What a Text Can and Cannot Mean
Let me give you an interpretive principle:
A text may mean more than the original human author fully understood, but it cannot mean less than what he actually said and intended.
Read that again and think about it.
Do you agree?
This type of hermeneutic—a theory or method of Bible interpretation—gives room for divine authorship, typology, progressive revelation, and Christological fulfillment. But it does not give us permission to let later theology erase the original meaning of the promise.
Isaiah 7 and Fuller Fulfillment
Let me give a good example: Isaiah 7 perfectly illustrates this principle. It is a passage most of you are probably familiar with, but the original context matters.
The year is around 734–733 BC. Ahaz, king of Judah, is terrified because Syria and northern Israel have formed an alliance against him. Jerusalem itself appears to be in danger.
Isaiah describes the fear this way:
“The heart of Ahaz and the heart of his people shook as the trees of the forest shake before the wind.”
Isaiah 7:2
So God sends Isaiah to Ahaz with a message: do not be afraid. These two kings will not succeed.
Then comes the prophecy:
“Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.”
Isaiah 7:14
For Ahaz, this was not originally a Christmas-card verse. It was a sign given in the middle of a national—and personal—crisis. The point was that before this child reached a certain age, the two kingdoms threatening Judah would be broken.
The Hebrew word almah can refer to a young woman of marriageable age and does not always carry the full technical force of the English word “virgin.” That is why some translations say “young woman.” In its original setting, the prophecy functioned as a real sign to Ahaz in his own historical crisis. Otherwise, what good is it?
But Matthew later sees that promise reaching its greater fulfillment in the virgin birth of Christ.
So the promise meant more than Ahaz understood.
But it did not mean less.
The original sign still had real meaning in Isaiah’s own day. The fuller fulfillment in Christ did not cancel the earlier meaning; it expanded it. Judah was delivered exactly as the prophecy said. God was faithful to his promise.
The Central Text
But I have not even gotten to the central text yet.
Do any of you know what all of this is preparing for?
You probably do.
The promises to Abraham are given in multiple passages—Genesis 12, 15, 17, and 21—but nothing is more important for this discussion than Genesis 15. There God tells Abraham that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars. Abraham believes God, and it is counted to him as righteousness. Then God makes a covenant with him in a dramatic and terrifying scene: animals are cut in pieces, Abraham falls into a deep sleep, and God alone passes between the pieces.
That matters.
Cutting a Covenant
This is where the language of “cutting a covenant” comes from. A covenant was not merely signed; it was illustrated dramatically. The animals were cut, and the parties passed between the pieces as a promise to each other. The symbolism was terrifyingly clear: “May this happen to me if I break this covenant.”
In the world of ancient covenant-making, especially in what we often call suzerain-vassal treaty patterns—a big seminary phrase—covenants would often involve obligations, conditions, and, most importantly, consequences. The greater king and the lesser servant were bound in a relationship of loyalty and accountability.
But Genesis 15 is striking because Abraham does not pass between the animals.
God alone does.
Abraham is asleep—think of Adam’s condition while Eve was made, and you will see the theme. God, all by his lonesome, moves through the pieces, pictured by the smoking fire pot and flaming torch. In other words, God takes the covenant burden completely upon himself, conditioned upon his own reputation. God binds himself to the promise.
This is not Abraham saying, “I will make this happen.”
It is God saying, “I will make this happen.”
An Everlasting Possession
That is why this promise is so important. The covenant rests finally on God’s faithfulness, not Abraham’s performance. And then, in Genesis 17, the land promise is described as an “everlasting possession.”
Not temporary.
Not merely symbolic.
Not a placeholder that simply evaporates later.
Everlasting.
So when people, such as myself, deeply believe ethnic Israel still has a future—and yes, I know the debate involves more than ethnicity, but that is the central issue here—we are not saying the church has no share in the blessings of Abraham. We are not saying Gentiles are outsiders to the covenant blessing. We are not even denying that all who are in Christ belong to the people of God.
We fully agree that those who belong to Christ are “Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise” (Galatians 3:29). Do you think we have yet to read that Scripture?
We are simply saying God will fulfill the promise as Abraham understood it, because God himself swore to do it.
Israel’s Partial Hardening
Paul says Israel has experienced a partial hardening “until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in,” and that the natural branches can be grafted back into their own olive tree (Romans 11).
Why?
Because God is faithful to the promise he made to Abraham.
Here is another principle I think you will agree with: if God is not faithful to the promise made to Abraham as Abraham heard it, then all the promises of God are in jeopardy. God works through language as we understand it. He knows what his words communicate. He knows how his promises are heard.
Sensus Plenior
Here is your second three-dollar word:
Sensus plenior — “fuller sense.”
A meaning intended by God in Scripture that may go beyond what the original human author or audience fully grasped, but does not contradict, erase, or reduce the meaning they actually heard.
It’s in Latin, so you know the theology is flexing.
You may have heard this idea described as “double fulfillment” or “near-far prophecy.” The point is simple: yes, promises can have a deeper fulfillment than the original hearer grasped. But deeper fulfillment cannot mean the original promise suddenly disappears.
The Literal Sense as the Foundation
When people confess the “literal” interpretation of Scripture, this is often what they mean. By literal, I do not mean literalism or letterism, as if Scripture never uses poetry, metaphor, symbolism, typology, or prophetic imagery. I mean the literal sense: the authorial, textual meaning of the passage in its own context.
Even the broader history of Christian interpretation recognized this. The classic four senses of Scripture were:
- Literal — The meaning of the text according to the words, grammar, context, and authorial intent.
- Allegorical — The meaning that points beyond the text to Christ, the gospel, or spiritual realities fulfilled in Christ.
- Moral or Tropological — The meaning that teaches how we should live, obey, repent, love, and pursue holiness.
- Anagogical — The meaning that points forward to final things: heaven, resurrection, judgment, glory, and the consummation of God’s kingdom.
The tradition even had a memory poem:
Littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria,
Moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia.
Loosely rendered into English:
The letter shows us what God and our fathers did;
The allegory shows us where our faith is hid;
The moral meaning gives us rules of daily life;
The anagogy shows us where we end our strife.
Origen has only the first three in his three-fold sense of Scripture in the third century. But the literal sense was the foundation.
This is exactly the kind of thing we are working through together in Through the Church Fathers. We are reading the sources themselves, not just talking about them secondhand.
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Through the Church Fathers in a Year
Thomas Aquinas said it this way:
“Hence in Holy Writ, no confusion results, for all the senses are founded on one—the literal—from which alone can any argument be drawn, and not from those intended in allegory.”
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part 1, Question 1, Article 10, Reply to Objection 1.
My point is simple: the best of the Christian interpretive tradition has insisted that the fuller meaning must be rooted in the literal sense, not detached from it.
Again: Scripture can mean more than the original hearer grasped.
But it cannot mean less.
The Camaro Illustration
If God were to “spiritualize” Israel to the point that ethnic Israel no longer has a future, it would be like me telling my son, “When you turn 18, I am going to give you a 1969 Camaro SS,” knowing exactly what he would understand by that.
Then, when the day comes, I give him a bicycle named “Camaro” and say, “Actually, this is better. You get transportation and exercise. You may not see it now, but you’ll thank me later.”
That would not be fulfillment.
That would be a bait and switch.
So yes, promises can have deeper fulfillment than the original hearer grasped. But deeper fulfillment cannot mean the original promise quietly disappears.
Here is the picture AI created for this:
I love it!
Why This Hope Matters
This is why dispensationalists, and many others who see 1948 as at least a possible beginning of fulfillment, get excited. Of course we do. We may be wrong about the timing. We may be wrong about how much of this present moment fits into prophecy. We should say that carefully. But if Paul himself looked forward to the future restoration of Israel, then we should not treat that hope as an embarrassment.
We should hope for the restoration of Israel in and with the people of God, not as a denial of the church, but as a testimony that God keeps his promises. Whatever nomenclature your position takes—dispensational, progressive dispensational, historic premillennial, or something else—my contention is that if you begin with a historical-grammatical approach, or what I prefer to call authorial intent, you should at least be able to say this: ethnic Israel still has a future, and we should long for that restoration with great anticipation.
That is not giving up on the world.
It is looking for the consummation of our hope.
