting, this new budding movement that was gaining momentum and being popular. In his book called Counterfeit Miracles, he points out that the miracles cited were surrounded by bad doctrine, often surrounded by immorality, and to him it indicated a merger of Christianity with heathenism.

Many of the outbreaks of tongues which Charismatic cite today were in clear connection with known heretics. For example, the Montanist movement, which did in fact happen in the first and second century, somewhere in that time period, very early on in church history, there was a group of people who spoke in ecstatic utterances.

These were called the Montanists because they followed a man named Montanus in the second century. He was claimed by the true church of his day to be a heretic because he claimed that he was the Paraclete.

Now, you know who the Paraclete is, who's the Paraclete, that's the Greek word for who? The Comforter, Paraclete, Paraclete means the Comforter, who is the Comforter? The Holy Spirit. So this man, Montanus, claimed that he was the Paraclete through whom the Holy Spirit spoke to the church.

Now does that sound like anything you've heard lately? So this is not new, this idea that people can speak and say God told me to tell you this and I'm a prophet and I'm going to tell you what God said.

This man claimed to be the very instrument of the Holy Spirit to speak to the church in his day, just as the Spirit had spoken through Paul and other apostles, so he claimed to be an apostle. Now, let's see, yet some of the modern charismatic writers who are trying to prove that the tongues movement and the faith healing and the sign gifts that they espouse have always happened for the last 2 ,000 years.

A man named Sheryl has written a book trying to point out that it's always been there, it's not new, and the fact is he claims that people like Montanus had tongues. Well, he did, but what Sheryl fails to point out is Montanus was a heretic.

He was a person who claimed that the Holy Spirit was talking through his mouth and that he was the mouthpiece of God. The judgment of the leading church historians that we have to read today agrees that there has been no recurrence of tongues, of the tongues phenomenon, of the first century in the succeeding centuries.

A man who is known as the father of church history, his name is Philip Schaff, wrote a book, it's a classic book, it's in all the seminaries everywhere in the world, Bible, people that want to study church history, study his book, it's called The History of the Christian Church, and it was published in the year 1910.

He is the acknowledged dean of church historians. He says that historically the gift of tongues passed from the church at least by the time of Chrysostom, 353 to 430 A .D. He further said that analogous phenomena of an inferior kind to the New Testament gift of tongues, and not miraculous, yet serving as illustrations either by approximation or as counterfeits, appeared from time to time in seasons of special religious excitement.

He mentions that this phenomenon has occurred among Mormons and other non-Christian sects, and he is referring to ecstatic utterances or gibberish. Now when Joseph Smith formed the Mormon church, and they built their temple, he stood all of his elders up on the stage and he told them, stand up and start to make noises and God will give you the gift of tongues of angels, and they began to speak with ecstatic utterances.

So the Mormon church has had this throughout its history. We know from testimonies, I heard a young man give a testimony at Roloff Enterprises who had been a warlock and had gotten saved, and he said in their coven meetings that they spoke in ecstatic utterances.

We know that Hindus do this. So we know that in the 1st century when Paul wrote to the church at Corinth, this is kind of interesting to take note of when you want to read 1st Corinthians chapters 12, 13, and 14 where it talks about tongues, that these people lived in the city where Diana worship was created and invented, and that the temple prostitutes who were used in the worship to this god, goddess of Diana, they would get in a trance and began to speak in ecstatic utterances, and they said it came from the gods.

So we know all of the history of this type of claim that these ecstatic utterances are the same thing that happened in the book of Acts, which I do not believe they were. I believe in the book of Acts they were known world languages, and that it was a miraculous gift that God allowed them to speak in a language they had not learned in school so that people could hear the gospel who had traveled in from all the countries of the world, and it also authenticated the gospel message to the whole world once and for all.

It authenticated the fact that the Lord Jesus Christ, his apostles, and the prophets of the early church were authentic mouthpieces of the Holy Spirit, and that's why these signs and wonders occurred.

If you study miracles throughout the Bible, you'll find that miracles were done to authenticate either the man of God or the message of God or a new dispensation virtually every time. They weren't just done to help the person who was healed, for example.

Proof of that is the fact that they got very angry at Jesus because when he would sometimes go into these places, he would choose one person and heal them, and there might be multitudes of people that needed healing.

