For he that speaketh in an unknown tongue speaketh not unto men, but unto God: for no man understandeth him; howbeit in the spirit he speaketh mysteries.
That is from 1 cor 14
Now combine my other verses that you misrepresented.
Your 1st paragraph attempts to address singing in the spirit.
You completely leave out " sing with the understanding"
By Leavinging out that CONTRAST, your " explaining" is a new mental inproved. Modification of what is there.
You cant logically make it into something " known" when it is CLEARLY DESCRIBING a heavenly UNKNOWN language.
1 Cor. 14 is perhaps the quintessential passage used to ‘proof’ modern tongues.
There just isn’t anything in that passage however that even remotely suggests the speaker does not understand what he’s saying.
To put the phase in a more modern English – “For one who speaks in a language, speaks not to men, but to God; no one understands (or put better, ‘no one hears with understanding’)…..”
One also has to take into consideration the demographic situation in Corinth as well. To postulate modern ‘tongues-speech’ here just doesn’t stand to reason given the context of not only the passage itself, but also the everyday communication situation in Corinth. Modern tongues-speech just isn’t there.
To take a sort of analogy –
If I attend a worship service in ‘East Haystack’, Alabama two things are going to be evident: one; there’s only going to be so many people at that service (i.e. there will be a finite given amount of people there) and two; the chances that anyone in East Haystack speaks anything but English is pretty slim to nil.
If I start praying aloud in say Lithuanian, there’s no one at that service that’s going to understand a word I’m saying. Even though I’m speaking a real language, no one
there will understand my “tongue”. That does not mean or imply that
no one else understands Lithuanian; just no one
at that particular service. In this sense, therefore, I am speaking only to God, since he understands all languages. To everyone at the service, even though I’m praying in the Spirit (as previously defined), I’m speaking “mysteries”, just an idiomatic way of saying “we have no clue what he’s saying”.
Any allusion to modern tongues-speech must be intentionally read into the passage; it’s just not there. The crux for tongues-speakers is that “praying in the Spirit” is equated with tongues-speech, thus the only possible way to interpret the passage is that the speaker himself has no clue what he’s saying. If he does, it negates the concept of modern tongues-speech.
The passage 1 Cor. 14:15 referring to singing in the Spirit and with understanding. I would have to say that this only reinforces the more correct definition of praying/singing in the Spirit – it has nothing to do with modern tongues-speech. If I sing in the Spirit (as previously defined), I can certainly sing with understanding (assuming I’m singing in my native language or one that I understand).
Again, there just isn’t any suggestion of modern tongues-speech unless one reads the modern Pentecostal/Charismatic redefinition of “praying/singing in the Spirit” into the passage.
In his entire letter, Paul is only talking about real , rational language(s) – always known to the one(s) speaking it/them, but not always known to those listening to or hearing it/them.