The Difference Between Narrative and Normative Passages

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Here's your host with today's lesson, Pastor Keith Foskey.

Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.

My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist.

Today we're going to begin a chapter by chapter study of the Book of Acts.

The Book of Acts is a very important, unique book in the New Testament.

It is a historical book and it actually is a part two, if you will, because it was written by the same author as the Gospel of Luke.

So if we think about the Gospel of Luke as part one of Luke's narrative, then we can think of Acts as part two of Luke's narrative, a continuation of the narrative that Luke gives to us.

And of course we know who Luke was.

Luke was an associate of the Apostle Paul.

He traveled with him on missionary journeys.

He was a doctor.

He was a well-educated man and he was a historian as well as being a physician.

And we see this shown many times in his great attention to detail, both in the writing of his Gospel and in the writing of the Book of Acts.

A few years ago, I preached through Acts.

I did an exposition of the whole book.

It took several years to go through the whole book.

And it was one of the most encouraging things that I have done in my years as a pastor, just being able to go through the history of the early church.

So I'm encouraged now to be able to read with you every day, a chapter at a time, and remind myself of the things that I learned through the Book of Acts and through that study.

And if you want to go deeper, I want to encourage you, go to our Sermon Audio page, find the series that I taught on the Book of Acts, and use that to dive deeper into these daily Bible studies.

Coffee with a Calvinist is intended to only be a morsel, just a little bit of Bible for you every morning when you're having your morning coffee.

This is not intended to be an entire meal.

This is only intended to be, as it were, like an hors d'oeuvre.

And so if you're interested in diving deeper into a study of the Book of Acts, I want to encourage you to go.

You can either go to sgfcjax.org, our church website, or you can go to Sermon Audio and look up my name, Keith Flosky, or our church, Sovereign Grace Family Church, and you can find under the series, a series on the Book of Acts.

So what I want to talk about today, well Acts chapter 1, we see the ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ, we see an important narrative there, and this again completes the narrative of the Gospel of Luke.

The Gospel of Luke ends with the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the Book of Acts begins with the ascension into heaven of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And so again, if you read the two together, they read like a part 1 and a part 2.

We have the mission and ministry of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, and then we have the mission and ministry of the church in the Book of Acts.

Now here's a couple things I want to mention when you're studying through Acts to kind of help you out.

The first thing to remember when you're studying the Book of Acts, when you're reading through, is to remember that the Book of Acts is written in the form that we would call the narrative.

The Book of Acts is a history book.

It's telling a story.

So not everything in the Book of Acts is intended to be doctrinal and didactic.

It's telling us what happened, not necessarily telling us what should be or what would always be.

One of the things that I have noticed in historic Christianity is that a lot of times when people have a misunderstanding of theology or have gone askew in their theology, it is because they see something happening in the Book of Acts and they assume that that is supposed to be normative for all time.

But that is not how we are to interpret narrative.

Narrative does not mean normative.

Let me say that again.

Narrative does not always mean normative.

So for instance, a lot of people assume that because the early church spoke in tongues, that the gift of tongues was supposed to be something that was for all times.

And yet we know that there are great debates about that.

And if you're interested in seeing what I've had to say on the subject, you can look up my lessons, not only in the Book of Acts, but in the Book of 1 Corinthians, where I talk about what I believe about the gift of tongues and how I believe it has been both misunderstood and misused in many modern churches.

And oftentimes they appeal, well, this is what happened in Acts.

But in reality, they're not copying what happened in Acts, because as we're going to see when we get to chapter 2, what happened in Acts was that the people of God, when they were given the gift of languages, which is what the word tongues means, they weren't speaking in a nonsensical, ecstatic utterance.

They were speaking in languages that people could understand.

Languages that they themselves had not studied, but languages that could be used to demonstrate that the gospel was now going to every tribe, tongue, people, and nation.

So again, narrative does not always mean normative.

Another thing that we see in the Book of Acts is the early church selling all of their property and collecting that money and using it within the church.

But some people say, well, was that an early form of communism? And does that mean that churches should be communism? First of all, it's not an early form of communism.

That's an absolute misreading of the text, because communism is not voluntary.

It is mandated by the state.

And one of the things that we see in the Book of Acts particularly is that all of the giving was voluntary.

When Ananias and Sapphira held back their money from the church, the apostle Peter says, it was yours to do with what you would, meaning that it wasn't something that was demanded.

It was something that was voluntary.

And so that's a big distinction.

But again, is it that all Christians of all time are never supposed to own property? I don't believe that that's so, and I don't believe that that's how we should read the Book of Acts.

Again, narrative does not always mean normative.

So my encouragement to you today is, as we begin this very important study of the Book of Acts, is to don't be afraid, one, to dive deeper, go look further.

If you get to a passage that is causing you some consternation, look up the sermons that have been preached on it, spend more time with it, dive into the Word, and don't be satisfied just with a very superficial and simple understanding.

But also remember, too, that everything that is narrative is not always intended to be normative.

A story doesn't always become something that's doctrinal.

When we want to find the doctrine of the New Testament, the teaching, the clear didactic teachings, that's what the epistles do.

You see, the Gospels and Acts give us the actions of Jesus and the apostles.

The epistles of Paul and Peter and John interpret those actions.

And so if there ever is a time when we see a conflict with maybe how we understand something in the Book of Acts and how we understand something elsewhere, we need to understand that the Book of Acts is narrative and needs to be interpreted as we would interpret any narrative.

Just because it says something happened doesn't mean that's the prescription.

To give you a good example, and this is what I'll close with today, throughout the Old Testament we see many examples of polygamy, men who had multiple wives.

But we know that that was not the prescription.

God's prescription from the very beginning was one man, one woman, no one else, that those two would come together and they would form a unit for life.

So it's one man, one woman for life.

That is the plan for marriage.

Now was that plan misused? Was that plan perverted by polygamy? Absolutely.

And some of the great heroes of the faith ended up being polygamists because they perverted that simple principle that God gave us for marriage, one man, one woman for life.

And so where do we go to find our understanding of marriage? Is it to the narratives of David who had multiple wives or Solomon who had many, many multiple wives? Is that where we go to find our doctrine? No.

We read those stories.

We understand that those stories happen within a context.

We understand that those are narrative, not normative.

And we go to the didactic passages, the clear didactic passages.

In fact, it's what I'm going to be preaching this Sunday.

Genesis 2.24, therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and shall cleave unto his wife and the two shall become one flesh.

The two shall become one flesh.

That's the doctrine of marriage.

That's the normative expression of marriage.

And it is not changed or perverted by a narrative which would explain something different that happened in history.

So again, when we read the book of Acts, understand that we're reading history.

And there is a lot to learn.

There's a lot for us to gain from this study of Acts.

But always comparing everything we learn with the rest of Scripture.

Remember, the Scripture is the best interpreter of the Scripture.

The Scripture interprets itself.

So let us be diligent.

Let us be noble Bereans, always going to the Scripture to see if what we're reading in one place agrees with the whole.

If our understanding of it agrees with the whole.

Thank you for watching today.

I hope that this has been an encouragement to you and I look forward to over the next several weeks going through the book of Acts together.

May God bless you.

My name's Keith Foskey and I've been your Calvinist.

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