Mark Tabata’s Weekday Devotionals:
Wednesday February 11 2026
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Revelation 16:13-14-And I saw three unclean spirits like frogs coming out of the mouth of the dragon, out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet. 14 For they are spirits of demons, performing signs, which go out to the kings of the earth and of the whole world, to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty.
It was one of the more bizarre incidents I have experienced as a Gospel preacher. A young man that I was working with in jail ministry calmly told me he was a Satanist and was going to summon his fifteen demons to come and kill me. Then, he placed his hand on my head and began speaking in tongues at me!
I don’t mean the kind of tongues that were practiced in the New Testament, when people would be miraculously endowed with the knowledge of the language of other nations which they had not previously learned.
Acts 2:4-12-And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. 5 And there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men, from every nation under heaven. 6 And when this sound occurred, the multitude came together, and were confused, because everyone heard them speak in his own language. 7 Then they were all amazed and marveled, saying to one another, “Look, are not all these who speak Galileans? 8 And how is it that we hear, each in our own language in which we were born? 9 Parthians and Medes and Elamites, those dwelling in Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya adjoining Cyrene, visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, 11 Cretans and Arabs—we hear them speaking in our own tongues the wonderful works of God.” 12 So they were all amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “Whatever could this mean?”
1 Corinthians 14:21-In the law it is written: “WITH MEN OF OTHER TONGUES AND OTHER LIPS I WILL SPEAK TO THIS PEOPLE; AND YET, FOR ALL THAT, THEY WILL NOT HEAR ME,” says the Lord.
No, I am talking about the gibberish speaking so commonly practiced in modern day charismatic churches. This practice is often misidentified as the New Testament miraculous gift of tongues. This counterfeit phenomena is found in non-Christian religions throughout throughout history. Batchelor points out:
“My exposure to this charismatic “tongues team” reminded me of some things I had read in my history books growing up. This modern manifestation of tongues finds its roots not in the Bible, but rather in ancient pagan spiritualistic rituals. In the sixth century b.c., the Oracle of Delphi was housed in a temple built near the foot of Mt. Parnassus. Delphi was also sacred to Dionysus, the god associated with wine, fertility, and sensual dance, and to the nine Muses, patron goddesses of music. While exhilarating music was played, Pythia, the chief priestess, would breathe intoxicating vapors, go into a frenzied trance, and then begin jabbering. The weird sounds the priestess muttered were then interpreted by a priest, who usually spoke in verse. Her utterances were regarded as the words of Apollo, but the messages were so ambiguous that they could seldom be proven wrong. 1 While living with the Native Americans in New Mexico, I witnessed a similar ritual several times. The Indians would eat the hallucinogenic peyote, then sit in a circle and chant and pound drums for hours. Before long, several were spasmodically muttering as they experienced their tormenting visions. Today the charismatic churches are by far the most popular among the Native Americans because it is such an easy and natural transition from their old religions. Among many heathen African tribes, in order to invoke the blessing of their gods, the people would sacrifice a chicken or goat and then dance around a fire for long hours, chanting songs to the hypnotic rhythm of a pounding drum. Eventually some of the people would become possessed by their gods and begin speaking the eerie languages of the spirit world. Then the local witch doctor or priest would translate the messages. This ritual is still practiced today among the Voodoo Catholics in the West Indies. This pagan practice first found its way into the North American Christian churches in the early 1800s. Many of the African slaves who were brought to America and forced to accept Christianity were unable to read the Bible for themselves. Even though they came from a variety of tribes in Africa, one practice most tribes held in common was the “Spirit Dances” with the “spirit-possessed” person muttering. The slaves mistakenly associated this with the Christian “gift of tongues” and began to incorporate a modified version into their meetings. These frantic services, which were accompanied by heavy rhythmic music, began to spread at first only in the South and the participants were mocked by the mainline denominations as “Holy Rollers.” Some even went so far as to grab venomous serpents during their possessed trances as a means of proving that they had the “spirit.”…The national expansion of the Pentecostal movement among Caucasians began in Los Angeles at the Apostolic Faith Gospel Mission on Azusa Street in 1906. The leader was a black former holiness preacher named William Seymour. From there, leaders continued to refine the doctrines and make them more attractive and palatable to other mainline Christians….It is important to note the prominent role music plays in all the pagan religions that practice glossolalia. This counterfeit gift of tongues first found its foothold in mainline churches through “baptized” pagan music and worship styles. The dominant, repetitious rhythms and syncopated beat disarm the higher reasoning powers and put the subconscious mind in a hypnotic state. In this vulnerable condition, the spirit of ecstatic utterance finds easy access.” (Doug Batchelor, Understanding Tongues, 248-279 (Kindle Edition); Roseville, CA; Amazing Facts, Inc.).
The early church often pointed out that the New Testament gift of tongues was the ability to fluently speak in the languages of other nations without having previously studied, and that this was very different from the gibberish speaking employed in paganism. One scholarly work, tracing the subject through church history, documents these things for us clearly.
