All right, Greg, let's get right into this with a question from Todd.

Yes, ma'am.

I've heard it said often that some things described in scripture are descriptive, not prescriptive, like murder or polygamy.

Should we view the believers despair portrayed in Psalms or Job descriptively, prescriptively, or is there some middle way we should look at it?

Well, just to distinguish between these two words, description is simply that,

description. Prescription is not telling us what is description, but what ought to be. So when we

read about polygamy in the Bible, some people say, well, there's polygamy in the

Bible. Yeah, but it's just describing what people do. It's not saying we ought to do that, all right?

It's simply describing it. Now, that's the distinction between the words. Then as an interpretive

task, we have to decide, is this prescriptive or merely descriptive? And that depends on the passage. So, I wonder if you, having clarified those two terms, reread the challenge or the question. Is there a third way kind of thing?

Should we view the believers' despair

portrayed in Psalms or Job descriptively, descriptively, or is there some middle way we should look at it?

Well, no. Yeah, it is merely describing believers despair, as far as I can tell. It is not prescribing it. It isn't saying you ought to despair. That's what

prescription is. This is what you ought to do. That's also what the word normative means. It means

it's ought to be the case, not necessarily that it is, characteristically, but the normative

guidelines of what we ought to do, the prescriptive ones.

When we read in Job and Psalms and the despair of those people, we just get a clear human perspective of the struggle of life, even when you know God.

They're describing what life is like. It isn't saying this is what life ought to be like.

It's telling us what life is like and how people deal with those kinds of difficulties,

whether it's Jover, the psalmist. Sometimes what we learn from the psalmist is we can identify with the same things that the

psalmist is going through.

So in the case of David in Psalm 13 in particular, how long the Lord, will you reject

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