Dr. Bernard, about 60% of the Bible is written in narrative or what we might call story form.

And as you noted in your book, Understanding God's Word, that presents a challenge for modern readers,

especially those of us who live in the West, because we

would prefer, and I thought this before, why didn't God give us a systematic theology textbook

that just made everything, step by step showed us exactly every point that we needed to know

for all matters related to salvation and Christian living. However, you noted

in your book, you said it's a mistake of Western rationalism to assume that the didactic or

teaching portions are propositional statements of the epistles are more authoritative or more

theological than the examples of Acts.

So I think that raises a question, and that is, how do we determine what are the

descriptive portions of Scripture and what are the prescriptive portions of Scripture?

So for the common example that gets thrown out is, you know, in the Book of Acts

Chapter 1, the disciples cast lots to determine who's going to replace Judas, and yet in the

modern church, we don't cast lots to determine leaders.

But in Acts chapter 2, we put a lot of emphasis on the narrative there, and we say that

people should imitate the example of Acts chapter 1, our chapter 2 verses 1 through 4,

everybody should receive the Holy Spirit. How do we decide the difference there? Let me take a broad

view and then we'll focus on the specific question that you raised. But the broad view is this.

All the Bible is the Word of God. All the Bible is given for our instruction.

All the teachings, all the stories are given for our instruction. And 1 Corinthians chapter 10,

for example, and other verses say that. That doesn't mean all the examples are good examples.

Some are examples to avoid. But all of them are given for our teaching. So we can't discount any portion of scripture. We can't just write it off is irrelevant. But obviously we have to discern what it is teaching and what applies. But to your big question, you have to think of the scope of human history. Of course, today we're in a literary culture.

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