God's Purpose for God's Church: Unity
Order in the Church
Prophecy is Preferable
Proclaim the Plan of God
Ronald Clements explains the situation which Isaiah addressed. “Isaiah found himself in conflict with certain priests and prophets of Jerusalem”: their self-indulgence in festivities and drink had confused their speech and their thinking, and led them to mock the serious declarations of Isaiah about divine action.210 “Isaiah turns back their mockeries on their own head by warning of the way God himself will punish them (v. 11) … [with] the coming of the Assyrians.”211 “Whom will he teach knowledge?” (28:9) alludes to Isaiah’s wasting his time because the scoffers are too drunk, confused, and self-confident to care. The Hebrew of 28:10 suggests “onomatopoeic … representation of the din made by the revellers” who found Isaiah’s rebuke “foolish and childish,” while in 28:11 “the reference is clearly to the harsh-sounding Assyrian language which … ‘this people’ would soon be hearing.… [These foreigners] would soon be teaching them a lesson.…”212 Bruce, Kistemaker, Allo, and Schrage paint a similar background.213
This misses the subtlety of Paul’s dual point: (i) tongue-speaking in public worship is inappropriate in the first place because it places many of God’s own people in the situation of feeling like foreigners in a foreign land and “not at home” in their own home; (ii) second, tongue-speaking, contrary to some mistaken assumptions about “spirituality” in Hellenism, will not bring the message of the gospel of Christ home to unbelievers. The cross is more than “religion” or “religious phenomena.”