He would not always heal them all. The healings, the signs and the wonders, when he told the men of John the Baptist to go back, and John the Baptist had questioned, are you really the one? What was his answer?

He said, am I not healing, making the blind to see and the lame to walk? Go back and tell him that I am he. But it was the sign miracles that Jesus and the apostles were doing that were proof and authentication to the Jew, not to the Gentile, but the Bible says that the Jew requires a sign.

The Gentile does not. The Jew does. So these were all signs that were given to the Jewish people that they might see. These truly were prophets of God, apostles, and even the Messiah. Well, let me give you a quote from the fourth century.

This was a man who lived from 347 to 407 AD, just barely 200 years after the apostle John died and went to heaven. His name was Chrysostom. He is probably the most highly regarded early church father.

More people read his writings than any of the others. And this is a direct quote from his commentary on the book of Corinthians. He was commenting on the passage in 1 Corinthians 13 and 14, and he testified that the gift of tongues had passed by his day.

And I quote him from his commentary on 1 Corinthians 12, 13, and 14. This whole place is very obscure. Now you can picture yourself reading through some of the information that's in 1 Corinthians 12, 13, and 14, and you read where it talks about a gift of knowledge, a word of knowledge, a word of wisdom, and you say, well, what is that?

And the only reason you even think you know what it is is because the charismatic movement has espoused those terms, and they do things, and they say that's what this is. But they're merely defining it as something they're doing.

They cannot prove to you that that is what was done in the first century in the early church because no one knows. No one really even knows. You can only conjecture what it meant. Because Chrysostom, who was Chrysostom, I should say, didn't have an R in it, who was one of the early church pastors, said this whole place is very obscure.

In other words, these verses in 1 Corinthians 12, 13, and 14, he said, I have a hard time interpreting these, but the obscurity is produced by our ignorance of the facts referred to and by their cessation, being such as then used to occur but now no longer take place.

Now that's a direct quote from a born-again Bible preacher who lived in 350 A .D. Just a couple of hundred years after John died, he said, I can't really tell you what this means in 1 Corinthians 12, 13, and 14 because they're obscure passages.

They're obscure because of my ignorance of the facts referred to because these things no longer happen in the church today. Is that amazing? Now, this is an early church father from the Eastern church.

He wrote this in homilies on the first epistle of Paul, the apostle to the Corinthians, by Christ's austin. Now, let me go to a Western church father who lived in 353 to 430. His name was Augustine. He was the very man who wrote about salvation by grace that Martin Luther years later read and his eyes were opened and he realized that the Catholic church had been perverted from the days of Augustine up to the time of Martin Luther.

There had been a perversion where they began to teach salvation by works. But Augustine was a born-again man of God who lived in the church before it was perverted and he wrote this sometime around the year 400 A .D., just a little over 250 years after John died.

He says this and this is found in his homilies on the first epistle of John by Augustine. In the earliest times, the Holy Ghost fell upon them that believed and they spake with tongues which they had not learned.

Now, that indicates that he believed it was a language. As the Spirit gave them utterance, these were signs adopted to the time for there behooved to be that betokening of the Holy Ghost in all tongues to show that the gospel of God was to run through all tongues all over the whole earth.

That thing was done for a betokening and it, quote, passed away. Isn't that amazing? You have the key early church father from the Eastern church and the key early church father from the Western church who both agree on the fact that the gift of tongues had ceased by their lifetime which was merely about 200 to 250 years after the last apostle passed away.

So apparently with the passing of the apostle John, these sign gifts which were given to authenticate the New Testament message and to show the Jew that it was from God, this purpose had been filled and fulfilled and therefore this gift passed off the scene according to all of these church historians and quoting to the Galilee back to almost the time of the apostles.

We also find that neither the first great awakening in the days of Jonathan Edwards or the second great awakening under Moody, Torrey, Billy Sunday, etc. had any occurrences of tongues or sign miracles.

The Cessation of Tongues in Church History

So one might ask this question, why did men like Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Wesley, Whitfield, John Knox, Charles Spurgeon, D .L. Moody, Billy Sunday, Gypsy Smith, Lester Roloff, and you could go right on up to Rocky Freeman, you can come right on up to our day.

