In this video, Phylicia arms you with a five-step process—context, claim, condition, consequence, consistency—for accurately interpreting and applying Biblical promises in our lives.
Watch Now
Transcription
The misapplication of promises that God has given in scripture can be very ideologically, theologically, and personally dangerous. It actually affects people because if they misinterpret a promise, then they misinterpret God’s character. And it can cause them to be angry at God when in fact the problem was never God himself. The problem was misinterpretation. Hello, and welcome back to Verity podcast. I’m Phylicia Masonheimer, your host and the founder of Every Woman A Theologian. We are in the middle of our beginner believer series. And today, I’m answering a question that I know so many of us have asked in our Christian faith walk.
What promises of the Bible actually apply to me? We have so many beautiful promises from God in scripture. But if you’ve been a student of the Bible for any span of time, you’ve probably wondered, can I rightly apply certain promises I see in the bible to my life and my faith walk or are these relevant only to the people to whom they were spoken? That’s an excellent question because it requires that we establish a hermeneutical process which basically is a fancy term for a process for studying the Bible accurately and rightly. We want to treat the bible with respect and honor and, most of all, we want to understand it in the way it was intended to be understood. I don’t know about you, but if I wrote a letter and somebody read it 100 of years later and gave it an interpretation I didn’t intend, I’d be pretty bummed out about that. And we’re talking about the most important letter ever written. The compilation of historical books that point to the story of redemption from the creator of the world. And so when we’re reading these books of the Bible which were given progressively through history, God’s revelation of himself to real people in real cultures and times, we really should desire to understand the promises in their context before we apply them to our lives. What are some of the promises in scripture? Well, I’ll give you a couple examples from the Old Testament.
We have the promise that God is going to bless Abraham and through his descendants to bless the entire world. This is in Genesis 12. We have the promise that God would be the God of Israel in Leviticus 26. We have the promise that God’s love will never fail in 1st Chronicles 16. There are so many beautiful promises all throughout the Old Testament and into the new. In Romans 1, God promises salvation to anybody who believes in Jesus Christ. In Romans 8, God promises that all things will work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose. There are so many promises that we can claim or understand something about God from but when it comes to applying them to our lives, we do need to follow a hermeneutical process that will help us figure out the best way to apply certain promises.
Well, what happens when you apply something wrong? Is there a magical curse that happens? Does something affect you in a bad way? No, of course not. We all make mistakes in our biblical interpretation. We are flawed. We’re always learning and God is so gracious for that. However, it has been the misinterpretation of biblical promises that has led to some very dangerous false teaching and deceptive teaching. So let’s use an example. Some people have used a passage in Isaiah that says by his stripes, we are healed. To say that because of Jesus’ death on the cross which was prophesied in that Isaiah passage, we all can experience complete bodily healing on earth.
Some will even point to the resurrection of Lazarus as evidence of this. But what no one wants to say is that Lazarus eventually died again. Lazarus got old after his resurrection. He probably got frail and sick, and he died and received an eternal glorified body with Christ. So when we misinterpret this Isaiah passage to say that it’s God’s will that nobody on earth experienced sickness or pain, not only have we missed the interpretation of Isaiah but we’ve also misinterpreted and misapplied that promise in new testament context and even ignored a promise in Revelation where God says that when we enter eternity, we will be in a place where there is no more sickness, no more crying, no more pain and no more death. If God is promising that in eternity, it follows that the world we live in now has all of those things and we will experience them even while following Christ. What’s the point here? My point is that the misapplication of promises that God has given in scripture can be very ideologically, theologically and personally dangerous. It actually affects people and their walk with God.
Because if they misinterpret a promise then they misinterpret God’s character. And it can cause them to be angry at God or unnecessarily judgmental of God when in fact the problem was never God himself. The problem was misinterpretation. So I have my own process for interpreting these promises. I have 5 words that I use and a process that I follow for determining whether a promise in scripture is something that can apply to me. These five words are context, claim, condition, consequence and consistency. I’m going to define these for you and then we’re going to walk through them together. Context.
Ask the question what is going on in this passage? Claim. To whom is this promise directed? Is it available for me to claim for myself? Condition, is this a conditional promise or an unconditional promise? Consequence, does the promise affect only the person involved or does it also affect its descendants spiritually and physically? Consistency, does my use or application of this promise align with how God has historically behaved? Okay, those are the 5. And now we’re going to go a little bit deeper into these particular steps because you can follow them anytime you encounter a promise in the bible and I think it will really help you in determining whether or not you can apply it to your own situation. Let’s start with context. What is going on in this passage? There is an amazing book by J Scott Duvall where he teaches how to build what he calls a theological bridge in your interpretive journey through the Bible. So what you’re doing is you’re looking at the original text in its original setting and audience. You’re identifying that and then you’re building out a bridge based on the principle about God, who he is in that original context to our modern context. And along the way you look at the whole Bible and you ask does the principle about God in this passage apply eternally or did it just apply in this particular situation? And so I borrow a little bit from J Scott Duvall when I’m looking at the context of a passage.
