Temporary Spiritual Gifts; Baptism of the Holy Spirit
There are a couple of things we need to observe in this section when we get into verses 8-11. First is the emphasis that these are from the Holy Spirit. In the function of the Trinity, while all three members are involved in almost everything, all three are part of the operation and yet usually one or another has primary responsibility for a particular aspect or task. Here, even though God the Father is involved in overseeing who gets a spiritual gift, and Jesus Christ distributes gifts, it is the Holy Spirit in this passage who is the one who is to distribute these gifts at salvation. It is His sovereign will, not the will of individual believers. There is no place for any believer to pray for any spiritual gift.
Each gift is given for the purpose of service to the local church. Your spiritual gift is not designed—with the one exception of evangelism—for working outside of a local church ministry. Even an evangelist, as per Ephesians 4:8-12, is given for the purpose of equipping the saints, believers in a local church, for the work of ministry. That is one reason, if at all possible, for believers to be involved in a local church.
1 Corinthians 12:9 NASB "to another faith by the same Spirit, and to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit." When we get to the word "faith" there are some people who want to understand this in terms of saving faith, but that is completely erroneous. That is not the subject here; this is something that is given to a believer subsequent to salvation. It is simultaneous with salvation but it is still logically subsequent to expressing faith alone in Christ alone. This was a temporary gift that was utilized in the early church due to a lack of having a complete canon of Scripture. So it is a special ability to trust God in the midst of extremely difficult circumstances, and it is thought to be linked in this passage with miracles, all of which are supernatural situations. So this is not the kind of faith that is found at saving faith; neither is this faith that is found in the process of spiritual growth or the faith-rest drill. This was a supernatural kind of faith related to miracles, healing, and other supernatural gifts that were temporary and restricted to the early church age.
The second in this grouping is the gift of healings [pl.]. There were different kinds of healings, and these healings were designed as calling cards, giving accreditation to the Messiah as well as to His apostles. This was their function, to call attention to the prophet, to the apostle, so that they might gain a hearing for the gospel. It validated what they were saying but it wasn't the only thing that validated what they were saying. This was a temporary gift. The healing gift functioned in the same was a teaching gift or an evangelism gift functioned. It wasn't the sort of thing that just came on the recipient, it was something that a person gifted with healing could go some place and heal somebody. The mission of Jesus Christ wasn't to heal everybody; the mission of the apostles wasn't to heal people. In terms of all the people they could have possibly healed in Judea they healed very few. Their purpose wasn't to heal people, it wasn't a function of compassion, it was to establish credentials. The second things we notice with healing is that in some cases there was the mention that the person who was healed had faith to be healed, but in many cases the person that was healed was healed without any mention of their faith. In fact, there is no indication whatsoever that they were even saved. The purpose of healing wasn't because they believed that they could be healed or because they were saved, it was to establish the credentials of the one who did the healing. It was up to the person who had the gift who they would heal and when, and it was not something that just came on them mystically at some times and not at others.
1 Corinthians 12:10 NASB "and to another [allos] the effecting of miracles, and to another prophecy, and to another the distinguishing of spirits, to another {various} kinds of tongues, and to another the interpretation of tongues." In 2 Corinthians 12 we are told that it was the working of miracles that was a sign of apostleship. So apostles not only had the gift of being an apostle but they also had other gifts associated with that. Miracles, again, was at the discretion of the individual. He is going to perform the miracle, it is not something that just happens apart from his decision making process.
Then the fourth in the group is prophecy. There is trouble seeing how the last two gifts connect with the first three in this group. There is prophecy and discerning of spirits. Actually, discerning of spirits is a gift that was given for discerning of whether or not the prophet was a true prophet or a false prophet. It is not someone who comes into a church and says, for example: "I discern a spirit of bitterness here." That is just typical emotive, subjective, Charismatic nonsense. The gift of discerning of spirits had to do with discerning whether or not the person who claimed to be a prophet was a true prophet, based on the content of their prophecy. 1 Corinthians 14:29 gives the principle: NASB "Let two or three prophets speak [in the assembly], and let the others pass judgment [evaluate]." We know from 1 John 4 that there were problems in the early church with those who claimed to be prophets and were not. We have the same problem today. There is a new movement afoot defining prophecy, and this came up out of the Signs and Wonders movement, one of many designations as what is technically referred to as The Third Wave of the Holy Spirit in the church age, and refers to different stages in the development of the Charismatic movement of the 20th century.
There is another error that people get into with regard to the New Testament gift of prophecy, that is an illegitimate breakdown of the gift into two categories. The way this usually operates is that they will say prophecy has two aspects, a foretelling [prediction] and a forth-telling. What they say is that the foretelling died out with the completion of the canon but you still have is the forth-telling, i.e. the challenge, the application, the mandates to the listener to live life a certain way. There was a lot of predictive prophecy in Daniel but the purpose of the prophecy wasn't simply to satisfy the curiosity of the Jews as to what was going to happen in the future, it was to encourage them that God was still in control, that even though they had been taken out of the land under divine discipline, the message was that God has a plan for Israel in history and that God is in control no matter how chaotic the events may be. That is the idea that we would put under forth-telling.
