When I think about the ability to distinguish between spirits, I think about my friend Steve. He has a distinct sense of people’s intentions and can perceive someone’s heart faster than seems reasonable to me, and he does something similar with organizations. Put a decision or an opportunity in front of him, and he’ll usually tell you quickly how that decision or opportunity will tie together down the road: whether it will end up blessing a group of people, or quietly costing them their flourishing.
Two different things are going on in that description, and they happen to be two of the four gifts in this post. Reading a person’s heart is one of them. Seeing how a situation will resolve when nobody has handed you the information to work it out is another, and Paul has a name for that one we’ve mostly stopped using.
We’ve spent eight posts on gifts that pretty much nobody fights about. Service, mercy, leadership, administration, teaching, exhortation, giving, faith: you can hold just about any position on the Holy Spirit and still be glad those show up in your church. The next four are different. Prophecy, the ability to distinguish between spirits, the utterance of wisdom, and the utterance of knowledge are the gifts people write books about and argue over, and they’re a big part of why thoughtful churches decided a long time ago that a series like this one costs more than it’s worth.
I’ve already said in this series that I’m a continuationist, in a sense, and that I’m genuinely unsure whether the gift of apostleship continues. That hasn’t changed. But here’s what I’ve been mulling over: most of us, myself included, have never actually decided what we believe about these four. We inherited a practice from whoever discipled us or whatever our church tradition is, and it’s been doing our theology for us ever since.
Four Gifts, One Circuit
Here they are in Paul’s own sequence:
For to one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the ability to distinguish between spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues.
(1 Corinthians 12:8-10)
Four of those belong together, and it’s the ESV’s own cross-references that put them there rather than any scheme of mine. Follow them, and you’ll see it. Follow the note on “the ability to distinguish between spirits” in verse 10, and it sends you two places: to 1 Corinthians 14:29, where two or three prophets speak, and the others weigh what is said, and to 1 John 4:1, where John tells the church not to believe every spirit but to test the spirits to see whether they are from God. Follow the note on “weigh what is said” in 14:29, and it sends you back to 12:10 and over to 1 John 4:1 again. Follow 1 John 4:1, and it leads you to 1 Thessalonians 5:21: “test everything; hold fast what is good.”
The lines run in multiple directions and back again, which means these aren’t four separate topics that happen to sit near each other on a list. They’re one “circuit.” I’m still a nerd, and open and closed circuits come to mind from my early engineering classes. In this text, something is given, and something else is given to weigh what was given. Paul seems never to describe revelation without describing its testing, and he never asks a church to test something he expects it to shut down.
The wisdom and knowledge gifts, meanwhile, aren’t the vague things the terms have become. The cross-reference the ESV places on “the utterance of wisdom” points back two chapters to where Paul says what he means by the word:
But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory… these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit.
(1 Corinthians 2:7, 10)
So the utterance of wisdom, in Paul’s own vocabulary, isn’t common sense. It’s something God revealed that nobody was going to work out on their own. Whether the gift still runs at that intensity is the question we’re coming to, but the term doesn’t start out meaning “unusually sensible person,” and we should probably stop letting it end up there.
What Prophecy Does
Paul gives it a job description, and it’s shorter than most of us expect: “the one who prophesies speaks to people for their upbuilding and encouragement and consolation” (1 Corinthians 14:3). Building up, encouraging, consoling. Three words that point at somebody else. Then he shows what it looks like on a visitor who wandered in:
But if all prophesy, and an unbeliever or outsider enters, he is convicted by all, he is called to account by all, the secrets of his heart are disclosed, and so, falling on his face, he will worship God and declare that God is really among you.
(1 Corinthians 14:24-25)
Notice who’s doing it. If all prophesy. I deeply believe the gift of prophecy is given to both men and women, and the Bible attests to this. Notice the outcome, too: it isn’t that the outsider walks away impressed with the church…it’s that he’s on his face, saying God is here.
Then there’s verse 32, which carries more than its length suggests: “the spirits of prophets are subject to prophets.” Whatever this gift is, it never takes the wheel. The person maintains self-control, which means that a word delivered by someone who couldn’t have stopped themselves already fails Paul’s test. I very much prefer the modern-day caveat, “this is perhaps from the Lord,” because it carries a measure of humility and self-control: what’s about to come out may well be from the Spirit, and the person saying it is still human.
One more cross-reference is worth considering here because it reaches back far. Paul opens the chapter telling the Corinthians to “earnestly desire the spiritual gifts, especially that you may prophesy” (1 Corinthians 14:1), and when he says it again four verses later, the ESV sends you to Numbers 11, where Joshua asks Moses to shut down two men prophesying out in the camp, and Moses answers him: “Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, that the Lord would put his Spirit on them!” Moses wanted this for everybody, Joel said it was coming for sons and daughters alike (Joel 2:28-29), and Paul told a whole church to want it!
That’s a long line of people wanting the same thing, and it’s worth considering before we decide how nervous to be about this gift and how to express it. And yes, I know that false prophets in the Old Testament were killed. I think the Bible instructs us to desire this gift, but why is there still so much debate about it?
The Argument, Fairly Stated
Here’s the disagreement, and I’d rather put each side in its own terms before I get to mine.
