As we look at chapters 12 through 14, if we approach them with the idea that what Paul is dealing with here is chiefly, or perhaps exclusively, the matter of speaking in tongues, what we are going to do is miss something which really should apply to every one of us. It may be that someone here or there is given this gift of tongues; but that is a minority, I would think, by the very fact of the multiplicity of the gifts. What we fail to see is that Paul is actually dealing with gifts, not just the gift of tongues.
The first thing Paul deals with here when he is talking about gifts is the fact that there is a multiplicity of gifts. There is a diversity of gifts in the church, and that corresponds in a most profound way to reality itself and to the nature of God. It is not difficult to illustrate that. All we have to do is consider the world in which we live, and beyond that the universe in which our world is located. From the scientific disciplines one clearly learns how intricately diverse the universe is.
When I was in high school and college studying chemistry, we studied the elements and the way they are put together. We thought we had understood all about them. It all had to do with how many neutrons, protons, and electrons the thing had. And if you could count them up and balance them out you could do anything. That is the way you distinguish between gold, or uranium, or copper, or anything else you are looking at.
Yet, as this particular discipline has unfolded, even within my own relatively short lifetime, the intricacy of the atom has become so complex that nobody today is willing to say that we know all of the particles that are to be found as the basic building blocks of matter. Things have happened in such minute quantities of time that you cannot even see what is happening. You can only figure it out from the effects. And when you think about the diversity, for example, there is more diversity in a grain of salt than you or I am ever going to understand.
People who explore this sort of thing comment about how interesting it is that the same kind of forces and the same kind of laws that govern the movement of these minute particles within an atom are identical with the forces and the laws that control the moving of the planets throughout all the vast universe. You see great diversity and yet a magnificent unity.
The reason for that is because what we see reflects the character of God, which is the basis of all reality. If you and I were setting out to talk about what God is like, we would produce something that was like that of the Greeks. Either we would see God entirely in human terms, and we would begin to write about the kind of Greek gods and goddesses that were the popular religion of the time. Or, like the philosophers, we would reason our way to some perfect, distant, and immobile ideal and say, “Well, that’s what God is like.” But as God speaks to us in the pages of the Bible to reveal what He is like, we find there from beginning to end that God is one and yet three. He is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That is the nature of God, and we cannot explain it. It corresponds to what we observe in life, that there is unity and diversity at the same time. This is the basis for what Paul is going to say about spiritual gifts.