What happens in this kind of flaky reasoning is that since foretelling in predictive prophecy ended and we are left with forth-telling, and this is basically the function of preaching. So then the conclusion is that prophecy in the New Testament age is really preaching. That is just absurd. It does tremendous disservice to any kind of word study on propheteuo [profhteuw], the verb prohetes [profhthj], for prophet, and it does disservice to kerusso [khrussw], the verb for preaching, or kerugma [khrugma], the word for proclamation. Today we do something funny. We take kerugma, the noun which means proclamation, and the verb form kerusso, which means to proclaim, and the person who did this was called the kerux [khruc], the proclaimer or the announcer. In almost all the cases in the New Testament where there is this word group the content of the proclamation is the gospel. In secular context a kerux was a herald. He announced the message or proclamation for the king. His job was to walk through the streets and make the announcement, and he was to be distracted by people saying: "When is this going to take place? How are we going to do it?" And so on. He just went through the streets and announced the message. So it is an emphasis on the proclamation of the gospel that, Christ has died on the cross as a substitute for mankind and that is the basis for salvation. This is in distinction from the Greek verb didasko [didaskw] which has the idea of instruction or teaching, or even another word katecheo [kathxew], from which we get our word catechism, which emphasizes more or less a categorical type of instruction. But preaching as we have it in our modern society is more of a literary or rhetorical format. It is a certain kind of a structure of an oratorical message. Whereas teaching has more to do with instruction, preaching has to do with a certain type of oratory. Sometimes you can teach and preach at the same time; other times there is no teaching whatsoever, in what is called preaching, it is more hortatory or exhortational and sometimes more entertaining than it is informing. But this idea that preaching versus teaching is a biblical category as we see it in our culture is a complete misunderstanding of Scripture. And preaching is not the same thing as prophecy.
We can go back to different messages in the Old Testament prophets and a particular message from Isaiah or Jeremiah or Ezekiel might really be directed to challenging the people right here today without a predictive element. Most of the time there was a predictive element with the gift of prophecy. So prophecy had that predictive element to it and we can't reduce it to something else. So it had to do with the giving of special revelation in some sense, whether or not that special revelation ended up being in Scripture.
The difference between an apostle and a prophet
1) They're both foundational to the church, the body of Christ. Ephesians 2:20 NASB "having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the corner {stone}." That says something because if these gifts are foundational then you don't build the foundation on every floor as construct the building. That foundation is laid once and it under girds the entire structure. So this is a strong argument for both the temporary nature of the apostles and the prophet. That is going to indicate that there are some gifts that are not permanent through the church age.
2) Both the apostle and the prophet received special revelation and predicted the future. They are distinguished in Ephesians 2:20.
3) The ministry of the apostle was to the church at large, whereas the prophet had a ministry that was mostly to local congregations. He was geographically restricted.
4) The specific job description of the apostle and the prophet was to provide edification to the body of Christ by exhorting and comforting the saints through special revelation given to them. So there is a similarity. 1 Corinthians 14:3; 29, 30; Ephesians 4:8-12.
5) These predictions included local specific time-bound revelations that were not included in Scripture. Even in the Old Testament not everything a prophet said had universal application and needed to be put down for subsequent generations.
6) A key element in prophecy was that it predicted future happenings. Acts 11:27, 28; 21:10, 11; 1 Timothy 1:18; Revelation 1:3.
As a result of this there were many false prophets coming along in the early church. 1 John 4:1 warns that many false prophets have gone out into the world. There is so much confusion related to this spiritual gift of prophecy that it is related to preaching, but it is not; it has to do with special revelation and prediction.
Then we have the last two gifts mention, and that is heteros, so we have a shift in category again to another. It doesn't say "kinds of tongues." It should be translated "varieties of languages." Tongues is such an archaic term today that we miss the point. It was languages, known human languages. They were legitimate languages, not ecstatic utterances, not gibberish. The interpretation of tongues has to do with translation.
1 Corinthians 12:11 NASB "But one and the same Spirit works all these things, distributing to each one individually just as He wills." So it is dependent upon the sovereign will of God the Holy Spirit and not on the individual.
1 Corinthians 12:12 NASB "For even as the body is one and {yet} has many members, and all the members of the body, though they are many, are one body, so also is Christ." In verses 12 & 13 we have a separate paragraph that emphasizes the unity of the body. Paul goes back and forth in this chapter to emphasize that on one hand there is the importance of each individual believer and on the other hand there is an importance in the overall body of Christ and the corporate unity of the body of Christ. This is something that gets diminished too often in a western context, because in our culture as a whole we are very strong on individualism and on each individual doing what he wants to do. Yet the Bible doesn't just emphasize individualism, it emphasizes this responsibility to the body as a whole, that we are part of a team.