R.C. Sproul

I want you to think about that for a moment, and let me ask this question.

What's the difference between a human being and the supreme being?

What's the chief difference, the essential difference?

And I'm choosing my words a little bit carefully here when I say, what is the essential difference between a human being and the supreme being?

Now, the word that I was playing with there is the word essential difference.

What does that word suggest to you?

If I say that something is essential, you will suggest perhaps that this means that which is absolutely necessary.

And that's a perfectly legitimate interpretation of the word essential.

But in its barest bone meaning, essential means necessary.

of the essence of something.

I love to do crossword puzzles.

In fact, every morning I do two of them.

A day without crossword puzzles for RCs, like a day without orange juice for other people.

And there's a word that often crops up in crossword puzzles.

It says the Latin form of being, and it's a four-letter word, E-S-S-E, esse, from which we get the English word essential.

That which is essential or that which has to do with the essence of things is

relates to something's being, what it is.

Now, I know we can get very abstract here.

We can go for an excursion, if you wanted to, into ancient Greek philosophy when people like Plato and Aristotle spent their days contemplating the meaning of essence, the meaning of being, because their quest, their great pursuit intellectually was to be able to discover truth.

what they called ultimate reality, the quintessence, the highest, the fifth essence of things.