The Villain Deconstructs

I’m convinced “deconstruction” has become a new word for an old tactic of the Enemy trying to separate people from God. It comes in many different forms, but at the end of the day, the Enemy simply wants you to walk away from your faith. If he can make you question the goodness of God, he can move you off mission and over to the sidelines where you will be less effective for the kingdom of God.

As I pastor people and walk alongside them through seasons of doubt, I have seen that most questions can be put into five categories:

• Is God real?
• Is God powerful?
• Is God Good?
• Is God for me?
• Can I trust God’s people (i.e., the church)?

When I meet people struggling in their faith, most of the time they are questioning one of those five things.

If you think back to the garden of Eden in Genesis 3, we see the first deconstruction in Scripture. The serpent’s use of “Did God really say that?” was the first of many attempts in recorded history to get people to doubt what God says. It’s still happening today. When Christians encounter passages in the Bible that are confusing, countercultural, or contrary to what we are comfortable with, many of us start asking the same question: Did God really say that? And we answer, Surely that means something else. Surely God never said that.

Walking Alongside Others

I have walked alongside countless people in ministry, including several close friends, as they process through what they believe. We can label this process different things—“crisis of faith,” “season of doubt,” “wrestling with God,” “deconstruction”—but generally it’s all the same idea. They usually experience some kind of incident that brings them to a place of wondering, What do I actually believe? From there, this process can go one of many ways.

Some go into “throw it all out” mode. My heart always moves toward this person because the Enemy sees them as susceptible and wants to put up a wall between them and God. When something happens or someone hurts them, their heart becomes so hardened and embittered that instead of seeking answers or trying to rebuild, they simply want to light a match to everything they once believed and burn it all down.

The Enemy loves it every time this happens and chalks it up as a win. Some within evangelical circles would say the Holy Spirit was never inside the people who denounce their faith. They had never placed their faith in Jesus to begin with, so they are not actually walking away from an authentic faith. Others would disagree with that. Wherever you land, it is no less tragic either way. As people walk away from the faith entirely, the best next step is to consistently share the gospel with them in hopes that they will either genuinely trust in Jesus or be reminded of what they once believed in the first place.

Other times people leave the faith because they experience disappointment or grief. Maybe a parent or child dies, they lose a job, they experience a bad breakup, or they get cancer or suffer illness. If this is you, I am so sorry! Every day we come into contact with a world that is fractured and broken, in need of being restored to its original intent. But please don’t shake your fist at God as though He inflicted you with loss and disease. God never desired that His children would suffer. We know that because of the fall in Genesis 3 the world is no longer how God intended it to be.

I have walked alongside people who stay stuck in an endless loop of questions. Hear me say this: Questions are not sinful. But I have seen a shift over the last decade where some people only want to live in the questions. Often, these people are not really that interested in finding answers. They don’t want you to send them articles to read or podcasts to listen to or scriptures to meditate on, but instead they move on to the next question, then the next, then the next.

Before too long, they have so many different open mental loops that finding the answers is too daunting, so they just open more loops and ask more questions. If you have questions—the age of the earth, what happened to dinosaurs, how the Bible came together—these big-rock questions that you cannot stop thinking about, that’s great! But please don’t stay in a place where you just have questions and you don’t search out the truth. There have never been more resources for you to find answers to your questions.

The journey of faith requires perseverance and other believers alongside us so we don’t grow weary and lose heart along the way. Some of you feel stuck and need to invite people into it with you who will put their arms around you and help you climb out.

Some of you know someone in that pit, and you need to reach out to that struggling friend or loved one and let them know they are not alone. This is a picture of what it looks like for the church to be the church. And there is nothing the Enemy hates more than the church on the move.

Tune in to hear Jonathan “JP” Pokluda this Thursday, March 12, on LIFE TODAY. Taken from Your Story Has a Villain: Identify Spiritual Warfare and Learn How to Defeat the Enemy by Jonathan Pokluda. Copyright © 2025 by Jonathan Pokluda. Used by permission of W Publishing, an imprint of Thomas Nelson, www.thomasnelson.com.