One Way or the Other: The Stone We All Must Reckon With

The Encounter That Cannot Be Escaped

I hail from Mbololo, Taita-Taveta County. Overlooking the plains, a great mass of rock rises from the hill massif, fixed in place as though it had always been there and would always remain. It is called Igho ja Mbololo, the Stone of Mbololo. Growing up, we heard many stories about it. Some spoke in wonder, others in caution, but all agreed on one thing: it could not be ignored. It stood whether one spoke of it or not. It remained whether one understood it or not. But the narrative about stones does not begin there. It begins in Scripture, and when it does, it does not remain local. It opens into something that runs from the first pages to the last, gathering weight as it moves.

Scripture does not introduce the stone as ornament. It appears where something unseen presses into what is seen. A man named Jacob lies down in the open, his head resting on a stone as though it were nothing more than ground made firm. He sleeps. He dreams. He wakes. And the place is no longer the same. “He took the stone… and set it up for a pillar” (Genesis 28:18–19). The stone has not shifted. It is still cold, still fixed, still silent. But the man stands differently before it. What was beneath him now confronts him. What was ordinary now marks a boundary he cannot cross again without remembering.

The stone becomes a thread through his life.

That thread does not break as the narrative unfolds. It deepens and hardens. The stone is no longer only set by men who have seen something. It is laid by God Himself. “Behold, I lay in Zion… a tried stone, a precious cornerstone, a sure foundation” (Isaiah 28:16). This is not an addition to the structure. It is what everything else must rest on. And in the same act, it divides. “He shall be for a sanctuary; but for a stone of stumbling and for a rock of offence” (Isaiah 8:14–15). The same surface steadies one man and sends another to the ground. The stone does not change. It does not soften for one and harden for another. It remains what it is. The difference is in the one who meets it.

In the wilderness, the rock is struck. The sound cracks the silence. The blow lands with force. And then the impossible happens. Water bursts out of what should not yield. It spills, gathers, runs across dry ground, sustaining a people who should not survive there. They drink and move on, but the meaning of what they have touched follows them. Later it is spoken plainly. “They drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them, and that Rock was Christ” (1 Corinthians 10:4). The rock was not a moment left behind. It remained with them. What they struck, what they leaned on, what gave them life, was not an object. It was Him.

And so the question of the rock becomes the question of a life. “Everyone who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds beat against that house, but it did not fall” (Matthew 7:24–25). The storm does not ask permission. It comes. It presses. It tests what cannot be seen at a glance. The difference is not in the storm. It is in the ground beneath the house. One stands because it rests on what does not move. Another falls because it never did. And long before this was spoken, a king had already cried out, “lead me to the rock that is higher than I” (Psalm 61:2). Not a rock he could shape. Not a ground he could manage. A rock above him, beyond him, able to hold what he could not.

By the time the narrative reaches its center, the distance between sign and substance collapses. The stone stands among men. It speaks, is watched, is measured. And before it is rejected, it is revealed. When the question is asked, “Who do you say that I am,” and the answer comes not from observation but from revelation, He responds, “on this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:16–18). The foundation is named before the storm breaks. What will stand is declared before it is tested.

As He moves toward the place where that word will be tested, the tension breaks into the open. He enters to the sound of voices rising around Him, praise carried on human breath, and when it is challenged, the answer comes without hesitation: if these were silent, the stones would cry out (Luke 19:40). The witness would not be lost. It would only change its voice. The stones are no longer only beneath men. They stand ready.

From there, the movement sharpens. “I have set my face like a flint” (Isaiah 50:7). The same hardness that marks the stone marks His resolve. He moves toward the blow that will fall on Him.

He is rejected. “The stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner” (Matthew 21:42). And then the words come, without comfort. “Whoever falls on this stone will be broken; but on whomever it falls, it will grind him to powder” (Matthew 21:44). Again, “everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces; but on whom it falls, it will crush him” (Luke 20:18).

