What spirit is working through modern tongue speakers?
This is a very fraught question and one which is painful to answer. Many Pentecostals are wonderful, selfless Christians, utterly dedicated to living a Christian life. However, it is obvious from the Scriptural analysis we have conducted that the Holy Spirit no longer confers the gift of tongues. So, if modern Christians are speaking in tongues they are either pretending (perhaps even to themselves), expressing an aberrant (possibly harmless) form of mental behaviour, or responding to an unclean supernatural influence.
It is this last explanation that ought to be of greatest concern.
The first two explanations (self-deception and aberrant behaviour) are bad enough in that they deflect Christians from praying to the LORD as He intended and they give agrievously unbiblical portrayal of Christianity to the world. How many thousands have rejected the Gospel because of the strange way supposedly devout tongue-speaking Christians were behaving?
The demonic element, however, is the truly dangerous one. Many observers have noted how erratic and unsettled Pentecostal and Charismatic tongue-speakers can be in their emotional lives and how hungry they are for signs and demonstrations of divine providence. For them the accent is on experience rather than faith – just as in the New Age movement.
We cited Pastor Bryce Hartin’s comments near the start of this paper and his great concern about the damage that tongue-speaking is doing, both to individual Christians and to Christianity in general. He has seen countless cases where tongue-speakers were subject to serious ongoing disturbances when they opened themselves to “the spirit.” It hardly occurred to any of them that the spirit concerned was not the Holy Spirit but a demonic entity masquerading as a benign being.
Through my own experience in the New Age movement, it is obvious to me that many Christians today think of the Holy Spirit as a force, and not as a Person (or perhaps as partly a force and partly a person). Thus they imagine they can call it/him down, rather like a subtle fluid from heaven. This is a truly hideous error and one which is doing immense harm to Christianity today. The Holy Spirit is a Person and only a Person. He cannot be invoked like a force or an energy. Nor can He be told what to do.
Remember, Jesus NEVER prayed to the Holy Spirit. He ALWAYS prayed to his Father in heaven. Surely that tells you something?
It would appear that, except in cases of sheer naivety, all practitioners of tongue-speaking are terribly confused about true Bible-based Christianity and are motivated in the main by pride, the belief that in some small way they can address the Holy Spirit (which Jesus never did) and tell ‘it’ what to do.
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No one likes to hear this, and I certainly don’t like to say it. But after 33 years in the New Age, when I finally came to Christ, I was truly taken aback by just how many Christians had become New Age practitioners by the back door, by just how many had lost their faith in Christ and replaced it with an experiential philosophy which actually conflicts with Biblical truth. Christians seem to have forgotten just how dangerous Satan is and how many counterfeit versions of Christianity he has created to deceive the unwary and lure them into his net of deception.
From long years of study in this field, I have not the slightest doubt that tongue-speaking, slaying in the spirit, the Toronto Blessing, and similar phenomena are entirely demonic in origin, a disguised form of witchcraft which poses a real spiritual threat to anyone foolish enough to become involved with it.
Most Christians are unfamiliar with Grimoires, collections of magical spells and incantations dating from the earliest times. These are designed to conjure and control dark spirits for magical purposes. Many of these spells and incantations are in Latin (as in the Satan-inspired Harry Potter series), but others are in Greek, Old English, Hebrew and Arabic. Thus it is very easy for a demon to induce a Christian to chant one of these spells under the mistaken belief that he is speaking in tongues. For example, if you heard a tongue speaker chanting “jam tibi impero,” you might imagine it was prayer given to him by the Holy Spirit. In fact it is the first three words of a magical incantation to command a dark demon.
Many Christians mistakenly believe that speaking in tongues is an exclusively Christian phenomenon. In fact, it is nothing of the sort. Many other cultures and religious traditions, including Voodoo and Santeria, practice tongues. It is also well known among followers of Falun Gong, the Chinese religious movement based on the ancient occult art of
Qigong. For example, “…hundreds of Pekingites turned up recently for an afternoon of holy rolling, trance dancing, faith healing, and speaking in tongues.[1992]”They were attending a Falun Gong meeting hosted by LiHongzhi, who by 1995 was claiming to be the “omniscient and omnipotent saviour of the entire universe” (Quotedin Qigong Fever: Body, Science and Utopia in China , by David A Palmer, Columbia University Press, 2007).
At a congressional meeting in Washington DC in May 2005, Professor David Ownby made a presentation on Unofficial Religions in China, in which he discussed Qigong and Falun Gong:
Led by charismatic masters, the movement promised miracle cures and supernormal powers, to be obtained through physical exercises, meditation, visualization, trance, and/or speaking in tongues. Parallel phenomena in the West would be called new religious movements or new age movements.
Speaking in tongues is also a features of Kundalini Yoga, which involves raising the‘serpent power’ at the base of the spine –a very dangerous occult practice.
In his book, Devatma Shakti (Kundalini): Divine Power, Swami Vishnu Tirtha quotes some of the relevant characteristics, based on a treatise by his guru, Shri YogãnandjiMahãrãja:
When your body begins trembling, hair stands on roots, you laugh or begin to weep without your wishing, your tongue begins to utter deformed sounds, you are filled with fear or see frightening visions…the Kundalini Shakti has become active…
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In his book, Devatma Shakti (Kundalini): Divine Power,
Swami Vishnu Tirthaquotessome of the relevant characteristics, based on a treatise by his guru, Shri YogãnandjiMahãrãja:
When your body begins trembling, hair stands on roots, you laugh or begin to weep without your wishing, your tongue begins to utter deformed sounds, you are filled with fear or see frightening visions…the Kundalini Shakti has become active…When no sooner you have sat with eyes closed than in an instant the body begins to show activity of throwing out limbs forcibly, deformed sounds are loudly uttered, your speech begins
to utter sounds like those of animals, birds and frogs or of a lion or like those of jackals, dogs, tigers, fear inspiring and not pleasing to hear, understand that the Great Goddess Kundalini has come into action…As soon as you sit for prayers your body begins to shake and in ecstasy of joy you begin to sing hymns in tones of music charming to hear and whose composition and poetry come out involuntarily, your hands giving arhythmical clapping, and
you pronounce languages you know not, but the sound ecstasizes your mind, know that the Goddess of speech, Saraswati, has awakened into action.
If you think the Holy Spirit is involved in any of this, you are gravely mistaken. It is completely, wholly and utterly demonic. The demons are even named –Shakti,Kundalini and Saraswati.
I will close with a stark warning by Pastor Bryce Hartin:
Until recent times, Spiritism was generally discredited. Its alleged phenomena were ridiculed and its mediums denounced as imposters. All this has now changed. The practice of Spiritism in some form or other has now become acceptable in society, but even more, its emergence in the tongues speaking section of the Church has actually made it respectable. The way is thus being prepared for new ever-widening spheres of demonic activity and for the supply of new and more efficient human channels through whom these deceiving spirits may operate. Someone has well said that the partition between the natural and the supernatural is wearing thin in places. Such is indeed the case. With the emergence this century of the tongues movement with its powerful emotional hype and its psychic healings, Satan has now created for himself a new source of authority and these teachings, having now gained respectability, open the door very wide for other “doctrines of demons.” Today’s Tongues, 1987, p.12-
Jeremy James
March 2010
Website: www.zephaniah.euThis is an excerpt from:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/28512340/Speaking-in-Tongues-is-Both-Unscriptural-and-Harmful
