One way to think about Bible application is to approach it as an individual seeking to make individual change. There is nothing wrong with that approach, as it can yield much fruitful application in your life.
Yet when you understand what God says about humanity broadly, you can take your application to the next level. Have you met someone whose insight could penetrate to the bottom of a sticky situation? Have you had a mentor who had a knack for identifying just what you needed to hear in a timely moment?
Chances are, such wise folks weren’t gifted with supernatural revelation about your particular situation. They likely had a firm grasp on what God’s word says about humanity as a whole. Then they could draw on that framework to make relevant application to particular situations. In other words, they had much biblical and practical wisdom.
You can develop that wisdom, too.
General Application to the Human Heart
Sometimes, your Bible application grows stale because you’ve run out of specific ideas of what to do in your own life. One solution to such staleness is to strap on a wide-angle lens and consider how your passage applies generally to the human heart.
We can make generalizations about the human heart because God has told us how the human heart works, as well as what the human heart needs. The purpose of such generalizations is not to presume upon any situation nor to put ourselves or others in a box. The purpose is to give us a framework from which to draw when we need to figure out what to do in a given situation.
And if you lead others in Bible study, drawing application from anthropological generalizations doesn’t mean you should make judgments about people’s struggles without understanding them as individuals. It just means that God has given you categories of things to look for and be aware of, both as you seek to disciple your own heart and as you lead others in Bible study.
Sometimes the most insightful teachers and wisest counselors—whose words penetrate most personally—are not those who have a deep relationship with you or even know you particularly well. No, often they simply understand the human condition and can therefore predict how the main point of a text might hit close to home in their generation.
According to Psalm 119:49-56, you can trust God’s words in a way you can’t trust anyone else’s words. This means that knowing what God says about people is more valuable than knowing what people (even experts) say about people.
This is my comfort in my affliction,
Psalm 119:50-52
that your promise gives me life.
The insolent utterly deride me,
but I do not turn away from your law.
When I think of your rules from of old,
I take comfort, O Lord.
And according to Psalm 119:97-104, the student who loves the law surpasses his teachers. This means that God’s word will equip you with more profound application skills than any teacher can offer.
Your commandment makes me wiser than my enemies,
Psalm 119:98-100
for it is ever with me.
I have more understanding than all my teachers,
for your testimonies are my meditation.
I understand more than the aged,
for I keep your precepts.
Application to our Application
So what can we bank on, as we consider how a text applies to the human heart generally? What does God’s word say about what it’s like to be human? Let me give you eight points to guide your Bible study.
- Humans were created to be different from every other creature.
- Humans tried (and therefore still try) to replace God.
- We need God’s law to show how great our sin is, and to show how life in God’s world works best.
- We need God’s law to help us find Jesus.
- People tend to misuse God’s law in one of two ways.
- We have seen a perfect man, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.
- We live in the tension of overlapping ages.
- We long for a better world.
These eight ideas don’t capture an exhaustive doctrine of humanity. Nor are all eight present in every text. But they give you a framework of what to look for when the time comes to consider application.
These general principles can be fleshed out in great detail for the rest of our lives and the rest of history. We’ll always find new points of connection to the particular lives of particular men and women on Planet Earth.
But these are the sorts of things we ought to keep in mind so we can look out for them in our application. In the coming months, I’ll give each of these eight points its own post (linked above) to unpack it further and demonstrate how it assists with Bible application.
