Taking a building apart is not the same skill as knowing what should stand.
You have watched it happen to somebody. Maybe a nephew. Maybe a man you discipled. Maybe you have felt the first tug of it yourself and told no one.
It usually starts with a fair question. Why did the church I grew up in treat that issue that way? Why did the leader everybody trusted turn out to be what he was? Why was I taught that verse like that, when the verse plainly does not say that?
Those are not rebellious questions. Some of them are overdue. But somewhere in the process the questions stop being a search and start being a solvent. The man who began by examining one brick ends up standing in a field where the house used to be, holding a crowbar, no longer sure what he was looking for.
That is the story our culture has named deconstruction. And the church has largely responded to it in the two least useful ways available: panic, or applause.
What It Gets Right
Let me start where honesty requires me to start, because if I skip this you will rightly stop reading.
Examining what you were handed is not sin. It is commanded. The Bereans are held up as the noble ones precisely because they refused to take an apostle’s word for it:
Now these were more noble-minded than those in Thessalonica, for they received the word with great eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so.
Acts 17:11, NASB1995
Paul preached. They checked. Luke calls that noble. Not arrogant, not divisive — noble. Somebody should have told that to the young man who was informed that asking a question was a sign of a rebellious spirit.
And more than that: a great deal of what people are deconstructing was never Christianity in the first place. It was a subculture. It was politics wearing a cross. It was a man’s personality mistaken for the Spirit’s authority. It was a set of house rules elevated to the level of Scripture, so that when the rules failed, the whole structure seemed to go with them.
Jesus went after exactly that. He told men who had built an entire architecture of additions that they were “teaching as doctrines the precepts of men” (Matthew 15:9). Tearing that down is not deconstruction. It is repentance. It is what reformation has always been.
So if you are a man sorting through what you were taught, trying to separate the Word of God from what your particular tribe glued to it — you are not in rebellion. You are doing necessary work, and the New Testament will help you do it.
Where It Runs Out of Floor
Here is where the honest question quietly changes jobs.
Sorting requires a standard. You cannot separate gold from gravel unless you already know what gold is. The Bereans were not evaluating Paul by their instincts, their hurt, or the current mood of Thessalonica. They were evaluating him by the Scriptures. They had a floor to stand on while they inspected the walls.
Modern deconstruction very often removes the floor first and then wonders why nothing can be rebuilt. The standard becomes: does this feel life-giving to me? Does this align with what I have come to believe about myself? And once that is the measure, the process cannot terminate — because the measuring stick moves every year, and there is always another wall that fails the test.
That is not a criticism of the questions. It is a criticism of the tool. A crowbar is a fine instrument. It has never once framed a room.
For no man can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.
1 Corinthians 3:11, NASB1995
Paul is writing to a church full of factions and celebrity preachers — a church that had every reason to deconstruct. His counsel is not tear it all out. It is: check what is under it. There is one foundation, and it is not a movement, a leader, a decade, or a denomination. Everything else in the building is negotiable. That one thing is load-bearing.
The Hidden Substitution
Watch for the moment the substitution happens, because it almost never announces itself.
It sounds like this: I could never worship a God who would ______.
Now, I understand the sentence. Some of you have earned that sentence in a hospital hallway. But look carefully at what it does. It seats a court, and it puts you on the bench, and it summons God as the defendant. And whatever survives that trial will not be God — it will be a portrait assembled from the parts of Him you already approved of.
Job’s friends spent thirty-five chapters explaining God. Job spent them demanding an answer. When God finally speaks, He does not defend Himself, and He does not apologize. He asks Job question after question about the natural world, and Job’s response is the honest end of every deconstruction that goes all the way down:
I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear; but now my eye sees You.
Job 42:5, NASB1995
That is the difference. Job did not get his questions answered. He got God. And it turned out that what he actually needed was not an explanation but a Person, which is why he ends the book with more peace and fewer answers than he started with.
Two Different Roads That Look Identical for a Mile
Both roads start with a hard question. They diverge on one thing: where the man takes it.
- The first road takes the question to God. It is loud. It sounds like the Psalms, which are full of men shouting “How long, O LORD? Will You forget me forever?” (Psalm 13:1). That is a question inside the covenant. It is addressed. It has a recipient.
- The second road takes the question away from God — to the group chat, to the algorithm, to the loudest voice online who is also angry and also has no floor. It is not addressed to anyone. It is a monologue.
The first man is wrestling. The second man is drifting. From the outside, in month one, they look exactly the same. In year three, they are not remotely in the same country.
Do not confuse them. And if you are pastoring someone, do not treat a wrestler like a deserter. Jacob wrestled all night and walked away with a limp and a new name. God has never once been offended by a man who would not let go.
To Whom Shall We Go?
There is a scene in John 6 that almost nobody preaches. Jesus has just said something so difficult that the crowd empties out. The text is blunt: “As a result of this many of His disciples withdrew and were not walking with Him anymore” (John 6:66). A first-century deconstruction, and a large one.
Jesus turns to the twelve and asks — and He genuinely asks — “You do not want to go away also, do you?”
Simon Peter answered Him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have words of eternal life.”
John 6:68, NASB1995
Read what Peter did not say. He did not say it all makes sense now. He did not say the hard saying had stopped being hard. He stayed for a reason that had nothing to do with having resolved the difficulty. He stayed because he had looked at the alternatives and found them empty.
That is a completely legitimate place to stand. If you are there this morning — holding real questions, no longer sure about several things you used to say with confidence, but unable to walk away from the man who said those words — you are not a hypocrite. You are Peter. Stay there. It is a load-bearing floor.
What to Actually Do
If you are in it, or walking beside someone who is:
- Separate the categories. Make three columns: what Scripture actually says, what my church added, and what a person did to me. Most collapses happen because all three got welded together. They are not the same thing, and only one of them is the Word of God.
- Keep a floor while you inspect the walls. Decide what is load-bearing before you start swinging — the character of God, the death and resurrection of Christ, the authority of the Word. Test everything else against those, not the other way around.
- Address the questions to Someone. Say them out loud in prayer, in the same words you would use with a friend. A question spoken to God is worship. A question spoken to no one is erosion.
- Do not do it alone. The men who come back almost always had one person who kept showing up without flinching. Be that, or find that.
The culture will tell you that taking it apart is the brave act. It is not, particularly. Anyone can hold a crowbar. The rarer courage is to keep asking hard questions while still kneeling — to want the truth badly enough that you are willing to be corrected by it rather than merely liberated from it.
Christ is not a system you were taught. He is a Person who died and got up. Systems deserve inspection. He deserves the question you have been carrying — asked to His face, and left there.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist