Just for the sake of a discernment exercise, do you want to hear what ‘fake tongues’ sounds like? Here you go.
Do you remember the charismatic prophet who claimed that the 2018 synagogue shooting would lead to a cure for cancer? Yeah, his name was Hank Kunneman and so far, there’s been no cure for cancer. Anyway, this false prophet charlatan was recently on Jim Bakker’s program, which is basically where false prophets go to sell their stuff after they’ve given enough wrong predictions nobody is listening to them anymore except Charisma Mag and paroled felons.
Deuteronomy 18 says that if someone gives a false prediction in the name of God that they’re a false prophet and never to listen to them again, but Bakker brought Kunneman out to help sell some survival slop, which is when he supposedly got a word from the Lord (in gibberish).
Watch below.
A few things here:
In the Bible, the gift of “tongues” (γλώσσες) means “languages.” This is what is seen in Acts 2, when people from 16 different languages or dialects could hear and interpret the preaching of the 120 witnesses, who were mostly Galilean. The Scripture says, “how is it that each man hears in his own native tongue?”
There are only a few other times in Acts that we see this gift demonstrated, in Acts 10 and Acts 19. As this secondary outpouring was spoken of in Acts 11, the Scripture says that the Spirit fell upon them “just as it did upon us at first,” meaning that the languages spoken of later in Acts is the same kind of “native tongues” spoken in Acts 2.
There is no hint whatsoever that the gifting of “tongues” is nonsense gibberish gobbledegook. Charismatics turn to 1 Corinthians 13:1 which speak of the “tongues of angels,” but Paul clearly was referring to fine oration and lofty speech. We know this because we see angels quite a bit in the Scripture and they are always speaking a human language (even when they’re seen in Heaven). It turns out that angels don’t speak gobbledegook either.
There were strict instructions regarding the gift of languages in the New Testament, as the Corinthian Church was consumed with charismatic nonsense and chicanery. One of those rules is that it should not be done without an interpreter (1 Corinthians 14:27), and one at a time to avoid confusion, and no more than a couple in any given worship service. Also, tongue speakers must have an interpreter, or else there’s no point to the babbling. Furthermore, women were forbidden from taking part in the process at all (1 Corinthians 14:34), which means that Kunneman’s wife should’ve been quiet.
The reason why the interpreter had to be different from the speaker (and preferably altogether unconnected in any way) is to assure that fraudsters and swindlers don’t go babble nonsense and then “interpret” something that supposedly came from God, but instead just came from their twisted head.
What you’ve seen demonstrated is not the Biblical gift of “tongues,” but was called “ecstatic utterance” in the early church and was uniformly condemned by all the church fathers as either psychosomatic self-deception or demonic. Until the Asuza anti-revival in 1906, no professing Christian is known to have even pretended to engage in the type of ecstatic utterance you see in the clip above without widespread condemnation of the church.
Now, if you want to learn how to “speak in tongues” like this (maybe for research purposes or just to make fun of the devil, you can learn how below.
Notice the student says (at about the 5 minute mark), “I feel like I’m making stuff up” and the teacher says, “That’s fine. You have to. You have to start in the flesh.”
Totes Biblical. That’s exactly how Peter did it. Right?