Why did none of these speak in tongues or exhibit these sign gifts? I just named some of the greatest men of God dating back to Jonathan Edwards in the first great awakening that swept two continents into the second great awakening that swept two continents.

No instances of tongues speaking or all these healing gifts and all of these sign gifts, not one instance of it occurred. And thousands and thousands of people were born again during those meetings and entire cities were changed, bars were shut down, houses of prostitution were closed.

Whole cities were just totally cleaned up as people like Billy Sunday came through town and preached the word of God. And they didn't have any of these sign gifts. You might ask the question of why, if they're still available, why didn't these men of God have them?

Why is it that the great missionaries like Adoniram Judson and Hudson Taylor and William Carey, the father of modern missions, did not speak in tongues? Why is it that all the tongue speakers are segregated into the Pentecostal and Charismatic churches and are not found in other fundamental Bible-believing churches like ours?

Does God not administer his gifts as needed in each local church? If this gift is a sign for the unbelieving Jews, as Paul stated in 1 Corinthians 1, 22 and 14 and 22, and a sign of impending judgment to the Jewish nation, as Paul stated in 1 Corinthians 14, 21, then why is it needed in the modern Charismatic church, which is predominantly Gentile?

It's a long sentence, I know. Reads better reading it than it does saying it. But what I said, my point is this. If Paul said in the Bible that tongues is a gift to unbelieving Jews, why is it needing in a church full of believing Gentiles?

What is its purpose? And you can go back in the Old Testament. In fact, Paul quotes the Old Testament in 1 Corinthians chapter 14 and points out that the Old Testament speaks of tongues as being a warning to Israel of impending judgment, which occurred in the year 70 AD when Titus and the Roman legions came through and destroyed the nation and scattered them all over the world.

Beyond that point, what could its purpose possibly be? What is its biblical purpose? What is it that, why is it that all the great missionaries spent their lives learning languages to minister to the heathen if they had access to the gift of tongues as at Pentecost?

Why are tongues never mentioned in even the epistles of Paul? You won't find one epistle that Paul wrote after the year AD 70 that mentions any of these gifts. Why did Paul indicate that these gifts were to confirm our quote so great salvation and that this confirmation has already passed in Hebrews chapter 2 verses 3 through 4?

See the Greek tense in that verse. Why did Jesus say blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed? You see, Jesus talked about a generation that would not get to see these miraculous wonders, but they'll believe anyway.

Why did he say that if they were just going to continue as they always had? Why did the apostle Paul use these great signs and wonders to authenticate the fact that he was an apostle if everyone could have them?

It'd be a sad way to prove you're an apostle if any old Joe could have these gifts, but he says, no, this proves I'm an apostle. I have these gifts. They follow me. So there are a lot of questions that would be difficult for the modern charismatic to answer that we could ask and that the Bible asks.

Even before Paul and John were finished writing, these signs stopped being mentioned in the Bible. Perhaps this is why Joel could say, and it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh and your sons and daughters shall prophesy.

Your old men shall dream dreams. Young men shall see visions. Joel two twenty eight. If these gifts had not ceased previously, how could they be reinstated in the end times? Perhaps that is exactly what Paul meant when he said, whether there be tongues, they shall cease.

First Corinthians thirteen eight. The real question is now, after so many years of the counterfeit, will we recognize the real as it surely comes in the end times? That's my little study. That's not my.

This is just a tiny little part of my study. This one has to do with William Carey asking the question, why didn't he speak in tongue? Why did he have to spend his whole life and lose his wife and his children to death on the foreign field to translate?

What was it? Eleven languages. If he could have had that gift, he could have just done that and one of the Christ without all that. I don't understand it myself, and I'm not claiming to be an authority on this at all.

I'm searching. I'm seeking the truth. I do know what the Bible says about it. I don't understand how that fits what people are claiming is happening. It just doesn't seem to fit, and it seems to me that it's difficult for them to answer these questions.

So until they can be answered, I think I will be content to speak English if that's all right with you. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your word and the fact that it is that which directs us and keeps us in the truth.

In fact, it is the truth and keep us in it. And we ask it in Jesus name. Amen. Now, I'd like...