EQUIPPED February 2, 2025

Descriptive and Prescriptive Bible Passages

Let's go to the Lord in prayer. Most gracious, merciful God, we thank you for this evening. We thank you for the opportunity that we have to gather one more time as a church family to put a cap on the end of our Lord's Day, to begin our Lord's Day in worship and to end our Lord's Day in worship.

Lord, we thank you for the privilege that we have to be here, to be in this facility, to be together as a body of believers and as a church family. Again, most importantly, to have the opportunity to be here to worship you.

Lord, I know each and every person here is seeking to know your word better and seeking to be more astute, more educated readers of Holy Scripture, God. So we thank you for that. We pray that the teaching this evening would be profitable, that it would be useful.

And we ask the Holy Spirit to help us illuminate this teaching as well so that we can help illuminate Scripture. God, but we know it's only through your power and the power of the Holy Spirit that we're able to grasp this.

So we thank you for that and we thank you for sending your Spirit to be with us or be with us tonight. And we love you and we pray all these things in Jesus' name, amen. All right, so I actually did a little bit of foreshadowing for this.

I don't know, it was probably somewhere in the second hour of the sermon this morning where I gave a little hat tip to the fact that we would be discussing. I'm just kidding, the sermon wasn't two hours.

You guys all know that. I know some people probably felt like it was six hours or 24 hours or something. But we were gonna talk about the idea of descriptive versus prescriptive Bible verses or concepts in Scripture.

And this is something that builds on the idea that we talked about recently, the idea we talked about that you can't simply read the Bible in the same way as you can any other book. Because if you just picked up a novel or if you just picked up a textbook or even a reference book, what you're doing is you can look at it, you can read the words and you're gathering the very specific meaning.

And most of the time, those meanings aren't cloaked in even necessarily a layer of metaphor. It's just there for you to read. But if we approach the Bible in that way, we find ourselves falling into a number of different errors.

So we have to be careful with that. So tonight, what we're gonna do is we'll discuss the difference between viewing texts as descriptive or describing something that happened as we see in a lot of historical narrative.

And much of the Old Testament is made up of historical narrative, not narrative, not all, but a lot of it. We even have some historical narrative in the New Testament. But we'll look at that descriptive and verses that are prescriptive or normative.

Meaning, now this is important because we have to pay attention to this. Because if a verse is prescriptive, it means that scripture is telling us something that we have to do. It's giving us a command.

Now, this ties into both our biblical literacy topic that we discussed last week, but it also ties into the idea of discernment in a pretty powerful way as well. Because now we realize that in being discerning readers of scripture, we have to be able to tell the difference between what is a descriptive passage and what is a prescriptive passage.

And why is that important? Because being able to distinguish between these two things is the difference between building a biblically informed and biblically accurate approach to any given subject or building an approach to something that is just tragically flawed and will ultimately lead you in the wrong direction.

And don't worry. I know we're talking high-level topics, but we'll get into some specific verses so we can actually work out this concept. I won't just leave you at the theoretical. Now, before we do that, though, as we get further into this topic, I wanna remind you of those five prerequisites to biblical literacy because they're crucial here too.

They're gonna impact the way you approach the text and the way you approach reading it. So just to remind ourselves of what these five prerequisites were, these five factors, the first one is that you have to be a true regenerate believer.

You cannot come to the text honestly if you don't believe that Jesus Christ is Lord, that Jesus Christ came to earth, lived, and died, and was resurrected for your sins. If you don't have faith in that, you're not a believer, and you can't fully comprehend all that the Bible has to tell us.

So that's important. Now, as a believer, number two, you have to have a prayerful attitude and a trust and reliance on the Holy Spirit to help you interpret these passages. Then number three is you have to have a posture of humility.

And this is important as well because what we tend to do as people is that we will come to the Bible looking for something. We will come to the Bible trying to tell somebody else what it says, and these are all the reasons that I have that you're wrong.

