By Nick Greer
"as we were going to the place of prayer, we met a slave girl who had a spirit of divination ... Paul, very much annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, 'I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.'" (Acts 16:16-18)
Acts 16 is a deep Scripture - deceptively simple, but one of those scriptures we come across from time to time that is bursting with meaning beneath the surface. Paul was much annoyed with this girl who had a 'spirit of divination'. Let's look at those words. In Greek, she had a pneu'ma py'tho·na, or literally, "a spirit of python". The NRSV Harper-Collins Study Bible notes of Acts 16:
"Spirit of divination, lit. 'a spirit of the Python,' which was associated with the Delphic oracle."
The Python was a mythical beast which guarded the Oracle of Delphi, near Corinth. At the Oracle of Delphi, travellers would congregate to hear a prophecy of the future for themselves or their country. According to some historians, the Pythoness (priestess) would cry out in unintelligible sounds which were interpreted by another person to form ambiguous verses. To have a spirit of the Python would be to be like the Pythoness - it would be someone who was filled with the demonic spirit of the oracle... someone who would prophecy by crying out in unintelligible sounds!
And as such, there is scriptural evidence in Acts 16 for false tongues. That is not to say that all tongues are wrong. While Paul excorcised this slave girl in Acts from the spirit of the Python, he himself spoke in tongues, and was glad of the experience (1.Cor.14:18).
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What have we learned from the experience of the slave girl? When someone 'speaks in tongues' we cannot be sure that they have salvation, becuase tongues is not a solely Christian phenomenon. According to Professor Maja-Lisa Swartz of the Helsinki University, after her research of the Tanzanian tribes people, "speaking in tongues is nothing specific for the Christian religion. It appears in all religions and is no guarantee for what type of spirit it is that the speaker is speaking for".
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For example, John MacArthur writes, in Charismatic Chaos, "Ecstatic speech is a part of many pagan religions in Africa, East Africa. Tonga people of Africa, when a demon is exorcised, sing in Zulu even though they say they don't know the Zulu language. Ecstatic speech is found today among Muslims, Eskimos, Tibetan monks. It is involved in parapsychological occult groups. Did you know that the Mormons, even Joseph Smith himself advocates speaking in tongues? ...." An Encyclopædia of Occultism says, "Speaking and writing in foreign tongues, or in unintelligible outpourings mistaken for such, is a very old form of psychic phenomenon."
Continued at http://rc.cutlweb.net
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