And I’m asking who are the people involved? What is going on? What’s the situation? Who is God? How does he act? What do I see in this passage that’s surrounding this promise? We never want to just pull a passage out of its context. One of my friends, in ministry said, a text without a context is a con. So if you have a text and you remove it from the surrounding things, events and people, what you end up with is a potentially deceptive promise not because the Bible is wrong but because you’re using it wrong. And so when you’re looking at a promise in scripture, you want to ask yourself what do we see around this promise that will help us to understand it? One example is 2nd Chronicles 714. This passage says, if my people who are called by my name humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and I will forgive their sin and heal their land. This promise was framed in a very specific setting where God is speaking to Israel as a nation and saying that if they turn around and repent that their nation can be healed and restored. They would not be judged in the way that God predicted they would be judged back in Deuteronomy if they turned away from him. Remember, God was only judging them because they would have partnered with evil instead of partnering with him.
They would have chosen a pathway that had natural consequences of evil. God was saying turn away from that, repent, seek my face and I am quick to give you the goodness of my heart. Sometimes people in America at least take this passage and apply it to American politics saying that our land will be healed if we go through this process. And, certainly, God’s people who are called by his name should humble themselves, pray and seek his face, turn from their wicked ways, and know that God does hear us. However, we also see in scripture that there are certain nations who had some people who did turn from their wickedness and yet the nation was still judged. One of the examples of this would be Moab. We know that Ruth was a righteous woman. She was a Moabitess.
And yet she turned towards God and God redeemed her story and even brought her into the lineage of the Messiah. However, Moab is harshly judged in the minor prophets, the books of the Old Testament, not too many hundreds of years after Ruth’s life. So even if one person or a few people or a group of people repent and turn, sometimes the nation itself will still be judged for its sin. God is not the unfair one here. 2nd Chronicles 714 was written specifically to Israel. It was a promise conditional on promises previously given to Israel. So we can’t just take this promise out and say that it applies directly to America. But what we can do is look at this promise’s context and ask ourselves who is God in this passage and what principle about God do I learn? I learned that God is merciful in this passage and that he hears those who call on his name.
And that’s something that I can translate to my modern context. So think about the context. What’s going on in the passage? Who it’s to, what it’s about. This leads me to the second term, the second step in our process, claim. To whom is this promise directed? Is it available to me to claim? So the claim in 2nd Chronicles 714 is Israel. Israel has a claim on this promise. That’s who it is directed to. So we can’t just pluck that promise out and immediately apply it without the same context to America.
However, we can look for the principle and use that principle as something that we can apply and can implement in our modern context. So the claim is Israel’s. However, the principle is something that I can say, okay, I can pray for my nation. I can be involved. I can see God’s face. And I can do these things knowing God will hear me because he is merciful. The 3rd step is condition. Is this a conditional or unconditional promise? This is something that many people don’t realize.
Not every promise in scripture is unconditional. God is unconditionally loving. He always offers his salvation to anyone who will call upon his name. But some of the promises he gave had conditions in scripture because Israel was to steward a land they were given so that the land would be a blessing to all the nations. Eventually, we know that the Messiah came in Jesus Christ and he was that blessing of the nations born in the physical Israel. Previously, Israel was told that if they were to sin against God through idolatry and injustice to the poor and the needy, corrupting the temple and the tabernacle, there would be consequences for their sin. And when they continued in this refusing to listen to the calls to repentance, God allowed them the natural consequence of their partnership with evil. It was a conditional promise.
They had a promise to keep that land and steward it for God and for the future Abraham’s descendants in the whole world if they honored God’s way of justice and love and mercy, but they didn’t do it. And that is why they received the consequence they did in the Assyrian and Babylonian deportations. So you have to ask is this a conditional promise or an unconditional promise? We know that there was a condition on Israel keeping the land and remaining in the land, but we also know there was an unconditional promise back in Genesis 3 and in Genesis 12. God unconditionally promised that he would bring out of Eve’s line a snake crusher who would redeem the world. He unconditionally promised to Abraham that he would bring someone out of his line that didn’t exist yet who would bless all generations. So there are certain promises that we know are unconditional. They’re never changing. They are based completely on the unchanging nature of God himself.
Others are based on the actions of humans. And in those conditional promises, we have to discern whether or not that applies to us or if it applied to the person it was spoken to. And that’s where context and claim become important as well. So we’ve talked about context, claim, and condition. The 4th step and term is consequence. Does the promise affect only the person involved or their descendants? And that effect might be spiritual or physical. So sometimes, God would make a promise specific to one person. So we know that Abraham received a very specific promise.