“Didymus the Blind (c. 313–398) was a theologian in Alexandria, where he taught during the last half of his life at the church school (possibly the famous Catechetical School of Alexandria), under the approval of the well-known bishop, Athanasius. He lost his sight at age four, before learning to read, yet mastered his studies and became a learned scholar by virtue of his incredibly good memory.…Tongues are clearly understood as human foreign languages.…Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 313–386) was a bishop of Jerusalem, a respected theologian in the Christian community of Palestine, and was apparently well-versed in both the Church Fathers and pagan philosophers.…Cyril wrote a surprisingly detailed description of the miracle of tongues, explicitly describing it as a gift of miraculous speech in previously unlearned human languages.…Ephrem (variant: Ephraem) the Syrian (c. 306–373) was a Syriac Christian deacon, theologian, prolific hymn writer, and was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1920 by Pope Benedict XV.…Unlike the Corinthian tongues, those of Pentecost were miraculous; however, both were nothing more or less than ordinary human languages.…We see that these accounts confirm the view that the gift of tongues was a miracle enabling an individual to speak a previously unknown language.…Pachomius (292–348) was an Egyptian Christian convert and ascetic who is generally credited with founding the movement of Christian cenobitic monasticism, a form of monasticism characterized by living in community rather than separately as isolated hermits as in eremitic monasticism.…The account of Pachomius speaking in tongues portrays it as a supernatural endowment of foreign human languages.…Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 260–339) became the bishop of Caesarea Maritima (in present day Israel) around 314 AD. He was a biblical scholar, biographer, polemicist, and has been called the “Father of Church History” because of his well-known Church History. It was in his capacity as a polemicist that we know about his view of the doctrine of tongues, primarily by way of his critique of the Montanist practice of ecstatic and frenzied babbling, which he condemned as diabolical and viewed as having nothing in common with the Christian doctrine of tongues.…Origen of Alexandria (c. 184–c. 253) was an early patristic theologian, scholar, ascetic and one of the most influential writers in early Christian theology.…Origen saw the Apostle Paul’s mission to carry the Gospel to all the nations as an obligation that was fulfilled because of his charism of tongues. In other words, he believed that the Holy Spirit had endowed Paul with the gift of many languages in order to proclaim the Good News of Christ throughout the world. This demonstrates a view of the gift of tongues as foreign languages whose purpose was explicitly for evangelism and mission.…There is no need to suppose either deceit or divine inspiration on the part of these oracles, says Origen, because what drives them into a state of ecstasy and madness such that they cannot control themselves is demonic, “spirits which are at enmity with the human race, and which in this way wish to hinder the soul from rising upwards, from following the path of virtue, and from returning to God in sincere piety.”454 Instead, he says, the “prophetic Spirit of Apollo” takes possession of these priestesses by such lewd and impure means, through their “private parts” that “no modest man would ever see or speak of.”…Tertullian (c. 155–c. 240) was a prolific early Christian writer from Carthage in the Roman province of Africa on the Mediterranean coast.…Viewed from a synoptic historical perspective, Tertullian’s contribution to the debate about the nature of Christian tongues is minimal at best.…In fact, there is one indication that he did not: he viewed the gift of tongues as a prophetic fulfillment of Isaiah 28:11, which describes how the Creator would speak in foreign languages to the Jews of Israel. This restricts Tertullian’s view of tongues to the gift of foreign languages.…Irenaeus (c. 130–c. 202) was a Greek bishop of Lugdunum in Gaul (now Lyon, France), best known for his work among the people of southern France in the second century.…It is clear from the writings of Irenaeus that he understood the gifts of tongues to be nothing other than the ability to speak in a foreign language, which was to be used for the purpose of bringing all peoples and nations into one accord with the Gospel of Christ.…It is clear that Irenaeus understood the gift tongues to be a miraculous ability to speak foreign languages and that the purpose of this gift was to propagate the Gospel. It is also significant that Irenaeus believed this, since he was one of the earliest Church Fathers, who had personally seen and heard the preaching of Polycarp, a disciple of the Apostle John. In sum, the universal consensus of the earliest patristics is that the gift of “tongues” refers to neither more nor less than the gift of speaking foreign languages.” (Philip E. Blosser, Charles A. Sullivan, Speaking in Tongues: A Critical Historical Examination, Volume 2: Tongues through Church History, 199-242 (Kindle Edition): Eugene, OR: PICKWICK Publications)
What to take from all of this?
First, the Bible definition of the miraculous gift of tongues is clearly the ability of a person to speak fluently in the language of another nation which he had not previously studied.
Second, this is contrasted with the gibberish speaking practiced in the demonically empowered pagan religions of the ancient (and modern) world.
Third, these distinctions have been recognized not only biblically, but also historically.
Finally, we would do well to remember that something “mysterious” is not necessarily of God. There are many spirits in the world besides the Holy Spirit (1 John 4:1), and is only with the Word of God that we can discern the spirit of truth from the spirit of error (1 John 4:6; 2 Timothy 3:16-17).
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, be with you all. Amen.