The Gift of God's Word Questions and Answers

First, we know that God is all-powerful. As Gabriel assured Mary: “Nothing is impossible with God” (Luke 1:37 CEB). Even so, the “stone paradox” helps us comprehend God’s power more accurately.

Given that God can generate any physical force, no stone should be “too heavy for Him to lift.” To arrive at an answer, we must look more carefully at the question. A truly immovable object would remain stubbornly unaffected by physical forces of any magnitude. The number 7, for instance, is immovable because it is not subject to physics. It lacks physical properties, such as having a length or mass. Therefore, God cannot move the number 7 because it is nonphysical. By its very nature it is not something that is able to be moved. This does not indicate, however, that God lacks power. He can do anything. But moving a number is not a possible thing to do.

However, since a stone is a physical object, we would agree that (in principle) it can be moved. Since God can generate any degree of physical force, an immovable stone could never exist. Such a stone would be both subject to physics and unaffected by physical forces, which is a contradiction. We can conclude that God could not create a stone too heavy for Him to lift. While God can do anything, creating an immovable stone is not something to do.

The phrase “immovable stone” is a nonsense phrase, just as the phrase “square circle” would be nonsense. Our inability to draw or coherently imagine a square circle—that is, a closed two-dimensional figure with four equal sides that meet at right angles and every point on the figure is at equal distance from the center—is not a criticism of our ability to draw or imagine. There is literally nothing to draw or imagine, since the phrase itself is a sheer contradiction.

C. S. Lewis made a similar observation, “Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask...are like that.”

Only God can “declare...what is yet to come” (Isa.44:7) because He is all-knowing. His knowledge is perfect in that He knows all past, present, future, hypothetical facts, and believes no falsehoods. However, as you suggest, we cannot suppose that His foreknowledge determines our acts, since we are morally responsible for what we do.

“Fatalism” (as this question suggests) implies that we are not accountable for sin, yet the Bible teaches that “each of us will give an account of ourselves to God” (Rom. 14:12). Notably, Peter did not blame Christ for causing his denial, but “broke down and wept” (Mark 14:72) upon realizing that he had sinned.

Our freedom does not nullify God’s foreknowledge. “Open theists” maintain that the future is unknowable and insist that, while God knows the past and present, He is ignorant of the future, since there is literally nothing to know. This belief is patently unbiblical. Scripture proves that God knows the future. Moreover, future tense statements, such as “the next president will be a woman,” are either true or false now. Surely, an all- knowing being knows future facts.

Christ’s foreknowledge did not cause Peter to deny Him three times. Quite the opposite, Peter’s impending, free denial caused Christ’s foreknowledge. In our limited view, we naturally suppose that cause A must occur before effect B. But in this case, the cause—namely, Peter’s denial—occurred after the effect, namely, Christ’s knowledge of Peter’s denial. If Peter had freely refrained from denying Christ, then this foreknowledge would have been different.

Although God foreordains everything (see Acts 4:27–28; Rom. 8:29; Eph. 1:5), He does not determine our acts. Both are true: God foreknows everything that will happen, and, at the same time, we are free. We need not concede either that God’s foreknowledge nullifies human freedom or that human freedom nullifies God’s foreknowledge.