One question settles more misreadings of Scripture than any other: is this passage telling me to do something, or telling me that something happened? A command asks for obedience. A report asks to be understood. Confuse the two and you can end up imitating what the Bible condemns, or brushing aside what it plainly requires. This guide trains that habit. It also adds two supporting checks, your own bias and the passage’s setting, because the habit works best when those keep it honest.
The material comes from the Jude 3 Project curriculum Courageous Conversations, specifically its lesson Can We Trust the Bible? You can work through the guide alone in about an hour with a Bible and a pen, or use it for a single group session. Each section asks you to look closely at what a text says, who it addresses and what kind of writing it is before you decide what it asks of you.
Begin with what you already assume
Before reading any further, write down three Bible passages you know well. If none come to mind, use these: Micah 6:8, the story of David and Goliath in 1 Samuel 17, and the story of Tamar in 2 Samuel 13. Beside each one, write a C if you think it tells readers what to do, or an R if you think it reports what happened. Then write one sentence explaining your choice.
Keep that page. You will come back to it at the end. If you are leading a group, give everyone two quiet minutes for this before anyone speaks. People tend to adopt the first confident answer they hear, and the goal here is to surface the assumptions each person actually brings.
Two kinds of text
The lesson Can We Trust the Bible? lists five practices for reading Scripture well, and the fourth is to identify prescriptive and descriptive texts. A prescriptive text gives a principle or command for people to follow. A descriptive text records historical events, settings and cultures. Its examples are pointed. Second Samuel 13 records the rape of Tamar, and 1 Samuel 17 records David killing Goliath. Of those two stories, Courageous Conversations says, “They do not encourage rape or instruct us to kill a giant with a rock.”
The example is blunt, but it shows how much is at stake. Much of the Bible is narrative, and much of that narrative records people at their worst: kings, priests, patriarchs and disciples all behave badly. If every recorded action were a model to copy, the Bible would contradict itself on every page and teach things it explicitly condemns. The curriculum names the payoff directly: “Determining if a text is descriptive versus prescriptive keeps us from misapplying passages and attempting to emulate everything we read.”
The opposite error deserves the same attention. Some readers file every uncomfortable command under history, as though calling something ancient meant it no longer applied. The distinction protects against both mistakes, but only if you let the text tell you which kind it is, rather than deciding beforehand which kind you would prefer.
Reading a command in its setting: Micah 6
Read Micah 6:1-8 slowly before focusing on the final verse. Here is the verse the curriculum uses as its example of a prescriptive text, in the KJV:
He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?
Start with the small words. “Shewed” is an older spelling of “showed.” The word “require” is the language of obligation. The verse states what God asks of the person addressed. It does not record what someone happened to do. Many modern translations render “love mercy” as “love kindness,” which is the wording the curriculum quotes. Both point toward faithful, generous love shown to others.
The surrounding verses sharpen the command. In verses 6-7 a worshipper asks what would be enough to bring before the LORD: burnt offerings, thousands of rams, rivers of oil, even a firstborn child. Verse 8 answers that question. The answer turns away from escalating religious display and toward justice, mercy and humility before God. Read without that context, Micah 6:8 sounds like a pleasant summary of good values. Read in context, it corrects a worshipper who thought God could be bought.
Notice the order of steps. First comes what the verse meant for Israel, the people Micah addressed. Only after that comes what it asks of a reader today. Here the move from one to the other is short, because the verse states what “is good” and what the LORD requires. Still, it remains a second step and should be taken deliberately.
Reading a report without flattening it: 2 Samuel 13
Facilitators should know that this chapter describes sexual violence within a family. Read it ahead of the group, tell participants what it contains before you begin, and make clear that no one needs to share anything personal. If the reading brings up abuse in someone’s own life, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available at 1-800-799-7233.
Second Samuel 13 contains no command to obey. It is a report. But a report is not morally neutral. Look at how the narrator lets the evil register as evil. Tamar protests that “no such thing ought to be done in Israel” (2 Samuel 13:12), which names Amnon’s act as a violation before he commits it. Later the chapter records that David was very angry when he heard (13:21), yet it gives no account of him doing anything about it. Absalom’s hatred grows over the following two years and ends in murder. The story judges what happens through its details and its consequences, without ever stopping to issue a verdict.
This is the second lesson the distinction teaches. “Descriptive” does not mean “approved,” and it does not mean “silent.” When you read a narrative, ask how the storyteller signals judgment: through a character’s protest, through what follows from an act, through what a responsible person fails to do. Calling a text descriptive is where interpretation begins, not where it ends.
The hard case: a command that is also a concession
Some passages are not settled by the two labels alone. Read Matthew 19:3-9. The Pharisees ask whether a man may put away his wife for every cause. They point to Moses, who commanded a certificate of divorce. Jesus answers:
He saith unto them, Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so.
