1 Corinthians 14:21

Paul has spent three chapters on spiritual gifts (1 Corinthians 12–14). 1 Corinthians 12 teaches that the one Spirit gives many gifts for the good of the one body, 1 Corinthians 13 sets love above them all as the more excellent way, and 1 Corinthians 14 applies that love to the gathered church. He has just argued that prophecy is greater than uninterpreted tongues because it builds up the church (1 Corinthians 14:1–19). Now he pauses and speaks to the mind behind the disorder.

Corinth was a wealthy, crowded port, known for its immorality, and its culture prized fine speaking, public display and personal standing. The church had carried some of that in with it. It was divided (1 Corinthians 1:10–17), it tolerated sexual sin (1 Corinthians 5:1–13), and its members took one another to court (1 Corinthians 6:1–11). Tongues, the most striking of the gifts, had become a mark of spiritual status, and Paul calls that way of thinking childish.

He begins with “Brethren”, a family word, and then gives a rebuke. The word for children is paidíon, a diminutive of pais that means a little or young child. “Understanding” is phrḗn, a word that names the midriff in physical use and here means the mind, the faculty of sound judgment. The Corinthians were thinking about worship as small children think, pleased with what is loud and impressive and careless of what helps anyone else.

Then Paul turns the picture over. “In malice be ye children” uses a different word, the verb nēpiázō, to be as an infant. Malice is kakía, from kakos, “bad”, and it covers wickedness, ill-will and the wish to do harm. In that one area a believer should be as unpractised as a baby. In understanding they are to be “men”, and the word is téleios, which means complete or of full age.

Scripture gives this pairing of wisdom and innocence in other places. Paul writes to Ephesus, “That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive; But speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ” (Ephesians 4:14–15). He tells the Romans, “I would have you wise unto that which is good, and simple concerning evil” (Romans 16:19), and Jesus sent out his disciples with the words “be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves” (Matthew 10:16).

“In the law it is written” brings Scripture into the argument. Nómos is the law of Moses, and Paul uses it here in its wider sense for the Old Testament Scriptures, since the words he quotes come from Isaiah 28:11–12. The Corinthians are to see that his teaching about tongues rests on what God has already said.

In Isaiah’s day Israel had refused God’s plain and simple teaching through his prophets. So God warned that he would speak to them in another way, through the “stammering lips and another tongue” of the Assyrian invaders. A foreign language heard in their own land would be the sign that judgment had come. Paul’s word is heteróglōssos, built from héteros, “other”, and glōssa, “tongue”, so it means other-tongued, speaking a foreign language.

The quotation ends sadly: “and yet for all that will they not hear me, saith the Lord.” The verb eisakoúō means to listen to, and it carries the sense of heeding what is heard. God spoke plainly and was refused, then spoke through foreigners and was refused again. Hebrews gives the same warning from Israel’s rebellion in the wilderness, when hearts were hardened against his voice (Hebrews 3:7–19).

Paul’s point for Corinth follows from this. In Scripture, speech that the hearers are unable to understand is a sign of God’s displeasure with people who have stopped listening to him. At Pentecost the Spirit enabled the disciples to speak in other languages (Acts 2:4–11), and that sign stood before unbelieving Israel as a witness to God’s new work and to the seriousness of refusing it. A church that fills its meetings with uninterpreted tongues is using a sign of judgment as if it were the best food for believers.

“Wherefore” is hṓste, “so that” or “therefore”, and it draws the conclusion from Isaiah. Tongues are the plural of glōssa, the tongue and so a language, here a language the speaker was given by the Spirit and had no part in learning. They “are for a sign”, and a sēmeîon is a sign, mark or token, something that points beyond itself. The people it is for are “them that believe not”, the ápistos, set against those who believe, pisteúō. The small Greek connectives dé and allá, both rendered “but”, set each half of the verse against the other.

So tongues mark God’s dealing with unbelief, as the foreign speech did in Isaiah. Prophesying, prophēteía, is the speaking of a message from God. It can include foretelling what is to come, and in this chapter its work lies mainly in the present, for Paul has said that the one who prophesies speaks to people for their edification, exhortation and comfort (1 Corinthians 14:3). That is why it serves “them which believe”. Paul’s measure for every gift is that the Corinthians should seek to excel “to the edifying of the church” (1 Corinthians 14:12).

Both purposes meet in Jesus. His miracles were signs to an unbelieving world, beginning at Cana (John 2:11), and he is the one who has made the Father known (John 1:18), teaching his disciples in words they could take in. Tongues and prophecy each carry on something of his own ministry.