You know, Noah received a very specific promise from God. David received a specific promise from God. And when we look at these promises, we have to ask, is this something we can apply to ourselves or was that David’s promise? So, for instance, David was told that he would have a king on the throne of David in the house of Judah forever. Well, we know that there is not a reigning king who is descended from David on the physical throne of Israel today. Was God not true to his promise? No. God gave a promise to David. It was a personal promise to David, and he fulfilled it spiritually through Jesus who was a descendant of David in his human fleshly line. So this promise affected David but it also affected all the spiritual descendants of David who by faith put their allegiance in God the Father through Jesus Christ and are redeemed and grafted into the promise of the Messiah.
So this promise is involving one person but also involving these spiritual descendants. And another example in certain, perspectives on end times theology, you’ll see some people who would say that the physical nation of Israel still receives a physical promise of the land of Israel for the Jewish people. So this was an eternal promise. It was not a temporary promise or a promise that only, existed as long as Israel was obedient but that it is an eternal promise that the land of Israel will now return to the physical government country of Israel. So in this viewpoint, you would say the promise is not just for David or for Abraham but it is for the physical descendants, not just the spiritual descendants but the physical descendants of them as well. So you will have some different perspectives on how promises play out. But ultimately the biggest question you have to ask is who is the primary target of this promise? Is it the nation of Israel? Is it Abraham? Is it David? Is it Noah? Is it Samuel? Who is the target of this promise and who is God in this passage? How does the principle about God transcend time and place? The last step is consistency, And this one’s really important. Does my use or application of this promise align with how God has historically acted? Very important.
If we are applying a biblical promise in a way that is inconsistent with God’s character, we have a very bad situation on our hands because now suddenly we have a promise that we are using in a way that is not how God would have used it before. God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. And that means that any promise that he makes must be applied in the same way yesterday, today, and forever. So we can’t take a promise like by his stripes you are healed and change that promise to mean something we want it to mean. We can’t take a promise like binding and loosing in heaven, which is from Matthew, and say, well, this means that whatever I command verbally as a Christian, I can make it come into being which is just a different form of manifestation. Binding and loosing was related to church discipline in the context of Matthew saying that if somebody is is walking outside the fold, they’re not walking in obedience to God, they are living in open unrepentant sin that we can say we are basically binding you to, your choices or loosing you, releasing you from the church setting until you repent and you return. So this the verse, the promise has to be applied in a way that is consistent with God’s character across both the old and the new testaments. God has not changed.
Jesus Christ is the old testament God incarnate. He’s not a different God. He’s not a changed God. He is not somebody who has completely new or, different character from old testament God. They are 1 and the same. They are 1 God, 3 persons, father, son and spirit. And so when we apply God’s promises, we must make sure that the way we apply it is consistent with who God is in the whole bible. So how do you know that you’re doing that? Well, you need to know your bible, right? You need to know especially the old testament because many people today are too scared or intimidated, sometimes too lazy, sometimes too tired to prioritize reading the parts of the bible that seem not as quickly applicable.
But they are so important for you to understand because you can’t apply the other parts of the bible if you don’t understand the old testament. You can’t rightly apply them if you’re going to ignore this entire chunk of the bible that Jesus quoted and Jesus fulfilled. We must spend time in the old testament. And if that’s you and you wanna know how to understand the old testament, how to understand the new testament, how to apply these promises for yourself, I would love it if you would join us for Bible in the year club in 2025. This year we’re reading through the entire Bible chronologically as we always do but with an explicit focus on the promises of God in scripture. You will get a reading plan with 6 readings a week. You’ll get some extra resources to dive in and an entire community to read with you for only $15 a month. So we’re going to be doing this starting January 6th and we would love to have you with us.
This is our 3rd year running this program. It’s our 1st year doing the promises of God. And if you are ready to understand the Bible for yourself, we would love to have you join us. If that sounds like something you’d like to check out, head to phyliciamasonheimer.com/bibleinyear and you can check it out and see everything that we are offering this year in the program and even check out a little glimpse of the first part of the course, which is where we teach you how to study the Bible, how to schedule in those deep study days, how to actually succeed at a Bible reading plan and not give up, and most of all to release perfectionism and the all or nothing mindset. We know that you will benefit from spending 9 whole months in 2025 in the Old Testament and the final 3 months in the New because you’ll come away knowing how to apply the promises of God to your life with confidence and know how the Bible draws us to intimacy with God. I hope this episode was helpful to you. I’m really hopeful to be studying the Bible with you next year. So please join us phyliciaamasonheimer.com/bibleinyear, and we cannot wait to dive deep in 2025.