Said Paul: ‘Tongues are a sign not to them that believe, but to them that believe not.’ By ‘tongues’ is meant — comments Barnes — “the power of speaking foreign languages.” And ‘tongues’ are a ‘sign’ primarily “designed to convince them [the unbelievers] of the truth of the Christian religion.”
Yet tongues-speaking, where understood, also had a secondary purpose — a purpose benefitting such believers as understood those tongues, or into whose language(s) those tongues-messages were translated. For “at the same time, the truths conveyed by a message” given in a foreign language and “the consolations administered by it, might be as clear evidence to the church of the attending power and presence and goodness of God — as the power of speaking foreign languages might be to infidels!”