In this verse, “suffered” means “permitted.” Jesus’ reply is striking. The instruction Moses gave (see Deuteronomy 24:1-4) is legal text, a prescription in form. Jesus does not deny that it was given. He reads it as a permission that regulated a broken situation, and he measures it against God’s intention “from the beginning,” which he has already drawn from Genesis in Matthew 19:4-5. A text can be a command in grammar while functioning as a limit placed on harm, not as a portrait of God’s ideal.
Courageous Conversations builds on this reasoning by drawing on New Testament scholar Esau McCaulley. In the lesson’s summary of his approach, readers of hard Old Testament passages should ask what a passage is for: whether it shows what God wanted his people to be, or works to limit the damage of a broken world. The curriculum presents this question as a tool for interpretation, not as an automatic answer. You still have to test it against the passage in front of you. Faithful Christians also differ on how the Old Testament law as a whole applies to believers today, and this guide does not settle that broader question. What Matthew 19 does show clearly is that Jesus himself distinguished between what the law allowed and what God intended.
Where the habit needs help
The strongest objection to everything above is a fair one. The lesson notes that people used passages such as Genesis 9:24, Colossians 3:22 and Philemon to defend chattel slavery. Genesis 9 is a narrative, and misusing it as a racial decree is a clear case of treating a report as a mandate. Colossians 3:22, however, is phrased as an instruction. Labeling it prescriptive does not make the difficulty go away.
That is why the habit cannot work alone. Calling a text a command still leaves other questions open. Who is being addressed? In what setting? Does the passage present God’s design, or does it regulate a situation that falls short of that design? The two supporting checks matter here.
The first check is bias. The curriculum’s first practice is to recognize your humanity, and it says plainly, “We must be aware of our cultural and biographical influences and work diligently to ensure they don’t dominate our interpretation of the text.” This cuts in both directions. Someone who has seen a verse used as a weapon may read harshly where the text is tender. Someone who has always been comfortable with a reading may never notice whom it harms.
The second check is context. The curriculum compares the reader to a news reporter who takes viewers back to the scene so they can understand what happened. Social, cultural and historical background are not decorations added to the text. They are how you learn what a sentence was doing when it was first written.
Behind both checks stands the lesson’s larger claim about where error lives. Courageous Conversations puts it this way: “any misinterpretation of the Bible is a user error and not an error in the Bible itself.” That sentence expresses trust in Scripture, and it also places responsibility on the reader. It does not promise that every hard passage has a quick answer. It asks you to suspect your own reading first and to keep working until the passage is understood on its own terms.
Finally, the curriculum’s fifth practice is to interpret in community: with Christians across history, commentaries and a local church. Readers working alone are the ones most likely to mistake their own assumptions for what the text says.
A practice: the four-line reading
Choose one passage that troubles you or that you have heard used carelessly. If nothing comes to mind, use 1 Samuel 17 or Matthew 19:3-9. Then do the following:
- Read the passage along with at least five verses before and after it. Mark where the larger scene or argument starts and stops.
- On line one, write who is speaking and to whom.
- On line two, name the kind of text: a report of events, a command, a permission, a poem, a prayer, a prophetic warning.
- On line three, write what the surrounding passage does with it. Does the narrator signal judgment? Does a later passage of Scripture comment on it, as Jesus comments on Moses in Matthew 19?
- On line four, write what the passage asks of a reader today, if anything. Then add one fact about your own background that might push you toward a particular reading.
End by asking the question from the lesson’s weekly challenge: “What purpose does this serve in the Bible’s story?”
In a group, have people work in pairs and swap their four lines. Before anyone disagrees, each person should restate the partner’s reading in a way the partner accepts as fair. Only after that should they discuss which reading accounts for more of the surrounding passage.
Questions for discussion
- Look back at the C and R marks you made at the start. Did any of them change? What in the text changed your mind?
- In 2 Samuel 13, which details show the storyteller’s judgment without stating a command? What would be lost if the chapter left those details out?
- In Matthew 19, the Pharisees cite a command and Jesus calls it a permission. What in his answer allows him to make that distinction? Where should a reader be cautious about making the same move with other laws?
- The lesson asks: “If different interpretations are possible for certain passages, how do we know when an interpretation is correct?” Which of the steps in the four-line reading helped you most with that question, and which left it unresolved?
- What in your background makes you quick to call a text a command, or quick to call it just history?
- Who reads Scripture with you closely enough to tell you when your reading has gone wrong? If no one does, what would it take to change that?
Something to carry
The next time a passage unsettles you, hold off on deciding whether you can trust it. Ask first whether you have let it tell you what kind of text it is. A story about a crime, a law that limits harm and a command about justice ask different things of a reader. Much of reading the Bible honestly comes down to noticing which one you are holding.