But we need to come with humility before Scripture because this is God's Word. Now, number four is related to that, if you recall. We have to be coming here seeking to obey God's Word. So we're not coming to the Bible telling it what it says or just pulling out the parts that we like.

We're coming because we want to know what God's Word is because that's gonna help us understand what God's will for our life is. But we're coming to know what God's Word is because we want to obey it.

We don't want to excuse something that we're doing. We don't want to come up with a justification for a sin or a justification for an activity, an activity of the church, a practice that we're doing in our worship that's not biblical.

We need to come to obey. And then five is that we have to be diligent in our study. As we mentioned last week, when I talk about Scripture being clear, I'm sorry to pick on Lynn every single time. Every week we do this.

She's like, you said Scripture was clear, but we've been reading it and there's stuff we still don't understand. Well, that's true because some of it is gonna take more work. Some passages will take more work, more effort, more illumination from the Holy Spirit, which is why all of these things have to be in place.

Now, again, this'll be, I might be repeating myself here, but the reason that these five prerequisites are important is because what they're gonna do is they are gonna help you put up guardrails against a few issues that will prevent you from having a proper hermeneutic or a proper interpretation of Scripture.

Because do you remember what we said last week that the meaning of the text was or where we get the meaning from the text? What's that single meaning? It comes from the authorial intent, right? The single meaning is what the author of the text meant for it to be.

Not what we think it could be or not what we massage these words around a little bit and we're able to make it into. It's what the author intended for it to be. So we're putting up guardrails against bad interpretations.

Now, there's a verse that speaks to this. It's 1 Corinthians 4, 6. And I have that one here. It says, Paul writes this, "'Now these things, brothers, I have applied to myself "'and Apollos for your sakes, "'so that in us you may learn "'not to go beyond what is written, "'so that none of you will become puffed up "'on behalf of one against the other.'".

But that phrase that's so key there is that you will learn not to go beyond what is written. That's the fatal flaw in so many churches and so many individuals. And I will tell you this too. This is a little bit of a rant, but when people say that they don't need to go to church to be Christians, they will isolate them.

I have a Bible at home, you know, that kind of thing. I can read the Bible for myself. I don't need to go to church on Sunday and have somebody tell me about it. Well, and when you get into that solitary environment, then you really have no other way to know what these passages are saying.

It's very easy to read and to go beyond what is written. So you have to be careful of that. But as we consider this idea, I have some bad news for all of us. And that is that we all bring something to Scripture with us whenever we read it.

We all bring something to each and every passage. And that is our own presuppositions. And it doesn't matter who we are. It doesn't matter how long we've been studying the Bible. Those presuppositions, they're simply a fact of life.

We have them by nature of being people. We have our life experience. We have the experience of the churches and the teaching that we've sat under as we were growing up and as we're coming along. We have what's going on in the world.

We have our own opinions on how things should be. And all these presuppositions we bring to us or we bring to Scripture when we read it. Now, if we are approaching the Bible with those five prerequisites I mentioned earlier, it will be okay.

You can overcome your presuppositions. Sometimes you're right, and that's great. But if we're coming humbly and we're coming to obey, then our presuppositions, we have to be willing to throw them out the window if we find that they conflict with what the Bible plainly says.

Or what we determine that the Bible says as we look at the various cross-references or however it is that we have to approach it. However, the other thing that those factors guard against, and this is something that we don't have to bring, but it's guarding against something negative.

And that is either what I alluded to earlier, what I said earlier, that is, one, trying to make the Bible say something that it doesn't say, or ignoring what it does say when that doesn't make us feel comfortable or whatever it is that it makes us feel.

And as I talked about feelings this morning, we can't allow our feelings to determine our interpretation of Scripture. Another thing we can't allow, and I can't remember if I'll talk about this later, we can't allow our experience to determine our interpretation as well.

You assess your experience by Scripture. You don't assess Scripture by your experience. What you've lived through doesn't make Scripture true or false. Scripture makes what you live through true or false.

So there's a vast difference there. Now, we have to remember, if the Bible says something, if it says that we have to do something and we're not doing it, it's not up to us to try to explain it away or look for another passage that appears to say something different because what do we already know about Scripture?

