Thorn, Vektek about your false beliefs
I am sorry to hear that your mother is ill. May all go well with her.
I don't think we can prove that tongues was not existed just because it was not mentioned in church history for many years.
I've already explained 1 Cor. 13:8-13 that the ceasing of tongues lines up only with false teaching.
Here is what I said in a previous post. "it is clear that in the context of the passage, tongues will cease when "that which is perfect is come". Just look around you. Do you see this world in a state of perfection? If your answer is "no" then you must know that tongues have not ceased. Also, there is nothing in scripture that states that "perfect" means when the Bible is complete as some would have you to believe. Verse 12 says that we now see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face. We know that Jesus was the only perfect one that ever lived on this earth. There is no way that tongues have already ceased. It just does not fit the context."
I don't think any of us were alive during the azusa street movement so I'm pretty sure none of us were there. All we know about it is what we have heard or read. I have heard some good and some bad. I don't have time to go back and read up on the movement, but if I am remembering it right they started off right, but flesh did get in eventually. Isn't that the way it has been all along. The enemy comes in to destroy to stop the truth. Tongues does not line up with false gospel, but your teaching that tongues has ceased does line up with false gospel. The devil does want to destroy this truth as he is very afraid of it.
I only care about truth and what the Bible is truly saying as well. You were saying that you were raised in pentecost your whole life. There are many Pentecostal groups including some that are cults. Do you mind if I ask you the name of the group you were raised in?
You said: "As a young man I began to test these doctrines against the only authority, the word of God. As I studied the bible, I had more and more questions. So much so, I could already tell it was getting uncomfortable for church leadership. Then I started studying the history of the church from the time of John forward. I realized then, how badly malformed the doctrines I had been raised on were."
It sounds like your church leadership had no real knowledge of the word of God as they could not even answer your questions. That lead you to false beliefs. It sounds like you studied some false teaching that twisted those verses causing you to come up with these false beliefs. There are tons of printed material explaining scripture throughout history that is false. I noticed that it is when you studied this so-called history is when you came to your false beliefs.
You said: "Looking at it from the outside with all of the stuff you should be getting with the health, wealth and prosperity movement. I think Jesus would be sitting outside these churches fashioning another whip, and removing these money changers from his proposed houses of worship."
I agree with you here. Satan has a lot of garbage teachings around the truth to help destroy the truth. I will keep to the truth and throw out the garbage. Satan wants me to throw out the truth too. I will not fall for his scheme.
Did you ever claim to speak in tongues? If so did you make it up because you were under pressure to do so, or did you have a supernatural experience? If you had a supernatural experience, do you believe it was caused by devils since you do not believe God does this today?
I won't go into the originial language subject since I am no scholar of these languages. I do know that false teachers can also twist up things by throwing the original language argument at you. Unless you really talk to a true language scholar I am not impressed.
Seek the Holy Spirit for the truth when you read the Bible. Thorn and Vektek, I know I have the real supernatural experience from the Holy Spirit. There is no way you can convince me otherwise.
Please, please read the article that Doc post about history of the gifts of the Spirit. It truly is an excellent article and I hope it will help to open your eyes. It shows the false teaching in much church history, but the truth was also there. Satan tries to hide the truth among his lies. Thorn you have studied much false teaching in church history. It is time for you and Vektek to get with the Holy Spirit and study with Him. He will not lead you astray as your church leaders and the writings of church history have. God wants you to know and experience the truth. Don't fall for satan's schemes and throw out the truth just because he has it surrounded by garbage. This is a trick that he is not only using now with the false prosperity message, but he has also surrounded precious truths with garbage throughout church history. Don't fall for it. You and Vektek would be more than dynamite for the kingdom of God if you could just come to the full truth of these things and experience them. I have thought about Vektek so many times, "She is a fighter. She would be like a Saul turning into a Paul if she could only come to the full truth."
Here are some things I copied from Doc's article. Please read the whole article.
"In the Early Church, as with the Modern Church, various schools of thought evolved into different groups. Some of these groups remained orthodox, some were mostly orthodox with a few doctrinal oddities or errors, and others fell off into deep error. Tongues speaking Christians were not immune to the same failings experienced by the rest of the body of Christ.
I likewise, thought I knew all about salvation, when I was still a sinner. But I found that when I finally humbled myself, bowed my knees before the crucified Lord and accepted him into my heart, salvation was a much deeper, transforming experience than I had assumed it would be. Similarly, when you put aside misinterpretation of Scripture, ignorance of Church history, and see these wonderful gifts in operation where they are genuine and operate under close oversight so that everyone stays within Scriptural bounds, you find then to be far different than the opponents purport them to be.
So we see the steady stream of genuine speaking in tongues flow from the apostles, to Polycarp and other second-generation Christians, directly to Irenaeus and other third-generation Christians, while separately spiritual events took place among the Montanists and died out. But genuine spiritual gifts carried on outside of the Montanism--before, during, and after that heretical movement--in orthodox Christian churches as witnessed by Irenaeus, Urbanus, Novatian, Hilary, and Ambrose.
If the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, and speaking in tongues in particular, ceased with the last Apostle, what explanation do we give for the falsity of these eye-witness accounts left to us by Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Novatian, Hilary, Ambrose? Did they deliberately deceive us? Were they so gullible that each and everyone were hoodwinked by passing spiritual snake-oil salesmen? I have yet to read a persuasive Cessationist explanation for these historical accounts.
Reasonable people may disagree on whether tongues is a present day experience. But no fair-minded Christian can absolutely ignore Church history. It is a historical fact, attested to by respected Early Church leaders, who left to us a written record of eye witness accounts, that speaking in tongues was taking place in their midst until the mid to late Fourth century. This is beyond dispute.
