As I sit here, CSI is going in the other room; it’s an old episode, of course, but apparently someone was interested in watching it. I didn’t like the episode well enough the first time around to want to watch it again, so I’m in here tapping the keys. It did spark a thought, though: the preacher’s job in studying Scripture (and anyone’s, really) is much the same as that of a criminalist or forensic scientist: follow the evidence, wherever it leads. When we run into problems—as individuals, as churches, as denominations—is usually when we set the evidence aside in favor of what we want to believe, or start allowing our preferred conclusions to distort our interpretation of the evidence. As Christians, we need to let Scripture speak for itself, to seek to understand it on its own terms, to the best of our ability; we need to allow it to tell us things that we don’t want to hear, to challenge our comfortable assumptions and stretch our cozy faith. We need to allow God to speak through his Word to lead us to the truth, rather than insisting on leading ourselves to our own ideas.As Gil Grissom is wont to say, “people lie, but the evidence never does.” To be sure, we’re never guaranteed to interpret that evidence correctly—even when we’re trying our best to be faithful, we still make mistakes because we’re still limited; but we can trust the Spirit to work through the process to correct our errors, if we’re open to correction. It isn’t solely on our shoulders to get it right—that’s the work of the Spirit in and through us; ours is to learn to get our own agendas out of the way so that they don’t block the Spirit’s work.