We know that it doesn't contradict itself. You cannot find a passage that says something different from what another passage says. It is impossible. And that comes only from our interpretation. So it's also, it's not for us to do that.

And again, it's not for us to just ignore what the Bible tells us. And that takes us straight to our main issue tonight, our main topic. How do we know when the Bible is telling us to do something or when it's just telling us about something?

And obviously, if you think back to some of our other hermeneutical principles, our principles of interpretation, context plays a massive role in that. And that's why this topic follows our discussion of biblical literacy and hermeneutics because what this is basically doing is putting those principles into play in a very real way or directly into action.

And before we get into some specific examples, what I wanna highlight is the reason that I think this is so important for us to talk about, and this is how it ties back into discernment, is because churches, pastors, people, very often take things that are descriptive in nature and turn them into something prescriptive.

So what I mean is there's a lot of passages that are historical narrative that people are trying to make normative or make them into a command for us now. And I invite you to see if you can think of some examples of that in your head, but I will give you some in just a little bit in case you don't have any of your own.

So I'll also say that we can probably divide these into categories, and not everything is black and white necessarily. Some things are prescriptive, some things are descriptive, some things are descriptive, but have a prescriptive application when you mix in the context of other verses that are related.

So it's not just a matter of reading one verse and necessarily knowing, although sometimes you can. So let's just get into prescriptive. So I would invite you to turn to the book of Ephesians. We're gonna start there, and you can turn to Ephesians chapter five.

Because again, what I wanna do is make some of these prescriptive passages plainly obvious. And you can tell by the language that we're looking at. So you can start at the very beginning of chapter five.

Paul writes this, therefore be imitators of God as beloved children and walk in love, just as Christ also loved us and gave himself up for us in offering in a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma. Now, actually, now that I read this whole thing, we got a little bit of both in there.

So what is very clearly a prescription here? Therefore be imitators of God. Paul is telling the church at Ephesus, this is what you are to do. So this is a prescription. However, if you look at the end of verse two, we see just as Christ also loved us and gave himself up for us in offering in a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma.

Well, that is describing what Christ has done. And why is that not a prescription? Because you cannot sacrifice yourself for the sins of other people. Okay, so we're starting to see just even a hint of how these are different.

Does that make sense? Okay, so that's Ephesians five, one and two. Let's go to six. Let no one deceive you with empty words. For because of these things, the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience.

Let no one deceive you with empty words. That is a prescription. That is a command. That is Paul telling us, don't do that. Don't let that happen to you. Again, some of these things are very clear simply by the way they're worded.

Verse 11, we're still in Ephesians five. And do not participate in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. Purely prescriptive. Now I wanna go to a couple more just because I like them.

Ephesians five, 22. I like this one, but don't worry, I like the other one too. Wives, be subject to your own husbands as to the Lord. Boy, that's a prescription, but that's one that people hate. They ignore it or they argue about it.

They say, why should I submit? My husband's not a godly man or whatever it is that they say. But anyway, that's a prescription. You can't get around that Paul is writing this and these are Paul's words inspired by God and they are scripture to us.

Now, verse 25, husbands, love your wives just as Christ also loved the church and gave himself up for her. Now, once again, that doesn't mean you can die for her sins, but that means that you can as a husband make sacrifices for your wife.

And not only that, you are commanded to love your wife as Christ loved the church. And while those are just a few words, there is just so much. There's an ocean of meaning contained in those words to love someone in the way that Christ loved the church.

But again, these are verses that are very prescriptive for us because they're telling us either what we should do, how we should act, what we should not do. We read this earlier and you don't have to chase me all over the place.

If we wanna read some of these together, I'll tell you. But Matthew 28, 19 and 20, go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to keep all that I commanded you.

And behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age. Jesus told his disciples that and that remains true for us. Now, let me address something that I talked about last week where I said, remember, these scripture verses were not written directly to us.

