Untitled Sermon (6)

Application

Learning Objectives

After this section, you should be able to:

• Explain why it’s necessary to determine what’s universal and what’s particular as a step in Bible interpretation

• Defend the necessity of application as the goal of Bible study

“So What?”

The third step of Bible study is application. This is asking the very important question, “So what?”

Consider the Scope and Limitations

One of the things that you have to watch in thinking about application is, actually determining the scope of a passage—

whether it actually applies to the situation you’re thinking about in life that it connects to.

Generalizing on Biblical Principles

When we’re dealing with things like the attributes of God and His character and those kinds of things, things that kind of remain unchanging—that’s the way God is,

that kind of thing; here’s a virtue that God honors, or here’s a sin that God condemns—

the application at that level is really pretty straightforward, in terms of who we are to be.

Proper Application of Biblical Particulars

But the more difficult kinds of applications deal with what we are to do, how we’re supposed to respond to certain situations.

So it’s important to consider the scope of a passage before you move to apply it, not simply to assume that it’s been that way in the past, and it’s in the Bible, so it’s that way forever.

Example: Old Testament Sacrificial Law

A great example of this is the idea of sacrifices.

We don’t go to church today and bring our lambs for sacrifice, even though there are all kinds of laws in the ot about the various kinds of sacrifices and states of cleanness and uncleanness that were a part of ot religion and ot life.

Because the nt altered the Law by seeing Jesus as the fulfillment of the Law and bringing an end to the role of the 613 commandments of the Torah,

we don’t bring sacrifices to church anymore.

Jesus Christ is our sacrifice.

When we’re thinking about application, particularly of ot passages and the kinds of events that happened in the ot, we’ve got to be careful not to generalize too much.

We always have to ask the question, “Does the passage that we have in mind have any limitation in terms of how we should think about what it addresses and the way it applies?”

Resources for Application

Now there are good resources that oftentimes will help with these questions, resources like the commentaries that I mentioned to you earlier.

Commentaries are valuable not only because they often have us think through the meaning of a text, but particularly commentaries that are aimed at pastors and with a pastoral emphasis in them—those commentaries are also wrestling with, how does this text apply?

What should be taught or preached from the passage to people about what’s going on in the text? These books will oftentimes engage on the level of, this is what the application is, or this is how the application works, this is what we should be thinking about—that kind of thing. It will wrestle with the question of limitations when it comes to application.

Necessity of Application

Now another important thing to say about application is this:

Without application, your Bible study is not complete.

The goal of opening the Scripture and reading it and studying it is not merely to collect information for your head. The goal of interacting with the Bible and doing Bible study and engaging in Bible study is to let God go to work in forming you as a person, in changing the way you think, in transforming who you are, in developing and helping you grow spiritually.

All those things assume that when you’re done working with a passage and reflecting on the Bible, that the Bible is encouraging you and pushing you to think about how you live, how you apply the text, how you approach life.

So application is a very essential feature of Bible study. You’ll never take an exam on it in a classroom, but it is the most important feature of graduating from Bible study, on any given day, that you can bring to your study of the Bible