Ligonier’s teaching guide on spiritual gifts, from the ministry R.C. Sproul founded, states the classic Reformed position: tongues, prophecy, and miracles were granted during the apostolic age to authenticate the apostles as messengers delivering new revelation, and with the death of the last apostle those gifts passed from the church. That’s not a fringe claim…and it certainly isn’t unbelief! It follows from a real observation that these gifts cluster around laying a foundation, and it’s held by people who love the Scriptures and have thought about this for considerably longer than I have.
John Piper presses the counterargument on the same texts. He reads 1 Thessalonians 5:19-21, “Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise prophecies, but test everything; hold fast what is good,” and asks why a church would be told to sift prophecies and keep the good ones if prophecy carried the authority of Scripture. You don’t hold fast to the good parts of inerrant speech. He reads 1 Corinthians 13:8-12 and notices that Paul says prophecy passes away when “the perfect comes,” which Paul then glosses as seeing “face to face,” so the gift runs until Christ returns precisely because it’s partial. He also points out that women manifestly prophesy in the New Testament, whereas authoritative teaching over men is restricted elsewhere, which pushes prophecy into a category other than office-level authority.
Sproul and Piper are both modern theological giants. Notice where the two of them agree. Both think the sign gifts authenticated the apostles. They are divided over whether authentication was the sole purpose.
Honestly, I’m still confused. People way smarter than me have debated this for a very long time. What I can say is that I have received what I believe were prophetic words, in the distant past and the recent past, from both men and women. My lived experience suggests that this gift continues, at minimum. Yes, I am a continuationist, even if I’m still unsure and confused whether apostleship continues. I’ve also prayed for the gift of tongues, felt like it might almost happen, and had nothing show up. That’s another post, though.
We Rename Them
Whether cessationist or continuationist, most of us who have been around the church for a while have already settled that argument in our own minds. And I honestly think we don’t “argue” these gifts away. Rather, we rename or rebrand them in a way that functionally doesn’t require anyone to have actually heard from God.
For example, prophecy becomes preaching. Discernment becomes being a good judge of character. The utterance of wisdom becomes having been around long enough to know how these things go, and the utterance of knowledge becomes being well-read. Every one of those renamings is defensible on its own terms and has some merit, and Christian maturity and wisdom are very good things. But that is exactly what makes the default so easy…each gift has a perfectly good natural explanation sitting close by.
Personally, going back to the opening illustration, I could do it to Steve in one sentence. He reads people well, and he’s strategic about organizations. Both are true, and neither needs the Holy Spirit. If that’s where my thinking files him, then I never have to ask what God is doing in my friend or what my friend might be able to tell me that I could not have worked out myself.
This is the same trap the first post in this series described, and it showed up again in leadership: when a gift has a plausible natural explanation, we file it under that explanation, and then nobody has to discern or decide anything. What’s different in these four gifts is the magnitude of what gets lost. A church can keep all of these words in its vocabulary (wisdom, discernment, prophecy, and knowledge) and still go twenty years without a single person expecting God to say anything to anybody apart from the words from a skilled teacher.
I understand why we do it: renaming is easy, and the alternative is hard. If prophecy is only preaching, then the whole thing stays on schedule, and nobody has to be told that their word wasn’t from God. That’s a real relief if you’re minimizing tensions…and it’s also how a gift dies in a church.
We Skip the Weighing
The second thing we do to minimize these gifts is “cut the circuit in half.”
Paul’s instruction for the Thessalonians is three clauses long: “Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise prophecies, but test everything; hold fast what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:19-21). A church that has retired the gift never has to test anything, because there’s never anything to test. A church that receives everything with enthusiasm often doesn’t test anything either, because testing can feel like doubting God. And when we make the divide, we get “Word” churches and “Spirit” churches, but we cut the circuit in half, forgetting the Word is from the Spirit and the Spirit illuminates the Word.
And weighing is the hard part because it’s corporate within the church. Paul says let the others weigh what is said, plural, which is the same posture the Jerusalem council takes when it writes “it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” (Acts 15:28). It means somebody in the room has to be able to say out loud, to a person’s face, that what was just said wasn’t from God…and then keep loving that person on Wednesday. Most of us would rather do almost anything else. We often delegate this to elders, which is good, right, and true. Those elders deliberate, and maybe correct in private, but then often don’t communicate any decision to preserve dignity. And the body never learns how to weigh what they may have experienced.
The danger of a false prophecy or utterance of “not wisdom” isn’t theoretical. A word delivered as God’s about somebody’s marriage, health, or calling, and never weighed by anyone, does damage that lasts for years. I don’t think anyone who wants these gifts to operate should minimize the danger, and it may be the single best argument the cessationist side has. But the answer Paul gives to it is never the off switch. It’s the weighing, and that’s the part we’ve really dropped. And weighing has weight.
I’ll never forget being with some friends who served overseas and received a “word from the Lord” that turned out to be untrue. Their sense of betrayal and anger crystallized into disbelief that any prophetic word held validity. I’m grieved to this day that friends who were young in the faith were wounded by another immature believer providing false hope. I’m personally haunted by Jeremiah 6:14: “They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.” May it never be said of us!
And yet, may the Spirit speak through us, broken humans, true and beneficial words in line with the Word and for the benefit of God’s people.
In Part
Paul lands all of this in the middle of the chapter on love, which is where this series is headed:
For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away… For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
(1 Corinthians 13:9-10, 12)
That’s maybe the most honest thing anyone has said about these four gifts. They’re partial because we are. They come through people who see dimly, which is why they’ve got to be weighed, and why weighing them isn’t doubt but love. And the day we finally don’t need them is the day we see His face.
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