They're not written to me, they're not written to you. They're written to the individual churches. They're spoken to the disciples, but that doesn't mean that there's no application for us. Just because we are not in the church of Ephesus and whatever year it was that Paul wrote this doesn't mean that we're not supposed to submit to our husbands or love our wives, or that we're not supposed to not participate in the unfruitful works of darkness.

There's an element of common sense in some of these things that tells you this is how you are to act because scripture says it. Now, let me look at another one, 1 Timothy 4, 16. And you can turn there if you'd like.

1 Timothy 4, 16 is a favorite verse of mine. Now, once again, consider the context and consider the audience. Paul is writing this letter to Timothy. It's an instruction to a young minister. Pay close attention to yourself and to your teaching.

Persevere in these things, for as you do this, you will save both yourself and those who hear you. This should be a verse treasured by anyone who is responsible for preaching or teaching other people.

Keep a close eye on your teaching. Some versions translate this as doctrine and persevere in these things, but also pay close attention to yourself. So pay attention to your life, pay attention to your doctrine.

That's a prescription for any kind of church leader. Now, we've been going with these just handful of verses, rapid fire through them, talking about something that's a prescription. Now, here's a verse that's a prescription, but if you take the context, it is not for us.

1 Timothy 5, 23, it should be just on the next page or so. Again, writing to Timothy, no longer drink water only, but use a little wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments. It's a prescription, but it's for Timothy's very specific circumstance.

It's for Timothy's very specific health issue, his stomach ailment. This is not, again, this is not pay close attention to yourself and your teaching. And now we're like, well, Paul says, don't drink water only, but have some wine.

That's not like carte blanche for us to follow this and drink wine or use this as an excuse to drink wine. So there's an example of a prescription where you have to view it in the context in which it was written.

Like I said, I know this is a very dangerous thing to say, but there is an element of common sense that's involved in this that doesn't always help people. Let's just do a couple more. Turning to the book of Titus or Paul's letter to Titus.

Chapter one, verse five. For this reason, I left you in Crete that you would set in order what remains and appoint elders in every city as I directed you. Now, this is prescriptive to Titus. Appoint elders in every city as I have directed you.

But you may recognize this as a concept that we base the proper form of church government around because the instruction that we see in all these New Testament letters is to appoint elders in these churches.

And we see and we understand that that is the form of government they were using. They did not say, Paul did not say appoint an administrative board and a Christian education committee chairman in every city.

We don't see that sort of model in scripture, but we do see him telling to appoint elders in every city. So when we look at the context there, we see that it's not necessarily to us. And because he is writing to somebody in Crete who's supposed to be appointing elders, that you can't automatically take this.

Now, the reason we get the idea of elders is because we find this in other verses as well. This is the model that we find prescribed throughout the New Testament. We find it in Acts, we find it in Timothy, we find it in Titus.

So that's how we take that. So again, not everything is perfectly clear. Here's another one, Titus chapter two, verses two and three. Older men are to be temperate, dignified, sensible, sound in faith and love and perseverance.

Older women likewise are to be reverent in their behavior, not malicious gossips, nor enslaved to much wine, teaching what is good, so that they may instruct the young women in sensibility to love their husbands, to love their children.

We've gone on to verse five now. To be sensible, pure, workers at home, kind, being subject to their own husbands so that the word of God will not be slandered. Prescriptive. People ask, well, if I'm a woman and I'm not supposed to be in leadership, what is it that I'm supposed to do?

I feel that God has gifted me in certain ways. I would direct you to Titus two, three. You're to mentor the younger women in ways to live a godly life. Older men are to do the same. Not all men are called to be leaders in a church, right?

Not all men are called to be elders, but they're still called to be temperate, dignified, sensible, sound in faith and love and perseverance, because we're all here to set examples of how to live the Christian life for other people.

Now I got one more, one more that I wanna hit for this, and it's Genesis 2, 24. So now we're going well outside of our New Testament comfort zone, and we're turning to the book of Genesis. Genesis 2, 24.

Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and cleave to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. This is a prescription from God about marriage, but where things get complicated is that when we consider prescriptive verses in the Old Testament, then we have to be sure that they still apply to us today.

The moral law of the 10 Commandments still applies, but it applies in a different way now that Jesus has fulfilled it. Now, if we take this verse, 2, 24, and we're talking about marriage, will we say, does this apply to us today?

Do we find this concept similarly in the New Testament? And of course we do. In Matthew 19, verse four, where Jesus, in discussing marriage and divorce with the Pharisees, says, have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, for this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

We see Jesus reinforcing the teaching of Genesis in the New Testament, in Matthew, in his gospel. For that reason, we can be slightly more comfortable about taking something from all the way early on in the first chapter of Genesis as a prescription for marriage, because Jesus has also taught it.

So we're not simply taking the Old Testament given to the nation of Israel and coming up with something there, but we're finding Jesus reinforcing that idea. So that is a whole bunch of verses that are prescriptive in nature in a couple of various ways.

Now, we're gonna get a little weird here, and we're gonna talk about some descriptive verses, and this is important. So we're back in Genesis, chapter four, verse 19, and I apologize in advance for this, but you know what, I shouldn't have to apologize because it's in the Bible, I didn't write it.

Genesis 4, 19, and I'll tell you why this is important that we consider something like this. And Lamech took for himself two wives. The name of one was Ada, the name of the other Zillah. Now, what do we see here?

We see polygamy. Some people, and this is a current issue in the Christian world, some people are taking such verses as these and suggesting that they are a prescription for polygamy, that God has said that it's okay for men to have more than one wife.

But I would argue that there is nothing about this verse that is telling you that it is okay to have multiple wives or multiple spouses or multiple whatever. We look at another verse. Let's go to 1 Kings 11, one through four, and then we'll be in 2 Kings after that.

1 Kings 11, one through four. King Solomon loved many foreign women along with the daughter of Pharaoh, Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, Sidonian, and Hittite women. From the nations concerning which Yahweh had said to the sons of Israel, you shall not go along with them, nor shall they go along with you, for they will surely turn your heart away after their gods.

Solomon clung to these in love, and he had 700 wives, princesses, and 300 concubines. But listen to this, and his wives turned his heart away. Now it happened at the time that Solomon was old, his wives turned his heart away after other gods, and his heart was not wholly devoted to Yahweh as God as the heart of his father David had been.

So this is a descriptive passage of Solomon and his many wives. But how could you take this passage that tells that those many wives were part of what turned his heart away from God as a prescription for polygamy or a prescription for having 700 wives of your own?

It doesn't make logical sense. Now, another thing that we see, and I'm not reading this one, I'll just generalize about it. We see that David, God's chosen king, committed adultery. That is a descriptive account.

It's not a prescription for committing adultery because you're a powerful person. It's also not a prescription for murdering the husband of the person that you committed adultery with. Again, I know that it's not the easiest thing for a lot of people, but we have to use common sense to look at these things.

Now, simply because polygamy exists in the Bible does not mean that it is a command. And again, I'm gonna say some of these things I'm gonna say over and over. Maybe I'll try to say them in a different way, but it's always gonna be the same thing.

Now, here's another one. This isn't related to polygamy, so we can just move on from that for just a moment. 2 Kings 6, five and six. Now it happened that as one was felling a beam, the axe head fell into the water, and he cried out and said, "'Alas, my master, for it was borrowed.'.

Then the man of God, which is Elisha, said, "'Where did it fall?'. And when he showed him the place, he cut off a stick and threw it in there and made the iron float.". Elisha made an iron axe head float up out of the water.

How could this possible? This is descriptive. How could it be ordering you, commanding you to make an iron axe head float? If I said, Dan, my axe head is in that pond down there where all those cows are, make it float and get it out.

You can't do it because it's not possible. So again, it's easy to use a silly example like that, but it's more serious when people are taking things like polygamy and trying to make doctrine out of them.

