I had a friend tell me recently that her brother enjoyed reading my website but his wife told him not to go back to it because I don’t believe in speaking in tongues.

I guess she’s not aware that in Scripture sign-seeking is a clear sign of unbelief.

“It’s never the sign of faith,” says my pastor, Richard Jordan. “The scripture says, for example, in I Cor. 14, ‘Wherefore tongues are for a sign not to them that believe but to them that believe not.’

“The requirement to have something outside of God’s Word confirm God’s Word is not a sign of confidence in God’s Word; it’s a sign of a lack of confidence. Anything that moves you to your experiences over the Word . . . we don’t believe what we believe because of our experiences, we believe it because it’s God’s Word.”

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The fake practice of jabbering gibberish, insisting it’s a supernatural gift from God, fits right in with the intentions of the developing Antichrist system. As Paul forewarns about the Antichrist in II Thess. 2:9, “Even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders.”

Jordan explains, “Folks, the Antichrist, when he shows up, is going to work miracles (Rev. 16). He’s going to have signs of an apostle and he’s going to profess to be an apostle. He’s going to profess to be God’s representative on earth and everyone will bow down and kiss his ring and call him ‘Holy Father’ and the rest of that business, and if somebody says, ‘Well, we don’t believe you,’ he’ll just go ‘poof’ and bring in the signs and prove it. He’ll have the signs and wonders and Israel will say, ‘Here he is; this is our Messiah! We’ve been looking for a sign!’ ”

In I Corinthians, each one of the nine sign gifts Paul lists, including tongues, were Jewish sign gifts that had nothing to do with the permanent ministry of the Body of Christ. They were simply used temporarily in the early Christian church to show the Jews God was at work in the Gentiles, initiating a new program.

“When Paul writes to the Romans to build them up in the faith and stablish them, he doesn’t list the sign gifts because he knows they’re not going to last beyond this transition period,” says Jordan. “You go over to Ephesians 4 where he lists the gifts there after the close of the Book of Acts and none of these things show up again.”

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Jordan continues, “Why would the Holy Spirit will and desire that the sign gifts for Israel and Israel’s situation be in evidence among the Body of Christ, knowing especially the confusion it could cause for people today. Well, that’s not the reason he did it. That didn’t deter Him because sound doctrine wouldn’t cause confusion, and the confusion today is not the result of the ministry of the Holy Spirit, it’s the result of ignoring the ministry of God the Holy Spirit that’s found in and through the teaching ministry of God.

“There are two reasons I believe He put them there. No. 1, in I Corinthians 1:22, Paul says that the ‘Jews require a sign.’ They won’t believe without a sign and tongues, for instance, were a sign to Israel to validate the truthfulness of the message being preached to them. It’s a sign that the man that’s preaching to them is authentic and it’s a true message from God.

“No. 2, they were to show that the salvation of God had gone to the Gentiles, not through Israel’s rise but through their fall. Because, folks, when those Jews saw that Gentile out there speaking in tongues. . . remember that passage in Isaiah 28 that that was a sign of the judgment of God on Israel?

“Not only did it witness to the Jews next door, but it also benefited the Body of Christ because, as Paul says in I Corinthians 13, ‘For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.’

“The point of that passage is simply that there’s a transition period going on in the Book of Acts. By the time Paul got saved and began to get ‘the revelation of the mystery,’ there was a gradual increase in the revelation being given him. He didn’t get the whole message in one revelation; he got it in a series ‘in abundance,’ as he calls it.

“That’s why you see things he does in early Acts begin to fall away in the end—the speaking in tongues, the water baptism, the healing. As you go further into the Book of Acts, you see more and more of them shed away. More revelation begins to come on the scene and there’s more knowledge. Paul functions more clearly in the light of the new program.

“The gifts were simply helps for the church in that transition period where they just had partial knowledge. As far as the church was concerned, it wasn’t just a bunch of gibberish about non-consequential things; it ministered to them and gave them help and information and edification. And it was the means thereby where God amplified their knowledge during that transition period.

“That’s the reason Paul says (in I Cor. 14) that when you do them, do them properly and in order, because when you do it in order you’ll know it’s God the Holy Spirit doing it through you and you’ll get the benefit from them.

“What you have to understand is there were things going on that these Believers didn’t understand because you’re in that last half of Acts (when Paul wrote I Corinthians) where there’s this transition from one program to the other and there’s a moving, or a setting aside of one, and a bringing in of the other, and the thing that’s being brought in hasn’t been completely made known yet.

“When the man stood up and spoke in tongues it was a sign to the Jewish synagogue next door, but there was also an interpreter of that tongue which gave a doctrine and a revelation to the (Corinthian) assembly there. It wasn’t just a bunch of people getting together wasting their time.”