The Cessationists’ claim that tongues ceased with the Apostles is clearly proven wrong by the historical record.
In 25 years of studying extensively the subject of spiritual gifts and speaking in tongues, I have yet to find a single anti-tongues argument that stood up to scriptural examination. Nor have I found one that fit with the clear historical record. It is indisputable that the Gifts continued. It is also indisputable also that the Gifts waned.
The Gifts did not cease, and could not be withdrawn, but they did eventually wane. By the time of John Chrysostom, they were virtually unknown.
Why the Gifts Waned
The more you see the written Word of God replaced by the ideas of men in the Church, the less life, virtue, and spiritual gifts are present.
Jesus said of the Jews of his day: "For God commanded...But you say...So for the sake of your tradition (the rules handed down by your forefathers), you have set aside the Word of God--depriving it of force and authority and making it of no effect. You pretenders--hypocrites!...Uselessly do they worship Me, for they teach as doctrines the commands of men."--Mat. 15:4-9 (Amplified). There is a correlation here that most overlook. It had been God's will to heal the sick and work miracles throughout the Old Testament, and His will had not changed in Christ's day. But healings and miracles had largely disappeared from the Jewish experience by the time Christ began his ministry. The religious people then, like today, made excuses for the lack of miracles. Had the Lord been like some Christians today, he would have began his ministry by preaching that miracles were only for Old Testament times, and that they were not needed in post-Old Testament Israel. But he did not do that. Instead, in the Scripture we just read, Jesus attributed the decline in miracles to hypocrisy, corruption, and the abandonment of God's written Word. Note also that he did not allow the unbelief around him to stop him from working miracles. No, he went right ahead and healed the sick, cast out devils, and worked miracles. For his trouble, the Pharisees claimed, "He casts out devils through the prince of the devils."--Mat. 9:34. That That accusation is still around today: "Those Charismatics! I tell you, that's all of the Devil! God just don't heal anymore. The days of miracles are over. Speaking in tongues ceased long ago. These are all false miracles! False signs and wonders!" Christ did not allow similar accusations of false ministry to stop him in his day, and we can not allow them to stop us today. As more and more of the philosophies and traditions of men were brought into the Church and given equal or greater standing than God's written Word, you see less and less life, virtue, and manifestations of the miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit. They never completely ceased, but they did steadily reduce to a mere trickle.
Today some Christians actually have adopted the same position and claim that speaking in tongues occurs now only when a person is under the power of demons. Filled with corruption, greed, sin, and hypocrisy, and actively denouncing speaking in tongues, it is little wonder that speaking in tongues waned in the Medieval Church even further. Some try to argue that after the Apostle John died, speaking in tongues continued only in heretical sects. But even one of the most determined critics of modern speaking in tongues has to grudgingly admit that tongues continued on in legitimate Christian churches long after the original apostles died:
Opponents to tongues disdain several of these groups that arose from the years 1000 to 1900 because some of them deviated sometimes slightly, sometimes greatly, from sound doctrine. Critics conclude therefore that speaking in tongues lead them into error. No, speaking in tongues did not lead them into error. Tongues did not lead the original Apostles, or the Early Church into error. Speaking in tongues, like prayer, baptisms, worship, and receiving communion continued in orthodox and non-orthodox Churches alike. Many Christian groups and denominations that never spoke in tongues fell off into error over the centuries. Among the many inaccurate positions the opponents to tongues take, is their assumption that if a person truly spoke in tongues, they would do so only in a state of extreme holiness, which would enable them to never sin, make a mistake, or be mislead. This uninformed argument expects far too much from speaking in tongues.
Just because tongues occurred among Montanists and Gnostics, while at the same time occurring in the true Church, no one denounces Irenaeus--a true Church leader of that day who witnessed and approved of tongues--as heretical. Nor does anyone consider the Churches he was a part of--that did speak in tongues--as heretical or false churches. No one argues that those genuine Christians spoke in demonic tongues simply because other false Christians claim to have spoken in tongues.
In Summation: 1. Multiple quotations from legitimate Early Church leaders, drawn from ancient writings still in existence today, show beyond any doubt that genuine speaking in tongues continued in Christian churches for centuries after the last Apostle died. 2. Those original sources expected all of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit including speaking in tongues to continue until the return of Christ. 3. Although speaking in tongues occurred both in orthodox Churches and in heretical sects, Early Church leaders did not use this as an occasion to reject all speaking in tongues. Neither should we. 4. Early Church leaders continued approving of tongues. So should we. 5. By the end of the Fourth Century, the gifts had waned. 6. It was believed at the time that the gifts had declined due to corruption and lifelessness in the Church. 7. Messages in tongues, prophecies, or revelations that do not agree with the foundational doctrines of Christ or any other part of God's Word, are simply not from God and must be rejected. 8. Speaking in tongues, or signs of various sorts, have revived with the majority of revivals that have come to the Body of Christ from the Fourth Century to today. 9. Speaking in tongues will not, nor will anything else, keep Christians from going off into error. 10. Cults then, and cults now, sometimes claim to have spoken in tongues. That should not stop us from allowing the Holy Spirit to manifest tongues in our midst."
Thanks for the post. I know you are a busy man, but coming to the full truth of the Bible is very important.
Here is a link to Doc's post since I cannot link outside of cz. This will link to the whole article and its author. This works if you copy and paste it in your browser. Or, just go to Doc's post above and click. I can't get the click feature to work. Be sure and check out the whole article. It is excellent. The article was written by Mel C. Montgomery.
//www.curezone.org/forums/fm.asp?i=2148732#i