But let me just point you briefly to Deuteronomy 17, 17. And I can read this. You don't need to turn there. Deuteronomy 17, 17 says this, "'And he shall not multiply wives for himself, or else his heart will turn away, nor shall he greatly increase silver or gold for himself.'".

So this is part of the Mosaic law that would clearly demonstrate to you it was written probably because of some of the polygamy sin early in the Old Testament, but to prevent it later on in the Old Testament, which it still doesn't do.

So we clearly see that this is not something that's okay. Now, I also have Mark 12, 43 written here. And oh, this is a, oh yeah, this is a good one. "'And calling his disciples to him, he said to them,' this is the story of the widow's might, "'Truly I say to you, this poor widow put in more than all those putting money in the treasury, for all they put in out of their surplus, but she, out of her poverty, put in all she owned, all she had to live on.'".

Now, what is the application that is always given for this passage? Especially if you've ever been a Baptist. The application is that you need to give sacrificially.

You need to be the widow,.

And you need to give everything that you have to the church. But Jesus doesn't say that. He simply describes the scene that's going on. And some very opportunistic people have decided that the application for this is that, you need to send me $5 ,000, and I will pray a special prayer for you, and sow a seed, and sow a blessing, and you will reap a reward from God because you gave sacrificially.

That's not the application of this verse. I can't wait till we get to this verse. But this is more commentary on the Pharisees destroying the houses of widows, taking advantage of the poor for their own benefit.

So again, that is a descriptive passage that people take as prescriptive. Now, on that topic, let's turn to the book of Acts. Acts chapter two, we'll start there. I just went the wrong direction. Acts chapter two.

Now, now is where we begin to risk the potential for offending people based on their beliefs. Acts chapter two, verses one through four. And when the day of Pentecost had fully come, they were all together in one place.

And suddenly there came from heaven a noise like a violent rushing wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues like fire distributing themselves, and they rested on each one of them.

And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues as the Spirit was giving them utterance. Now, what I wanna tell you about the book of Acts is that the book of Acts is a historical narrative about the early church.

The book of Acts is describing things that happened. We go beyond what is written when we take the description of some of these things and we make them into doctrines. What is the doctrine that comes from this?

The baptism of the Holy Spirit. Some churches, some denominations, some Christians believe that water baptism and baptism of the Holy Spirit are two separate things. Water baptism is not significant, and you're not a Christian until you've been baptized by the Holy Spirit.

Some Christians also believe that you are not filled with the Holy Spirit if you have not spoken in tongues. But that is false because you are indwelt by the Holy Spirit from the moment that you become a regenerate Christian.

It has nothing to do with tongues. It has nothing to do with baptism by the Holy Spirit or tongues of fire. So we have to be careful with some of these things. That's, again, that's descriptive. Let's look at two, verse 38, and we can argue about this in the questions.

Now, and Peter said to them, "'Repent, and each of you be baptized "'in the name of Jesus Christ "'for the forgiveness of your sins, "'and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.'". Now, this is still descriptive.

However, this is Peter giving a command to people that we will also find reiterated in other parts of Scripture. Baptism is a theme that recurs over and over and over. We see John the Baptist talk about it.

We see Jesus talk about it. We see Paul talk about it later. So while that is a descriptive, it is a descriptive of a prescriptive. We're getting all like mixed around now, right? So he's describing a prescriptive statement.

Once again, context. Was it to us? No, it was not. It's to the people that asked the question. But is it a concept that we see somewhere else, and it is a concept we see prescribed somewhere else?

It is.

That's what makes it different. Now, let's go a little bit further. Acts chapter two, verses 43 to 47. "'And fear came upon every soul, "'and many wonders and signs were taking place "'through the apostles.

"'And all those who had believed were together "'and had all things in common. "'And they began selling their property and possessions, "'and were dividing them up with all "'as anyone might have need.

"'And daily, devoting themselves with one accord "'in the temple and breaking bread from house to house, "'they were taking their meals together "'with gladness and sincerity of heart, "'praising God and having favor with all the people.