This is not distant language. It is immediate. A man meets the stone when the ground he trusted gives way beneath him, when what once felt solid begins to shift, when decisions, ambitions, or certainties that carried him no longer hold. He comes up against something he cannot bend or explain away. He feels the break there, not to destroy him, but to bring him onto what is firm, to force him onto ground that does not move.

But there is another way. A man can sense it and still turn aside. He can build beside it, close enough to borrow its strength but not close enough to be shaped by it. He can speak over it, reason around it, delay it, tell himself there will be time later. Life continues. Structures rise. Confidence returns. Until the moment comes when what he built is tested, and what he avoided is no longer something he approaches, but something that comes upon him.

Then it is no longer the man meeting the stone. It is the stone meeting the man. And when it does, there is nothing left to adjust, nothing left to reposition, nothing left to build on. What remains is only what can stand.

He is crucified. The earth trembles. The ground heaves. The rocks split open (Matthew 27:51). What has always stood firm fractures at His death. And when He is laid in the tomb, a stone is rolled across the entrance, heavy, deliberate, final.

But the stone does not hold Him.

There is another shaking. The stone is rolled away (Matthew 28:2), not to let Him out, but to show that He is already gone. What was meant to confine becomes a witness. What was set to close becomes evidence. The stones themselves yield. None prevail.

The stone is named without ambiguity. “Jesus Christ… is the stone which was rejected by you builders, which has become the cornerstone… neither is there salvation in any other” (Acts 4:11–12). Not an idea. Not a symbol. A person. The ground itself. And those who come to Him do not come to something uncertain or shifting. They come “to Mount Zion… to the city of the living God” (Hebrews 12:22–24). Not to a mountain that may be touched and shaken, but to what stands beyond trembling. What is received here does not move. It is a kingdom that cannot be shaken (Hebrews 12:28). The same stone that breaks and crushes becomes, for those who come to it, the ground that does not give way.

And what begins with Jacob widens into kings. A man named Nebuchadnezzar sees an image, towering, dazzling, built of gold, silver, bronze, iron, and clay. It stands in full display of human power. Then a stone appears, not cut by human hands. It strikes. The blow lands at the feet. The entire image shatters. The pieces scatter like dust. The wind carries them away. Nothing remains. And the stone grows. It becomes a mountain. It fills the whole earth (Daniel 2:34–35).

This is the direction. “He must reign till he has put all enemies under his feet” (1 Corinthians 15:25). “The kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ” (Revelation 11:15).

The stone is not new to history, and it does not pass with it. The one Jacob encountered in the open field was not a moment confined to his night. It was an encounter with what had already been. What met him there did not begin there. It was the Ancient of Days (Daniel 7:9), present in time without being bound by it. The stone beneath his head marked a point where eternity pressed into a man’s life.

And what was encountered there did not recede with the passing of years. It remained. Through the wilderness, through the kings and the prophets, through rejection and revelation, it stood as the same unchanging ground. “Trust in the Lord forever, for in the Lord is the Rock of Ages” (Isaiah 26:4). The Rock that gave water, the foundation that was laid, the cornerstone that was rejected and raised (Psalm 118:22; Ephesians 2:20), was not a succession of meanings, but a single reality unfolding. The Rock of Ages did not emerge. It endured.

It has stood through centuries without shifting. It stands now. It has not moved. It has not adjusted itself to the age. It has not softened to accommodate what passes. It remains what it has always been.

And it will stand when what now appears permanent gives way. The kingdoms of men, structured, reinforced, and defended, will meet what cannot be overturned. The stone not cut by human hands will strike (Daniel 2:34–35), and what has been assembled will not be repaired. It will be reduced to pieces, carried away, and remembered no more. And what remains will not be another system rising in its place, but a kingdom already established, a kingdom that cannot be shaken (Hebrews 12:28), extending until it fills the whole earth.

The Ancient of Days does not move.

The Rock of Ages does not shift.

What changes is the one who encounters Him.

The Stone remains.

And because it remains, everything else is measured against it.

The question is not whether it will be dealt with.

Only how.