Demolition Work   (March 18, 2018)

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          Some time ago I saw a documentary about a family of demolition experts. It was their business to bring down those colossal but unusable structures that stand in the middle of many American cities. It was fascinating to watch, but it was not the type of work for which most of us would want to be responsible! Most of us consider a controlled explosion something limited to fireworks on the fourth of July, but that is decidedly not what this family was doing. They were using dangerous explosives—the kind of explosives that can kill you—the kind of explosives that can level a twenty story building! Still, it was a necessary job so they did it...just very precisely.

          I saw another example of this type of work when it came to our little town of Alma, Arkansas some years back. The premise of the show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition was to take some worthy but financially distressed family who had suffered and sacrificed for their family, community or country, and build them a new home in a remarkably small window of time: usually a week or less. It was amazing to watch, in time-lapse photography, how quickly an entire house could be torn down, rearranged and rebuilt. The families (as well as the viewers) were genuinely dumbfounded when the final “reveal” took place and everyone could see all the work that had been accomplished in such a short time.

          God works in the lives of his people in a similar fashion—not that he works incredibly fast but he does follow a similar plan—demolition first and then reconstruction. The Lord described this process in his commission to Jeremiah: 

“Then the Lord reached out his hand and touched my mouth and said to me, ‘Now, I have put my words in your mouth. See, today I appoint you over nations and kingdoms to uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant.’” [Jeremiah 1:9-10]

Notice, the Lord sent his word through Jeremiah to accomplish the uprooting of nations, their downfall and destruction. But that is not all he sent him to do; after their destruction, their uprooting, Jeremiah was “to build and to plant.” In order to plant a crop, the field must first be prepared—to build a house, the land must be cleared—to build a new life, one that glorifies God, there must be surrender and the old life occupying the site must be cleared away. Reconstruction can only occur after demolition has cleared the site. I fear too many Christians are building their lives on a shaky foundation because they did not first “clear the land.”