Paul pictures the whole church gathered in one place, with everyone speaking in tongues. It is an extreme case, chosen to show where the Corinthians’ preference leads. Into this meeting come two kinds of outsider. The “unlearned” is an idiōtēs, a private person, which came to mean an ordinary person who lacks special knowledge of the matter in hand. Here it is someone unfamiliar with Christian teaching and with what goes on in the church, perhaps a curious visitor or a person from another religious background. The unbeliever, ápistos, is someone who has yet to believe the gospel.

Their verdict is that “ye are mad”. Maínomai means to rave like a maniac. Greeks and Romans expected public gatherings, civic or religious, to keep a certain decorum, and they connected raving with the ecstatic worship of some of their own cults. A church that sounded like that would confirm what its neighbours already suspected and send them away before they had heard the gospel. Paul asks his question expecting the answer yes.

The church’s meeting is a public witness as well as a family gathering. God is a God of order and peace (1 Corinthians 14:33), and what his people do together should show who he is. Paul goes on to give detailed directions for tongues and prophecy (1 Corinthians 14:26–33) and closes the chapter with “Let all things be done decently and in order” (1 Corinthians 14:40). Jesus told his disciples to let their light shine before men (Matthew 5:16). Paul tells believers to walk in wisdom toward outsiders (Colossians 4:5) and to pursue what makes for peace and for building one another up (Romans 14:19), and Hebrews urges us to keep meeting together (Hebrews 10:25). A meeting that an outsider can follow serves all of these.

Now the same visitor comes into a meeting where all prophesy. Prophēteúō is to speak under inspiration, and what marks it here is that it can be understood. Two things happen to him. He is “convinced of all”, where elénchō means to confute or admonish, to show someone that he is in the wrong. He is also “judged of all”, where anakrínō means to examine or search out. One speaker after another says what God has given, and the visitor finds that it all describes him.

Verse 25 tells what this is like from the inside. “The secrets of his heart” are kryptós, concealed and private, the thoughts, motives and sins he has kept to himself. They become phanerós, visible and evident. Only God could know such things, so the man understands who is speaking to him. Scripture says that the word of God is “a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12), and Jesus promised to send the Spirit, who would convict the world of sin, of righteousness and of judgment (John 16:7–11). It happened at Pentecost, when Peter’s hearers were convicted by his sermon (Acts 2:37). Jesus did the same beside a well in Samaria, when he told a woman the truth about her past and she was led to confession and worship (John 4:17–19).

The visitor’s response is to fall on his face. Bowing to the ground was the common posture of reverence in Israel and among the nations, before a king or a god, and proskynéō is the word for it: to prostrate oneself in homage. This homage goes to God himself, and it is the worship in spirit and in truth of which Jesus spoke (John 4:24).

Then he speaks: “God is in you of a truth.” The man who might have said “ye are mad” now reports that God is among these people. Isaiah had spoken of people from the nations coming to bow before the God of Israel (Isaiah 45:14), and the church’s commission to make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:19–20) goes forward in an ordinary meeting where God’s word is spoken clearly. The visitor’s confession is completed in confessing Jesus as Lord (Romans 10:9). It looks ahead to the day when every knee will bow at the name of Jesus and every tongue confess that he is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Philippians 2:10–11).

God has always been a speaking God. He, “who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:1–2). Jesus is the Word made flesh, God’s clearest speech to us, and yet “his own received him not” (John 1:1–14). The refusal Isaiah described reached its height there, when many saw his signs, heard his teaching and stayed deaf to him.

He is also the way, the truth and the life (John 14:6), and he knows every human heart. When the church speaks God’s word plainly, it shares in Christ’s own work of making the Father known, and the Spirit he sent does the convicting. “God is in you of a truth” is true because Christ dwells in his people by that Spirit.

This passage shows a God who wants to be understood. He spoke through prophets and then through his Son, and he gives gifts to his church so that his people are built up and strangers can hear him. It shows him, too, as the one who knows every heart, and whose knowledge of us aims at bringing us to worship. The visitor in verse 25 is exposed and welcomed in the same hour.

The passage also gives a measure for a gathering, which is whether those present, members and newcomers alike, could follow what was said and meet God in it. And it gives a picture of maturity to grow into: a mind that thinks hard about what helps others, joined to a heart that stays a beginner at malice. If something you heard in church has ever searched you and left you feeling known, verse 25 tells you what was happening. God was there, in truth.