Jim Bakker Show - Can Deconstruction Be Healthy? | Dr. Michael Brown
Aired: 2023-04-24
Duration: 03:59


=== Endless Reasons to Reject (03:41) ===

[00:00:00]  Dr. Brown, let's get back to your book.
[00:00:03]  Would you explain to me what the deconstructionist movement is?
[00:00:09]  Wow.
[00:00:11]  Yes, so you hear a lot of people talking about deconstructing, and you could even call it a movement in that regard.
[00:00:18]  So what it means is people are now asking questions and saying, okay, I just took this for granted.
[00:00:25]  I believed the Bible was God's word.
[00:00:27]  I believe the Christian faith was true.
[00:00:29]  I was raised with it.
[00:00:30]  Well, how do I know the Bible is God's word?
[00:00:33]  How do I know there is a God?
[00:00:35]  How do I know if there is a God, that the Christian faith is the true faith?
[00:00:39]  And they're asking questions and now saying, well, we have deconstructed.
[00:00:43]  In other words, we are no longer believers or we are ex-evangelicals.
[00:00:47]  And there are whole movements of this, social media gatherings where people come around this.
[00:00:52]  And it's almost become kind of the smart thing to do to show how I'm a thinking person and I'm deconstructing.
[00:01:00]  So I actually have a chapter in the book, Can Deconstructionism Be Good?
[00:01:06]  Can it be healthy?
[00:01:07]  Because immediately we hear deconstruction and we throw it out.
[00:01:10]  There can be something healthy about asking honest questions with humility and with a real heart to find the truth.
[00:01:19]  It can be very dangerous to come with arrogance and say, I'm going to prove this thing as false.
[00:01:25]  If you want to reject the Bible, you could find endless numbers of reasons to do it.
[00:01:29]  Endless numbers of websites that will tell you how bad the Bible is.
[00:01:33]  Endless numbers of videos that will show you all the so-called contradictions in the Bible.
[00:01:37]  Endless stories of people who were, quote, hurt by the church and on and on and on.
[00:01:42]  If you're looking for a way out, you can find it.
[00:01:45]  But that's not being honest.
[00:01:46]  That's not being truthful.
[00:01:48]  That's looking for a way out.
[00:01:50]  What you have to do is say, all right, God, if you're really there, I want to follow you and know you if you're really true.
[00:01:58]  If the Bible is true, no matter what you require of me, I want to follow you because you're a God.
[00:02:04]  But if this is not true, if I'm talking to the heir, I want to know that.
[00:02:09]  And see, when I got saved, I'm a brand new believer.
[00:02:12]  My dad says to me, Michael, it's great you're off drugs, but we're Jews.
[00:02:17]  We don't believe this.
[00:02:19]  So he brings me to meet the local rabbi.
[00:02:21]  So as a brand new believer, just saved a few weeks, I'm now talking to the local rabbi, and he's challenging me.
[00:02:28]  He's a learned man.
[00:02:29]  He's fresh out of Jewish Theological Seminary.
[00:02:31]  Not long after that, I start college.
[00:02:33]  All my degrees, my bachelor's, master's, and PhD were all at secular universities.
[00:02:38]  I never once studied with someone who believed the same thing I believed in the academic world.
[00:02:44]  They all were hostile to my faith or indifferent to it or contradictory to it.
[00:02:49]  And that meant I had a search for answers.
[00:02:52]  And I got to a point in life when I said, I just want to follow God and his truth wherever it leads.
[00:02:59]  I knew he was real, and I want to follow God and his truth wherever that leads.
[00:03:04]  That only reinforced me in my beliefs.
[00:03:07]  I have a colleague, a messianic Jewish friend of mine whose mother was a Holocaust survivor, and she became a believer.
[00:03:15]  And when he was a young man, just an older teenager, actually, he decided, I'm going to study the Bible to prove to my mother that Jesus is not the Messiah.
[00:03:25]  And he got saved in the process.

=== Together, Let's Find Answers (00:33) ===

[00:03:27]  So I take people through the process.
[00:03:30]  And look, Jude says, have mercy on those who doubt.
[00:03:34]  It's okay to come with your questions.
[00:03:36]  Let us cultivate an atmosphere where people feel safe answering their questions.
[00:03:41]  And when we feel safe, fielding those questions and say, hey, together, let's get answers because there are answers to every single objection.
[00:03:50]  God's word is tested and true.
[00:03:53]  When the objections are gone, when the atheists are gone, when the mockers are gone, the word of God will still be standing strong.