Different from the construction process of the traditional finite difference method, we derive a large class of high-accuracy methods for approximating derivatives. Since Taylor expansion is avoided, the requirement for function smoothness in the new methods is greatly reduced. We analyze the approximation errors of the proposed methods and compare their approximation effects. As a typical application, we use the proposed methods to solve elliptic, hyperbolic and parabolic problems numerically. For time-dependent problems, a class of new fully implicit difference schemes and the fourth-order Runge-Kutta method are both used for discretization. When using fully implicit difference schemes, the unconditional stability and convergence are proved for hyperbolic and parabolic problems with the periodic boundary conditions. A large number of numerical experiments are provided to demonstrate the theoretical results.