http://www.goingtojesus.com/tongues-at-spirit-baptism.html
Name: Daniel B
web comment:
I recently read your book on Speaking in Tongues at Spirit Baptism. I’m a recent graduate of Bible College and an Assemblies of God pastor, so your book sounded intriguing.
I appreciate the spirit of humility with which you wrote the book. That was refreshing and respectable.
I know that an argument from silence is a huge faux pas, and I make it with some reluctance. But to be honest, I find it difficult to believe that speaking in tongues is essential to the new birth when it is spoken of so little! Would not our gracious God make it more clear….even by flat out telling us that this is what Tongues really is?
What are your thoughts on this?
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Thank you, Daniel, for your comments.
My thoughts have been, in a way, your thoughts. Why in the world would God not make it more clear concerning the testimony of the Spirit being the evidence of the baptism of the Spirit (which baptism is undeniably the new birth)?
I cannot presume to know God’s mind on this, but I do know this much: if the Scriptures had made the new birth as clear as we think we would like them to be on the subject, the wicked men who ruled Christianity the last two millennia, who had unbridled power and complete control of Western culture, would have either destroyed the Scriptures or altered them. I am utterly convinced that the only reason that the Scriptures survived for us as well as they did is those who preserved them did not understand them. God “blinded their minds”, and they did His will. So, maybe the wisdom of God is in the fact of the fundamental truth of all the gospel, the new birth, was not made so plain that the ungodly could see it.
If you stop to consider the issue of the new birth in the NT books, you will meet with the incredible, but undeniable fact that it is never made absolutely clear when or how the New Birth is accomplished. I am sure there must be at least a few, somewhere, but I personally have yet to meet a Christian minister who has considered the question, “When were the disciples born again?” And among those who have dealt with that question, from what I have heard, there are a number of conflicting answers rendered.
So, it is not just that the NT does not make it perfectly clear, whether or not everyone speaks in tongues when they are baptized by the Spirit into the body of Christ (1Cor. 12:13). At issue is the fact that the New Birth itself, the very bedrock upon which the whole life of every believer is built, is never made plain in the NT — unless it is as I have described it in my booklet, Speaking in Tongues at Spirit Baptism. If what I have said is true, everything else makes sense — even if it exposes the ceremonial religious system of Church religion to be worthless in the sight of God. (I am aware of the enormous ramifications of that.) If, however, what I am teaching is not true, then I am a false teacher (as many contend that I am), and we all are left again in the darkness of our own opinions as to when the Bible teaches that a person is born of the Spirit.
If I may, I would like to suggest my little book, Spiritual Light. In the chapter, “Taking the Lord’s Name in Vain”, you will learn why I teach that it is unwise, and completely unbiblical, for anyone to claim to have already “gotten saved”. That chapter is a good starting point for this discussion.
May God be with you, and bless you and yours is my sincere prayer. We here greet you in the name of the Lord, and in his love. I hope you feel welcome to respond to this letter in any way you please. I certainly hope that you will.
Your servant in Christ,
jdc