Open Theist God: I have no clue what I’ll do!

One of the clearest tests of divine authority in scripture is God’s ability to declare the future with precision and certainty. Isaiah 41:21–23 is not vague: “Declare to us the things to come. Tell us what the future holds, so we may know you are gods.” This is not a demand for moral wisdom or historical insight. It is a demand for foreknowledge. And not just general foreknowledge—it is a test of predictive specificity: “Tell us what is going to happen so that we may know you are divine.” The open theist cannot affirm this. He has no meaningful way to read Isaiah 41 except to evacuate it of the very feature that God Himself claims proves His uniqueness—His sovereign knowledge of the future before it happens. Open theism insists on libertarian freedom—and rightly so. But it draws the false conclusion that, because human choices are free in this robust libertarian sense, God cannot know them in advance. It asserts that God’s knowledge is limited to what can be known, and that truly free choices have no truth value until they occur. Therefore, God does not know future libertarian choices, and thus cannot declare ahead of time what those choices will be or how He will respond to them. But then, what becomes of Isaiah 41? The open theist is trapped. He insists that God’s decisions are reactive—that God waits to see what people will do, and then responds accordingly. But this reduces every divine prediction to a hypothetical: “If you do X, then I will do Y.” Yet Isaiah 41 includes no such conditionals. God is not offering probabilistic forecasts. He is issuing declarations of what will happen. That is the whole point: “I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times what is still to come” (Isaiah 46:10). God does not say, “If you rebel, I will probably judge you.” He says, “You will rebel. I will judge you.” He does not say, “I might raise up Cyrus depending on how Babylon behaves.” He says, “I will raise up Cyrus by name, though He has not known me” (Isaiah 45:4–5). There is no ambiguity. No contingency. No hypothetical framework. According to open theism, God cannot know how free agents will choose. But in Isaiah 41–48, God repeatedly grounds His claim to divinity on precisely this ability—to declare the future before it happens. Not by watching it unfold and reacting in real time, but by proclaiming it ahead of time and allowing it to unfold exactly as foreseen. If human libertarian freedom precludes foreknowledge, then these predictions should be impossible. So the open theist must do one of two things: deny that God actually made those predictions, or deny that they were fulfilled. In either case, He places himself in opposition to the very claims God makes about Himself in Isaiah. And in so doing, He reveals the devastating consequence of His view: not just that God cannot predict the future, but that God cannot know what He Himself will do. This is where the argument breaks down. The open theist claims that God is responsive—that He reacts in light of what humans freely choose. But if He cannot know what they will freely choose, then He cannot know how He will react. And if He cannot know how He will react, then He cannot know what He will do. And if He cannot know what He will do, He cannot say what He will do. Isaiah 41 goes bye-bye. Why? Because open theists insist that Isaiah 41 is not about God foretelling future events, but declaring His future intentions. In other words, He is telling us that He will declare what He will do ahead of time and then do it in the future, and that this is the litmus test of deity. But if open theism is true, that is impossible for God. Such prediction is beyond His ability, and Isaiah 41 is nonsense. The real God of scripture is not waiting to find out what He will do. He declares the end from the beginning—not because the future is causally determined, but because His knowledge is perfect and without limit. Libertarian freedom is real. But so is divine omniscience. God does not guess. He does not speculate. He does not hope. He declares. And that is how we know He is God.